Sister Saints: Mormon Women Since

the End of Polygamy Colleen Mcdannell

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Sister Saints
 Sister Saints
Mormon Women Since the End
of Polygamy
x•x
Colleen McDannell

1
 1
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
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Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

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© Colleen McDannell 2019

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: McDannell, Colleen, author.
Title: Sister saints : Mormon women since the end of polygamy / Colleen McDannell.
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, [2019] |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018001321 | ISBN 9780190221317 (hardcover : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9780190221331 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Mormon women—History.
Classification: LCC BX8643.W66 M333 2018 | DDC 289.3082—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018001321

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
To my Friend Ann Braude, who always stands for women
 CON T E N T S

Preface ix

1. Building Zion 1
2. Polygamy’s End 17
3. Uplifting Humanity 35
4. Edged Out 53
5. A Style of Our Own 65
6. Not All Alike 87
7. Bullying the Saints 109
8. A Church of Converts 131
9. Equal Partners 153
10. Internet Mormons 173
Epilogue 195

Acknowledgments 203
Notes 205
Bibliographic Essay 235
Index 281

vii
 PR E FAC E

In the summer of 1989, my husband and I made the long trek across the
country from Baltimore, Maryland, to Salt Lake City, Utah. We had just
spent four years in Heidelberg, Germany, and I was on my way to start a
new teaching position at the University of Utah. Our two cats enjoyed a
relatively painless airplane ride, while we struggled with the heat and the
boredom of the American interstate highway system. At our first meal in
our new state, we ate something called a “Mormon scone,” which bore little
resemblance to its British cousin. While I had lived most of my life in the
western United States, Utah was alien territory. That a scone was not quite
a scone was a complicated harbinger of things to come.
I had come to the University of Utah as the holder of an endowed chair
in Religious Studies, housed in the Department of History, and named after
a feisty Latter-​day Saint philosopher, Sterling M. McMurrin. According
to the lore passed down to me, the donor who funded the chair wanted
someone to teach “comparative religion” and thus introduce the students
to something other than Mormonism. Before that point, my experience
with the Latter-​day Saints had been limited to dealing with the director of
public affairs in the Europe Area Office in Frankfurt. I had been writing a
book about heaven with a German colleague and wanted to include a sec-
tion on the Latter-​day Saint understanding of life after death. We contacted
the Mormons to see if they had a library we could use, but then they told us
that if we merely described which books we wanted, they would have them
shipped from Salt Lake. Any books? Any books. Over the next few months
we were loaned every book we asked for and extra ones that they thought
might be helpful. Mormons, it seemed, were profoundly kind and—​even
better for a scholar—​were organized bibliophiles.
Once settled in Salt Lake, I joined a group of women scholars from our
University and Brigham Young University, all of whom were new to Utah.
We were interested in women’s issues and considered ourselves feminists,
even the women from BYU. By the early nineties, however, Tomi-​Ann
Roberts and Cecilia Konchar Farr found their faculty positions at BYU
to be increasingly tenuous. The critical Gender Studies that had become
ix
 x   Preface

standard across the educational landscape was generating strife at BYU.

None of this made any sense to me. These were excellent scholars and en-
gaging teachers. In any other environment, they would have been valued
colleagues. Why were these women not welcomed on their campus? What
happened to the kind and book-​oriented Mormons I knew?
Then, in 1991, I experienced more directly the fear of intellectual in-
quiry that was threatening Mormon women at BYU. I was working on a
book about the objects and spaces people use in their religious lives and
was conducting interviews with Latter-​day Saints about their feelings about
their priesthood garments—​the special underclothing Mormons wear. We
never talked explicitly about the temple experience, which I knew was sa-
cred. That August I presented a few tentative results at a conference held
in Salt Lake. Every summer average Latter-​day Saints met to discuss the
history, culture, sociology, and literature of their faith. A few of the speakers
were faculty at BYU or other colleges, but most of the presenters were
simply bright individuals who felt a passion to study their own religion.
Shortly after the conference, the highest authorities of the Mormon
church told members that they should not attend such symposia. In spite of
my careful attention to Mormon sensibilities, my paper and several others
by Latter-​day Saints were deemed to be offensive. I kept thinking: Why
would Mormon leaders want to silence their intellectually engaged flock?
Wouldn’t Catholic bishops be overjoyed if average parishioners rigor-
ously studied theology and church history and presented their findings
to packed rooms? Soon after, I stopped writing about Mormons. The cli-
mate was inhospitable. Latter-​day Saints were being silenced; a few were
excommunicated. I would follow the desires of the funder of my endowed
chair and concentrate on the religious world outside of Utah.
But I never lost the desire to understand the Latter-​day Saint women who
surrounded me—​students, friends, and neighbors. Sister Saints: Mormon
Women Since the End of Polygamy is my effort to explain what led up to the
conflicts that Latter-​day Saint women faced in the early nineties and how
Mormonism has changed since then. As a historian of religion, I knew that
the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-​day Saints was a vibrant, growing in-
ternational religion claiming almost sixteen million members. It publishes
church materials in 188 different languages and supports over 30,000
congregations. And yet, there is a lack of historical scholarship on the or-
dinary lives of the women who make up more than half of the Mormon
population.
Much of Mormon history circles around the stories of men—​those who
founded the church, led it, fell from it, directed it, or defined it. Sister Saints,
however, continues the movement by feminist Mormon historians to ex-
plore a different set of questions: What were the women doing while the
 Preface  xi

