Polygamy: An Early American History by Sarah M.S. Pearsall (review)

In 1844, Belinda Hilton fled Boston and her monogamous marriage and headed to Nauvoo, Illinois, the center of the growing Latter-day Saints (Mormon) movement. She was soon a plural wife, gaining not only husband Parley P. Pratt but four fellow wives, and eventually there were nine wives altogether. Ten years later Belinda Hilton Pratt published A Defence of Polygamy by a Lady, a passionate argument for plural marriage. For her, monogamy was the tyrannical form of marriage. An analysis of Belinda's tract is the focus of the last chapter of this book that eloquently uncovers the surprising range and depth of the history of polygamy well before the Mormons. Pearsall describes her book as "a turbulent journey, from sixteenth-century Europe to the nineteenth-century United States with a lots of stops—in Amerindian wigwams, West African compounds, American bedrooms, and many other locations," charting numerous controversies over marriage that are "an exceptionally useful way to survey busy hubs of intersectionality, crisscrossing gender with racial, ethnic, religious and other identities and ideals" (pp. 16–17, 9). Pearsall challenges the conventional view that polygamy was condemned in the United States because it violated republican principles, demonstrating that the presence of plural marriage and debates about it long predated the republic. She provides compelling evidence that ideas about how women and men should marry and procreate have been central to North American history. Though the focus is on polygamy, this is also the history of the work it took to make monogamous heterosexual marriage the only form of allowable marriage, emphasizing that this was a legacy of colonial conquest and the product of many battles. Ultimately, the book shows the "embedded power of the infrastructure of monogamy" (p. 294). This is an important study, one that is carefully crafted, deeply researched, and written in engaging, accessible prose. Pearsall teaches at the University of Cambridge and is the author of the prize-winning Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century (2010).

Each chapter has a focus on an individual or people drawn into contests over polygamy. The book begins with the Guale Rebellion of 1597 (Georgia) and Pueblo Revolt of 1680 (New Mexico), in which polygamy and the right of Indigenous men to plural marriage became a symbol and rallying cry to the "rebels" who opposed the authority of Spain over their lives. Secular and religious authorities in sixteenth-century Spain combatted polygamy with a vengeance at home because of concern that Muslim populations would grow faster, and in the "New World" they discerned that multiple wives created powerful Indigenous leaders with sprawling networks of diplomatic and family relations. Pearsall argues persuasively, in dealing with a wide range of Indigenous people, that their refusal to give up polygamy was because of colonial catastrophes of disease and warfare that amplified the importance of family and households; it was not an insistence on clinging to a timeless tradition. These were contests over sovereignty. The focus then shifts to New France (Quebec) and the clashes of Algonquian people with the Jesuits, before turning to the Metacom and Weetamoo's War of 1675 (Rhode Island), led by the powerful female leader Weetamoo, herself a plural wife. Here, too, colonialism forced realignments that increased the power of the often polygamous Indigenous leaders. A fourth chapter looks at plural unions in Africa, where plural marriage forged alliances, built trade networks, and helped generate wealth, and on slave plantations where polygamy "became a statement of power among those stuck in a system actively trying to render them powerless" (p. 141). A common theme is the condemnation of colonial powers who cast polygamy as inherent barbarism practiced by racially inferior groups, justifying brutality.

The fifth and sixth chapters explore the debates about polygamy forged in global encounters and the social theories of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries found in British, French, and American texts. This included women thinkers and writers on marriage and...