men were doing what they did? If women were brought into the histor-
ical narrative, how might that change the story? What do women see as
spiritually fulfilling in their lives? What new religious forms occur as one
generation slides into another? Calling on my background in American re-
ligious history, I investigate what has sustained and motivated Latter-​day
Saint women and how that has changed over time.
When women do work their way into the story, they tend to be either
polygamists or pioneers—​often both. The nineteenth century looms large in
Latter-​day Saint culture, because it was then that the central concepts of the
faith were laid out. Moreover, Mormons see the early years as overflowing
with evidence of the supernatural and the extraordinary. Latter-​day Saints
treasure their history, building bridges between the present and the time
of sacred beginnings. Even Mormon feminists look backward to the nine-
teenth century for evidence of a usable past of female agency and origi-
nality. They point to the women who went East and studied medicine or
the ones who secured the right to vote in 1870. “Why can’t the twenty-​first
century,” they seem to be asking, “be more like the nineteenth?”
In the American imagination, Mormon women still have not left the
nineteenth century. In the media, Mormon women silently support their
men and say little about their own lives. Television shows tell tales of plural
wives. Their clothing might be modern and the settings look familiar, but
the themes recall the anti-​Mormonism of a hundred years ago. The famed
Broadway play Angels in America paints women as either addled wives on
pills or bossy mothers. In 2002 news reports of the kidnapped Elizabeth
Smart kept asking, “why didn’t she fight back?” The Book of Mormon musical
almost entirely erased Latter-​day Saint women. The female lead, Nabalungi,
is baptized late in the show and does not remain orthodox. Mormon women
are cast either as helpless Victorian ladies or strange sexual beings. It is hard
to break free of the Mormon nineteenth century.
The Latter-​day Saint women of Sister Saints are modern. Most are not
polygamists, they do not live on farms, they do not suffer in obedient si-
lence. Yes, there are Latter-​day Saint women who do—​or have done—​all
of those things. But this is (for the most part) a book about monogamous
women, who are members of a church that vigorously disavows polygamy.
Although their grandparents or parents may have been pioneers who
walked across the plains and produced their own domestic goods, the
women I write about live modern lives.
One of the reasons that the story of modern women is rarely told is be-
cause it is much easier to imagine the nineteenth century as a time of uni-
fied sisterhood. Conflict, of course, exists in everyone’s history, but during
the twentieth century Latter-​day Saint women more confidently asserted
their differences with each other and with church leaders. Sister Saints pays
 xii   Preface

close attention to the feminist stirrings within the church and the price that
many women have paid for speaking out against inequality. At the same
time, it explores how Mormon women have resisted being pushed out of
traditional domestic roles. Antifeminism belongs in a book about modern
Mormon women as much as feminism does.
The modern women of Sister Saints also value things that others would
define as “not modern.” Mormon doctrine resists the modern divide be-
tween sacred and secular. God’s real presence is felt in everyday life. New
revelations come all the time. Women in particular have a sacramental view
of reality in which the transcendent intervenes regularly. Consequently,
Latter-​day Saints expect their inspired leaders to comment authoritatively
on the private aspects of their lives. Members are not surprised to learn that
their church earns profit from cattle ranches in Florida or shopping centers
in Utah. Mormon women live in a fluid religious world that is structured by
the informal and spontaneous—​reflected in their Sunday “meetings”—​as
well as highly symbolic rituals conducted in temples, which they consider
profoundly holy. Women’s acquiescence to the authority of male prophets
and church leaders can only be understood if one takes seriously the power
of the sacred in their lives.
If the mark of the modern is the autonomy of the individual, then
the mark of the modern Latter-​day Saint woman is that her autonomy is
exercised in relationship with others.1 Sister Saints stresses the importance
of community in the evolution of the modern Latter-​day Saint. Individual
agency and intelligence are valued, but the divine is not experienced in
isolation. It is “sociality” or community that forms the foundation of both
heaven and earth (D&C 130:1–​2)—​for women and for men. From the
collection of plural wives, to the sisterhood of the Relief Society, to the
female missionary traveling with her “companion,” to the digital village
built by bloggers, Latter-​day Saint women express themselves through
and with each other. Even God, as we will see, must be understood in the
plural. Consequently, the family—​and women’s significant yet changing
role within it—​has intensely spiritual as well as emotional and economic
dimensions. Sister Saints explores how women come to know themselves
in conversation with friends, family, church leaders, and the writings of
ancestors. It is these women that I am trying to make visible.
Finally, Sister Saints argues that Mormon women have always been ac-
tive creators of Mormon culture, even if they do so within a given religious
framework. Without women’s support of polygamy, plural marriages never
would have survived the attacks of the US government and of American
popular culture. Latter-​day Saint women not only shared in the building
and sustaining of farming communities, but they developed an array of
civic and charitable institutions that shaped a growing faith community.
 Preface  xiii

Even the development of a Mormon style of self-​restraint, chastity, do-

mesticity, and hyperfemininity—​a style that persevered through the coun-
terculture years of the sixties and seventies—​was able to survive because
women were committed to that worldview. As more Latter-​day Saint
women graduate from college, serve missions, and seek to balance outside
work with family life, a more intricate and varied Mormonism is evolving.
Today, more Latter-​day Saints live outside of the United States than inside
of it. The “Mormon style” lingers, but global Mormonism is far too compli-
cated for easy caricatures. Women now are a part of a vast array of cultures,
classes, and political orientations. Sister Saints offers a social history built
from these voices of Latter-​day Saint women.
Sister Saints
 CHAPTER 1
•••
Building Zion

I n the winter of 1884 Mormon editor Emmeline B. Wells took time out
from her busy schedule to meet with British reformer Emily Faithfull,
who was on a speaking tour of the West. The two women shared much in
common. Both were fully committed to the rights of women and their po-
litical equality with men. Both had founded magazines in which women
wrote the stories, set the type, and marketed the results. Both were
considered strong-​minded women who moved easily in the world of ideas.
And both were well known and respected for their passionate dedication to
improving women’s lives.
Wells wrote that she found Faithfull to be amiable and noble, with good
sense and a superior education.1 Faithfull’s extensive travels made her a
charming conversationalist. Her 1884 tour was actually her third such
venture in the United States, having previously lectured on “The Changed
Position of Women in the Nineteenth Century.”
Wells was a woman with little or no patience for the mindlessness that
marked many women’s lives in the late nineteenth century. Born in 1828,
she was raised in a serious Yankee household where her mother encouraged
her intellectual spirit. In an era when most girls had limited education,
the young Emmeline was sent away for schooling in various western
Massachusetts villages. It was while she was away in 1841 that her mother
and younger siblings joined a new religion. A traveling preacher told them
about a young man from Vermont to whom God had given special pro-
phetic authority and a new book of Scripture. This seer, named Joseph
Smith, organized the Church of Christ in 1830, shortly after the publica-
tion of that Scripture: the Book of Mormon. The community would soon
become known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-​day Saints, though

1
 2  Sister Saints

outsiders called them “Mormons.” Insiders knew each other as “Saints.”

Neither Wells’s stepfather nor older siblings converted to the new faith, so
as a teenager Emmeline had to choose her own path. Was the religion a true
revelation or a dangerous delusion? Persuaded by her mother and others in
her town, she was baptized on her fourteenth birthday.
Her life changed immediately and dramatically. By fifteen she had mar-
ried a fellow Mormon and moved with her mother and some of her siblings
to a utopian community being built on the banks of the Mississippi River.
Life in the new town was a struggle. Emmeline began teaching school but
soon suffered a string of tragedies: her prophet was murdered, her baby
died, and her young husband abandoned her.
New forms of Christianity, youthful marriages, fleeing husbands, and in-
fant death were nothing new in mid-​nineteenth-​century America. That a
recent convert would turn to teaching to earn her way in the Mormon city
of Nauvoo would have made sense to any Victorian lady. Nor would any­
one have been surprised that in 1845 she married the fifty-​year-​old father
of some of the children she was teaching. We do not know who initiated
the marriage, but a surviving letter from Emmeline reveals her deep love
for her new husband.2 What would have been surprising to most people,
however, was that she was one of several wives of Newel K. Whitney. She
would bear him two daughters before his death in 1850. Then, after having
walked across the plains and over mountains to Salt Lake City, Emmeline
would propose marriage to Daniel H. Wells, a distinguished member of the
growing Latter-​day Saint community. In 1852, at the age of twenty-​four, she
became his seventh wife and mother to three of his thirty-​seven children.
Emmeline Wells was a “new” Mormon woman—​a city dweller, a woman
of ideas who looked outward to the nation and the world, and a woman who
managed her own household with little male help. Wells would also go on
to own and edit a women’s magazine, travel to the nation’s capital to argue
for women’s right to vote, organize emergency wheat storage, and serve on a
hospital board. She ran for public office and was active at the highest level in
the Relief Society, a Mormon women’s organization. Wells frequently acted
as a hostess to important visitors to Utah while still managing a compli-
cated extended family. She was an unusually active and outspoken Latter-​
day Saint, but she shared many traits with other Mormon women.
Emmeline Wells was thus perfectly situated to introduce Emily Faithfull
to the Mormons. Brigham Young had imagined a vast empire in the
intermountain West, beyond the reach of the federal government, which
he initially named “Deseret” after the Book of Mormon term for honeybee
(Ether 2:3). Like a beehive, Deseret would be a place of industry and com-
munity. Latter-​day Saints also understood themselves to be the remnant of
God’s Chosen People, a Nation of Israel. They were in Zion, the land given
 b u i l d i n g z i o n    3

to the righteous by God. By the time of Faithfull’s visit, Deseret as a polit-

ical entity had ceased to exist. It had become Utah Territory: much reduced
in size, multireligious, multiethnic, and under the authority of the federal
government. But Zion continued to endure in the minds of the Latter-​day
Saints. Women were praised for being “Mothers in Israel” or “Daughters
of Zion,” partners in constructing a promised land. From the moment
the Mormons arrived in the Salt Lake valley in 1847, women created and
maintained both the ideal and the reality of the American Zion.
Unfortunately, Emily Faithfull would have none of this. She ignored
Wells’s accomplishments and sneered at the Mormon women she met.
Even attending a luncheon at the elegant mansion of the church president
and conversing with some of its leading women did not impress Faithfull.
In her memoir, Three Visits to America, she admitted that she was treated
with kindness and courtesy, but she saw nothing worthwhile in the reli-
gion the women practiced. Faithfull disparaged the structure of the Latter-​
day Saints church by comparing them to the much-​maligned Jesuits and
dismissed the notion of a sacred Zion as a land speculation scheme. The
emigrants who settled the region were “ignorant people,” she wrote, and the
“hateful system of polygamy” caused “the cruelest subjection and the most
hopeless degradation.”3 It seemed that no amount of accomplishment or
refinement could sever the association of polygamy with degeneracy.
Wells, however, gave as good as she got. When the publisher of Three
Visits to America asked Wells to review the book for her own magazine, she
did not mince words. Wells began her comments in the Woman’s Exponent
by observing sarcastically that many authors seemed to think that writing
a book “in forcible language and thrilling incident” detailing the “horrors
of Mormonism” would immediately push Congress to end polygamy.4 She
then wondered how someone who lectured about the hypocrisy, extrava-
gance, and shams of the modern world could pander so much to society’s
taste for the sensational. Why would the visitor “join in the hue and cry
against those of whom she knew so little, before she had thoroughly
investigated the subject?” Wells noted that Faithfull saw almost nothing of
Zion because her asthma had gotten the better of her and so curtailed her
visit. According to Wells, Faithfull had lied about attending the eightieth
birthday party of Mormon notable Eliza R. Snow. Instead, she based Three
Visits to America on her own imagination and the writings of other anti-​
Mormons. Faithfull, it turned out, was not very faithful.

Although we might point to polygamy as the dividing line between Mormon

and non-​Mormon, the foundational difference is much deeper. Wells and
her sister Saints had converted to a specific religious system that shaped both
their highest aspirations and the humblest aspects of their everyday lives. It
 4  Sister Saints

was the intensity of women’s religious experiences that enabled them both
to endure the everyday struggles of pioneer life and to assent to the plural
marriages that so disgusted Faithfull and other non-​Mormons. What were
the aspects of this religion that drew women together into a tight commu-
nity that could withstand the ridicule of a whole nation? What were the
consequences of adopting this new faith? What roles did women play in
building Zion?
The Mormonism that Wells and the pioneer generation of women
embraced was embodied, practical, and supernaturally oriented. The re-
luctance of Latter-​day Saints to separate the spiritual from the material set
them apart from most Protestants of the time, who were increasingly de-
voted to the Enlightenment values of reason and privatized faith. Latter-​day
Saints were more like the religious enthusiasts of antebellum America, who
believed the current order of the world was ending and that new revelations
required nontraditional worship and unconventional social arrangements.
Like the Shakers, Mormons conflated spirituality, economic production,
and communal living. And like the Methodists, they accepted the duty to
seek out the power of the supernatural in everyday life. Eventually, Latter-​
day Saints would develop feelings for sacred space, liturgical rites, and sa-
cred clothing not dissimilar from those of Catholics and Anglicans.
So while Latter-​day Saints shared many characteristics with other
Christians, there was one thing that truly set them apart: their conviction
that their prophet, Joseph Smith, had received multiple revelations from
God. For Mormons, the Bible was not the definitive testament of God’s re-
lationship with his people. Smith had translated from an ancient Egyptian
script a book that, they believed, accurately described the history of a tribe
of Israelites who had settled in the New World. The Last Days were near,
and soon would come the millennial age with its renewed, transformed,
and glorified earth. Until that time, these Saints of the latter days were
called upon to construct a literal kingdom of God, to gather where they
could build their own sacred nation: a New Jerusalem, an American Israel,
a Zion. There they would experience God’s continual revelation—​to the
presidents of the church for the group and to individuals for their own
well-​being. The divinely inspired leaders deserved the obedience and
submission of their followers. Those who could not submit or obey were
expelled; Zion was to be a place for Saints. The Saints insisted that they
were not simply reforming Christianity but restoring religion to its pure
and original form.
For early Latter-​day Saints, religion was not a set of abstract beliefs.
Mormons saw plowing fields, digging ditches, and constructing homes as
fundamentally religious acts. For the first twenty-​five years or so in Salt
Lake, they held large religious services either outside or in a large assembly
 b u i l d i n g z i o n    5

hall. During the eighteen-​seventies, “meetinghouses” made of adobe or

stone were built for geographical areas called “wards,” but the Saints were
sporadic in their attendance.5 Since labor was perceived as a religious act,
work could take precedence over worship. Some attended Sunday School
or Sacrament meetings, but even Wells showed no guilt in writing “this
morning we rose very late.”6 Churchgoing had not become a marker of
piety. Constructing meetinghouses and attending services were more im-
portant outside of Salt Lake City, but Mormonism was more like an eth-
nicity than a denomination. Eventually meetings and organizations would
come to define Latter-​day Saint existence, but in the Nation of Deseret it
was the immediacy of the divine and the prevalence of all-​consuming labor
that structured women’s lives.
The intensity of a woman’s religious commitment typically began with
her conversion. The decision to be baptized and join the Latter-​day Saints
was usually a life-​changing experience because conversion often meant
separating from families and friends. When Helena Erickson Rosbery
heard traveling missionaries preach in her village in Sweden, she “thought
the two Brothers looked more like angels than men.” After having a series of
visions of the truth of their message, she was baptized. “I was so full of the
Spirit,” she recalled decades later, that “I thought if I was a man, I could go
and preach the gospel and refute all the arguments the learned priests could
bring to establish their doctrines.” Her Catholic husband did not share her
enthusiasm and refused to let her participate in the new religion. Eventually
Helena escaped with her daughter to a Mormon community in Denmark.
“I left all that was near and dear to me,” she remembered, “for I loved the
Lord more than anything on earth.” Helena’s husband pursued his wife and
child but eventually he, too, converted, and in 1859 the family joined the
Saints in Utah. 7 For many convert women, becoming a Latter-​day Saint was
an act of both commitment and defiance.
Not all men who followed their wives to the New World accepted the
new religion. When Mary Bulkley converted in 1857 in England, her hus-
band treated her cruelly and her neighbors threatened her. “I had to travel
my journey all alone; a very thorny path,” she recalled, “but thank the Lord
I was blest with dreams to help me, and I got my children all baptized that
was old enough and the others blessed but had to do it all in secret [and]
not let my friends know.”8 Bulkley arranged for the family to immigrate to
Utah, but her husband died unconverted in Iowa City, leaving her penniless.
She and her seven children walked to “the valley,” with Bulkley guiding an
oxcart. Even if a whole family converted, a woman knew that her other kin
would no longer be a part of her life. Between 1852 and 1887 over 73,000
European immigrants came to the Salt Lake Great Basin.9 Deseret was built
on a foundation of foreign and broken families.
 6  Sister Saints

Sometimes women who had once enthusiastically joined the church had
their fervor transformed into anti-​Mormonism. When Fanny Stenhouse’s
husband left the church, she became disenchanted and carved out a place
for herself in the developing genre of anti-​Mormon exposés. Ann Eliza
Young infamously divorced Brigham Young and then set off to discredit
her former family through writings and lectures. These women skillfully
utilized the media at a time when most women’s voices were not heard in
the public arena.
Other women made the decision to remain Mormon even when their
husbands left the church. William S. Godbe and William Jarman were fa-
mous excommunicated apostates, but their wives, Charlotte and Maria,
remained orthodox Mormons. Both divorced their husbands and raised
their children within the community of Saints. Women’s enthusiasm for re-
ligion often took precedence over their commitments to family.

Women made such sacrifices because they believed they had seen with
their own eyes the spiritual blessings God had given to the Saints. Other
Christians believed that the extraordinary miracles of the New Testament
ended with the early church, but Mormons preached that believers could
experience the supernatural in their everyday lives—​just as the apostles
did in their day. The immediacy of these experiences fulfilled the promises
made by Mormon missionaries. The physical manifestations of God were
proof that the Book of Mormon was true and that Joseph Smith was a
prophet.
Beginning in the eighteen-​thirties, some Mormon women were caught
up in a divine power so strong that they spoke and sang in unknown lan-
guages. For example, hearing Joseph Smith preach, Lydia Bailey felt the
glory of God swell up in her: “She was enveloped as with a flame, and unable
longer to retain her seat, she arose and her mouth was filled with the praises
of God and his glory. This spirit of tongues was upon her.”10 Other women
interpreted what was said. At times men were present; at other times only in
intimate gatherings of women were heavenly sounds heard. Women experi-
enced glossolalia (speaking in tongues) in the early temples of Kirtland and
Nauvoo, at large conferences, in their local churches, at school openings,
and in the most mundane circumstances. In 1895 at “Sister Stevenson’s”
birthday party, “Sister Sarah Phelps spoke in tongues with great power in-
somuch that the floor and the chairs and our limbs trembled.”11 In her diary,
Wells often mentioned that her women friends spoke and interpreted in
tongues—​and at times she did as well.12
During the nineteenth century, hearing unknown languages was
a common occurrence at both Latter-​day Saint worship services and
at informal home gatherings, to the point of becoming routine and
 b u i l d i n g z i o n    7

unexceptional. The nature of this language was unclear. Wells thought the
strange words could be a primordial Indian dialect or the pure language of
Adam.13 While glossolalia was typically translated, diaries rarely explained
what actually was said. Communicating an explicit message was less im-
portant than conveying a general feeling of spiritual empowerment and
comfort. At times of celebration, during periods of anxiety, or even during
routine church meetings, women experienced the intense spirit of the Lord.
Speaking and singing in tongues was often accompanied by women
blessing and prophesizing. In 1894 a Canadian couple asked the
community’s spiritual leader, Charles Ora Card, to bless the new home they
had built. Card described in his diary how the couple had been fasting and
praying, hoping that his wife, Zina Presendia, might speak in tongues. Zina
did speak in tongues, but then she “put her hands on their heads as if to
bless them. She did upon mine [Charles] more particularly and with longer
duration.” Atena, the woman who owned the home, interpreted what Zina
had said. Then Atena herself prophesized, telling Charles he would even-
tually be free from debt. “This comfort[ed] me very much for I long to see
the day,” Charles wrote. “We had a spiritual feast and spent the evening in
conversing,” he concluded. “God blest us much.”14 The Gifts of the Holy
Spirit were just that, gifts that came to some and not to others.
By far the most widespread spiritual gift experienced by women was the
ability to heal. Healing was an essential part of Latter-​day Saint life because
illness and death were unavoidable, as they were everywhere in nineteenth-​
century America. No family could boast of being free from pain, suffering,
and grief. Children contracted scarlet fever, chicken pox, and pneumonia.
In 1880 Eliza Lyman observed that “to see a beloved child suffering the
pains of Death without the power to relieve them in the least is almost too
much for human nature to bear.”15 Adults fared little better. Most available
medical treatments took place at home, and so women intimately interacted
with the sick and disabled. Women managed the “gates of mortality,” both
introducing new souls into the world and smoothing their transition into
the next.16
Two models of healing exist within Christianity in general and in
Mormonism in particular. In the first, healing was one of several spiritual
gifts given by God to believers, including women (I Corinthians 12:9).
The father of Joseph Smith, recognized as the “patriarch” of the church,
gave special blessings (Patriarchal Blessings) that recognized such gifts in
women. In 1835 he told Elizabeth Ann Whitney (later Wells’s sister wife
in Nauvoo), “When thy husband is far from thee and thy little ones are
afflicted thou shalt have power to prevail and they shall be healed.”17 In
1842 Joseph Smith himself chided those who questioned women’s healing
abilities. “Respecting the female laying on hands,” he explained, “there
 8  Sister Saints

could be no devils in it if God gave his sanction by healing—​that there

could be no more sin in any female laying hands on the sick than in wetting
the face with water—​that it is no sin for anybody to do it that has faith.”18
Women practiced healing throughout the nineteenth century.
In the second model, healing was tied to church offices typically occu-
pied by men. In his 1831 revelations on healing, Smith explained how it
worked: two or more elders should be called to pray and lay their hands
on the afflicted person (D&C 42:44). In another revelation, William
E. McLellin was told to “lay your hands upon the sick, and they shall re-
cover” (D&C 66:9). These revelations echoed the epistle of James (5:14),
who also mentioned that the elders of the church would anoint the sick with
oil in the name of the Lord. For Smith, women could also be marked to heal,
although it is unclear how he is using the word “ordain”: “Wherein they are
ordained, it is the privilege of those set apart to administer in that authority
which is confer’d on them—​and if sisters should have faith to heal the sick,
let all hold their tongues, and let everything roll on.”19 Women might be
“set apart” by others in the church for healing. In this version of the model,
healing required the acknowledgment of authority figures.
Throughout most of the nineteenth century, these two models for healing
existed simultaneously and peacefully. Women healed, and they called on
men to heal. In 1878, after the deaths of four of her children and the near
death of a son who had disemboweled himself on a pitchfork, Margaret
Ballard’s husband fell ill. First the elders were called and they attempted to
heal him, but he did not seem to be recovering. According to Margaret, “a
voice came to me and said, ‘administer to him,’ but I was very timid about
this for the brethren had just administered to him.” Then the voice came
again, but “I felt that they would think me bold and I was very weak. The
voice came to me this third time and I heeded to its promptings and went
and put my hands upon his head. The Spirit of the Holy Ghost was with me
and I was filled with a Divine strength in performing the ordinance.” A few
years later, her father had a serious case of pneumonia, and Margaret again
healed after the elders left. She recalled her father saying, “Thank God for
this blessing, I knew this power was in the church and I thank Him for it.”20
From Margaret’s perspective, while it was her own divine gift that enabled
her husband and father to recover, this did not negate the call to the elders,
nor did they impede her efforts.
Only certain women were engaged in healing, blessing, speaking in
tongues, and prophesizing, but many Mormon women reported uncanny
dreams during which God gave them special insights and inspiration.
Martha Cox had to flee to Mexico in 1889 to avoid being arrested for po-
lygamy. Her life was difficult, and “I had bitter hatred in my heart against
the officials in Utah and against the traitors who exposed the Saints.”21 One
 b u i l d i n g z i o n    9

night she had a dream that she believed gave her insight into what this ha-
tred was doing to her. She dreamt that she had a chain around her neck
with bundles on it. Each bundle represented a wrong she had done, or a
complaint she had, or a debt she had accrued. Then, in the dream she slowly
lifted off each bundle, freeing herself from the burdens she had imposed
on herself. The dream told her that she needed to become free of her ha-
tred and fears. Dreams were a key source of spiritual power. They reassured
women about lost loved ones, comforted them, and provided them with
hidden information.
Latter-​day Saint temples, however, were increasingly becoming the place
where the divine touched the human. Utah’s first temple was constructed in St.
George in 1877; one went up in Logan in 1884. The Manti Temple would be
dedicated in 1888 and the Salt Lake Temple finished in 1893. Until 1889 the
Saints in Salt Lake had conducted the special rituals in the small “Endowment
House” on the temple block. But steam-​powered derricks enabled temple
walls to rise eighty feet into the air, complementing the massive nearby
Tabernacle (1864–​67) and Assembly Hall (1877–​82). The Logan Temple
sat atop a hill with painted white limestone walls. With their mansard roofs
and crenellated towers, the temples were dramatically different from the small
ward meetinghouses where the Saints worshipped during the week.
Within the temple, women found personal inspiration while cultivating
ritual authority. They decorated the space as they would their own homes,
expressing both their artistry and devotion in woven rugs, drapery, and
even hair wreaths. Women sewed special robes worn in the temple and then
dressed the dead in those priestly garments when they prepared the Saints
for burial. Female temple workers washed and anointed other women,
reciting prayers while touching their bare skin with oil. Wells recalled in
1880 that her friend Eliza Snow “ministered in that Temple in the holy
rites that pertain to the house of the Lord as priestess and Mother in Israel
to hundreds of her sex,” and that women officiated earlier in the Nauvoo
Temple “in the character of [a]‌priestess.”22
Groups of men and women then observed the plan of salvation dra-
matically portrayed by actors in various rooms. Women promised to obey
their husbands and special signs and words were given to them that enabled
married women to enter the highest kingdom of heaven along with their
husbands. Women often went to the temple prior to giving birth or when
they were ill. They also performed rituals for their dead ancestors to ensure
that they, too, had the opportunity to move into the highest realms of the
afterlife. “It gave me great joy to be an instrument in the hands of the Lord,”
Margaret Ballard explained, “in helping work out salvation for those who
died in darkness.”23 Only women could perform ordinances for women,
securing their role in temple rituals.
 10  Sister Saints

It would be incorrect to conclude, however, that women associated being

a Latter-​day Saint solely with otherworldly experiences. The kingdom of
Zion relied on women’s practical contributions not only to care for their
families but also to attend to the needs of the community’s poor, widows,
and orphans. A “Female Relief Society,” not unlike Protestant benevolent
associations common at the time, had been founded in Nauvoo in 1842.
Smith, however, told the assembled women that he had something more
ambitious in mind for a select group of them. In addition to attending to
the poor, they should correct the morals and strengthen the virtues of the
community’s women in order to “save the Elders the trouble of rebuking.”24
In speaking to the Relief Society, Smith employed terms that up until then
had only been addressed to men: he would deliver “keys” to “this society and
to the church,” and he promised, according to notes taken at the meeting,
that “he was going to make of this Society a kingdom of priests as in Enoch’s
day—​as in Paul’s day.”25 Smith would “ordain” officers to direct the Society.
His wife Emma would “preside” as president, and he repeated the revelation
that she would also expound the Scriptures and teach other women (D&C
25:5–​8). Smith did not explain the Society’s precise relationship to the male
priesthood, and the meeting’s minutes are tantalizingly obscure.
The prophet was never able to clarify his intentions. After Smith’s death,
Brigham Young was convinced that Joseph’s wife Emma was stirring up
women against the practice of plural marriage. Emma Smith was a forceful,
intelligent, and well-​regarded member of the Latter-​day Saint community,
and Young did not want to risk her—​or any woman—​disrupting his au-
thority or the unity of the Saints. In March 1845, Young made one thing
absolutely clear to influential Mormon men: women, when they got to-
gether in groups, were trouble. Not only would there be no more Relief
Society meetings, but “I will curse every man that lets his wife or daugh-
ters meet again—​until I tell them . . . I don’t [want] the advice or counsel
of any woman—​they would lead us down to hell—​.” According to Young,
women were weak like Eve and needed men to lead them into the Celestial
Kingdom.26 Moreover, Young claimed that Smith had not initiated the
Relief Society, and if anyone said he did, “tell them it is a damned lie for
I know he never encouraged it.” Colorful, opinionated, and always con-
fident in his judgments, Young preached that “when I want sisters or the
wives of the members of the church to get up [a]‌Relief Society, I will
summon them to my aid but until that time let them stay at home.”27 For a
community struggling to find and uphold a God-​appointed leader, women’s
diverse attitudes regarding plural marriage were seen as undermining
hard-​fought unity.
Emma Smith, who never wavered from believing her husband was a
prophet of God, did vacillate in her support of his multiple marriages. She
 b u i l d i n g z i o n    11

came to know of his wives at different times and seemed torn between her
love for Joseph and her disgust at his sexual behavior. After her husband’s
death, when Young decided to lead the Saints into the Western desert,
Emma and her children rejected his prophetic authority and stayed in
Nauvoo. In that regard, Young was correct that women could be trouble.
Once in Utah, however, Young realized that if he wanted to create
a stable, self-​sustaining economy, he needed the support of women.
Lingering in the background were Smith’s talks to Latter-​day Saint women,
which were both obscure and empowering. In 1855 some of the ambiguous
character of the prophet’s injunctions to the newly formed Relief Society
was clarified through the publication of a set of edited excerpts of Smith’s
sermons. While compiling a manuscript history of the church, church his-
torian George A. Smith and Thomas Bullock altered the “original sermon”
that Eliza R. Snow had transcribed. The new editing more clearly linked
women’s authority to that of men’s. For instance, in the original minutes,
Joseph Smith simply spoke of “delivering the keys to this Society and to
the church,” but the revision read: “He spoke of delivering the keys of the
Priesthood to the church, and said that the faithful members of the Relief
Society should receive them in connection with their husbands” [italics
mine].28 After the revisions were read to him, Young reportedly said he “was
much pleased with them.”29 Upon hearing the alteration, Heber C. Kimball,
Young’s first counselor, explained: “heard Joseph’s sermon read, liked it
better as revised.”30 These changes surely made it easier for Young to permit
Latter-​day Saint women to meet for charitable activities. In 1867 Young
approved the church-​wide reorganization of the Relief Society under the
authority of Eliza R. Snow.
Over the next decade, until his death in 1877, Young would call on the
newly reorganized Relief Society to perform a great variety of tasks ranging
from making clothing for poor Indians, to producing silk, to running co-
operative stores. By 1888 there were almost four hundred local Relief
Societies, each with an organization similar to that of the male priesthood.31
Women raised funds to build and furnish their own buildings, where they
not only conducted meetings but also dried fruit, wove rugs from rags, sold
baby clothing and shoes, sewed temple clothing, braided straw for bonnets,
and produced quilts. By the turn of the century, Relief Society property in
Utah was worth more than $95,000.32
In 1876, after Young became frustrated trying to get men to save wheat
for emergencies, he asked Wells to organize the women of the Relief Society
to collect grain. Using the Woman’s Exponent as a vehicle to generate en-
thusiasm for the project, Wells reported on how women sold the eggs they
collected on Sundays and bought grain with the money they earned. Other
women and children went into fields after wheat had been harvested and
 12  Sister Saints

gleaned the leftovers. They put on dances and teas and used the proceeds
to buy surplus wheat. Relief Society committees were organized in order to
fundraise and coordinate building the storehouses. Like the Relief Society
buildings and the cooperative stores, women owned both the wheat and
the storage facilities. Church leaders warned local ward bishops that they
had no authority over the stored grain.
Young also worked hard to convince women to produce their own silk
fabric for clothing. In 1868 he imported mulberry seeds from France and
planted them at an experimental farm in Salt Lake. Once the trees had grown,
he made cuttings and distributed them to families around the Valley. On his
own property he built a cocoonery capable of feeding and tending over two
million silkworms, which would be fed with the mulberry leaves. Young
believed that women could effectively do this work, and Wells’s Woman’s
Exponent explained how the breeding and sale of silk eggs could provide a
handsome income “with little trouble and less outlay.”33 Young gave the task
of organizing silk production to his wife Zina Diantha, and even after he
died she continued to organize Mormon women to produce silk.
Silk production was highly labor intensive because the worms required
much space, constant monitoring of temperatures, and copious amounts of
mulberry leaves cut in specific dimensions. Matilda Andrus was probably
not alone in characterizing raising silkworms as a “nerve-​racking, stinking
mess.”34 Most production was done in homes, but in 1880 a silk factory
was finally completed at the mouth of City Creek canyon, although it only
functioned for ten years. Women had a difficult time making any profit from
their efforts because they could not get loans to buy the equipment needed
to weave the silk threads into material. In 1899 Zina “regretted the indif-
ference of the people” toward these efforts in spite of the three hundred
pounds of cocoons that had been raised in Provo.35 The quality of silk was
never very high, and most of it went into making token pieces like fringe
decoration for the St. George Temple and souvenir scarves. By 1905 the
experiment was officially over.
Even if storing grain proved successful while manufacturing silk did
not, both activities helped meld together religious commitment and ec-
onomic behavior. Not all Latter-​day Saint women belonged to the Relief
Society during the nineteenth century, but many who did belong did more
than take care of the poor and the sick. The Relief Society responded to
the diverse needs of the community and in doing so encouraged women
to learn the skills of management, budgeting, compromise, and leader-
ship. Relief Society buildings provided women with their own space sepa-
rate from that of men. The Woman’s Exponent documented and publicized
their accomplishments, making it possible for Mormon women even in
small towns to learn what their sisters around the country were doing. The
 b u i l d i n g z i o n    13

Relief Society provided religious instruction and aid for the needy, but it
also constructed a practical framework for women to work toward common
goals and to share their knowledge and achievements.
The Relief Society supported economic activities because Young felt that
women should work at whatever jobs would build up Zion. He variously
suggested they learn how to spawn fish in springs, manage a telegraph of-
fice, write schoolbooks, do men’s tailoring, and study obstetrics.36 Women
doing such work would free Latter-​day Saint men up to do heavy labor
and to serve the church. “Our work, our everyday labor, our whole lives
are within the scope of our religion,” Young preached in 1869. The Saints
should develop what “they are inclined to,” and Young taught that women
should use “the powers with which they are endowed” even if that meant
becoming a mathematician or accountant. “We believe that women are
useful, not only to sweep houses, wash dishes, make beds, and raise babies,”
he told the Saints assembled in the new tabernacle, “but they should stand
behind the counter, study law or physic, or become good bookkeepers and
be able to do the business in any counting house, and all this to enlarge the
sphere of usefulness for the benefit of society at large.” Women, by “the de-
sign of their creation,” were expected take on diverse jobs in the growing
Latter-​day Saint community. 37 Family was not their only concern.
Working to build up the Kingdom of God was as much a religious act
as healing or speaking in tongues. Women raised on Victorian notions of
womanhood in Europe or on the East Coast may have had a difficult time
imagining this expanded understanding of work and religion. But life in the
intermountain West demanded physical strength, especially for women
who continued to live on farms after the waning pioneer days. The “weaker
sex” was expected to be strong. Young asked women to develop expertise in
areas the community needed rather than assume that their sentimental na-
ture limited what they could do. Pioneer life could be violent and brutal—​
and even city dwellers at the end of the century experienced a stream of
illness, accidents, and death that made female “innocence” hard to main-
tain. Women were expected to be productive members of the community,
and their sex did not exempt them from hard work.

After the continental railroad tied the Utah Territory closer to the national
culture, Young worried about its impact on the Latter-​day Saints. Would
Zion be able to hold its own place as an alternative to worldly Babylon if
the territory and the nation were yoked together by a growing transpor-
tation system? As Utah slowly moved to a cash-​based economy, Young in-
creasingly directed his concerns about consumerism to women. “We have
hundreds of young men here who dare not take girls for wives. Why?”
Young asked in 1872. “Because the very first thing they want [is] a horse
 14  Sister Saints

and buggy, and a piano; they want somebody to come every day to give
them lessons on the piano; they want two hired girls and a mansion, so
that they can entertain company, and the boys are afraid to marry them.”38
An emerging class system was impeding the dream of a society in which all
believers shared in God’s blessings. It seemed that not all women wanted a
life devoted exclusively to work and religion.
Women were blamed for turning families away from home manufactur­ing
and for demanding an easy life. However, as the Utah Territory became in-
creasingly linked to a national economy—newly oriented toward big busi-
ness and laissez-​faire capitalist values—women suffered. Eliza Lyman wrote
in her 1878 diary that at Thanksgiving rich people feasted on roast turkey
and plum puddings, but she and her family only had oyster soup, “which
I despise.” She poignantly observed that “we poor have not much enjoy-
ment on such days.” Rather, she could only look forward to “hard work and
poor fare the same as any other day.” Her friend “Sister Rogers” had to leave
her children almost every day to wash and iron for others. “Today which is a
grand holiday for the rich,” Lyman reported, “she is out cleaning house and
her children at home alone as usual. No rest for her.”39 If Mormonism meant
work and religion, what would be the impact if one Latter-​day Saint woman
had leisure because another one did her work?
It was not only class differences that threatened Zion. The steadily rising
number and proportion of non-​Mormons in Utah made the territory far
more multicultural than the Saints had ever imagined. In 1860, 88 per-
cent of the territory was Mormon; by 1890 it was 66 percent and falling.40
Mining had brought non-​Mormon “Gentiles” into the Utah Territory and
merchants followed. Protestant and Catholic clergymen arrived and set up
churches. Catholic nuns and Protestant women staffed schools, hospitals,
and orphanages. In 1870 Salt Lake City’s total population of 12,900 was
mostly Mormons; twenty years later it was a multireligious 44,800.41 It was
not simply Presbyterians and Catholics who bought goods manufactured
in the East or imported from around the world. Latter-​day Saints also read
cheap magazines. Their newspapers advertised the latest fashions and labor-​
saving devices. Not satisfied with the likes of handmade straw bonnets, the
daughters of the Latter-​day pioneer generation increasingly looked to non-​
Mormon merchants to satisfy their fashion desires.
Even more threateningly, Mormon girls began looking at Gentile
boys, Gentile religions, and Gentile notions of womanhood. A plural-
istic Utah, in short, meant more options for young men and women. In
1880, after Jane H. Blood had attended a “mixed” wedding, she wrote
disparagingly of it in her diary. “I felt sorry to see a good girl like her
marry out of the church,” she lamented. “I believe it is her mother’s fault.
I would sooner bury my girls then see them marry out of this church
 b u i l d i n g z i o n    15

for I think I should have to bear part of the blame for not teaching them
better.”42 In order to help families keep their children securely in the fold,
the church centralized its youth organizations, and in 1889 Susa Young
Gates founded the Young Woman’s Journal. There, in story after story,
girls learned of the disasters that followed when they did not heed the
instructions of their Mormon mothers.
As the nineteenth century was ending, Latter-​day Saints had many
worries. The railroad had brought consumer goods, “worldly” values
embedded in popular magazines and newspapers, and an increasing
number of settlers who had no interest in the truths that the Saints held
close to their hearts. Indeed, many of those who traveled to the Utah
Territory thought Mormonism to be alien and un-​American, not quite a
religion. But what truly astonished the rest of the nation was Latter-​day
Saint women’s continual refrain that their religion called them to accept
plural marriages. With the end of the Civil War and the Northern victors
declaring slavery abolished, attention turned to the other “relic of barba-
rism” that the country’s politicians had vowed to uproot.
 CHAPTER 2
•••
Polygamy’s End

O utsiders thought that Latter-​day Saints had given their allegiance

to a false and fanatical religion, and—​like Catholics or, even worse,
Muslims—​promoted an immoral notion of family life. Just as Protestants
condemned the celibate lives of Catholic clergy and fantasized about de-
based life in “Mohammedean” harems, they could not understand how
plural marriage could be defended as “celestial.” Since the Reformation,
Protestants had embedded eternal values within the structure of family life.
“True” Christian men and women knew how to keep house, raise children,
have proper sex, and structure married life. Domesticity was not detached
from religion but derived from it. Marriage reflected eternal Christian
values. Consequently, from the perspective of outsiders, a false religion—​
like Mormonism—​would naturally produce a false family.
From the perspective of the Latter-​day Saints, however, plural marriage
was divinely ordained. Mormons had moved from place to place in the
United States, and then left it entirely, at least in part to be able to fulfill God’s
commands. Emmeline Wells lived as a plural wife because she believed that
the revelations of Joseph Smith came from God. For women like Wells who
converted when they were young and underwent the struggles of pioneer
life, plural marriage was but one aspect of a vast array of controversial reli-
gious practices. In order to understand the nature of plural marriage and
women’s complicated responses to it, we must first grasp Smith’s innova-
tive ideas about heaven and of divinity. Although Mormon women had di-
verse experiences with plural marriage, they were unified in their assertion
that they had a constitutional right to worship according to the dictates of
their own conscience. By the end of the nineteenth century, antipolygamy
polemics and legislation had made life intolerable for the Saints in Utah. Yet

17
 18  Sister Saints

women’s efforts to justify plural marriage had laid the groundwork for them
to demand their rights as citizens.

Smith’s revelation on plural marriage both accompanied and relied on a

substantial reconceptualizing of the structure of heaven. In 1843 Smith told
his closest male followers that God had given him a glimpse into the nature
of eternal life. The highest degree of heaven could only be reached “if a man
marry a wife and make a covenant with her for time and for all eternity”
(D&C 132:18). Heaven had “degrees” (D&C 131:1), and at the highest
level, a woman and man needed to be linked together under the authority
of the Latter-​day Saint priesthood. For the dead, heaven did not end marital
relations in favor of focused contemplation of the divine. Instead, Latter-​
day Saint temple marriages would be eternally durable and perfect. If men
and women were properly married in the temple, the spiritual progression
begun on earth continued after their death. Their eventual exaltation and
glory would enable them to produce spirit children, “a fullness and contin-
uation of the seeds forever and ever” (D&C 132:19). Such heavenly devel-
opment had no end: “Then shall they be gods, because they have all power,
and the angels are subject unto them” (D&C 132:20). Only a united female
and male could experience the highest realm of glory.
Also residing in the highest heaven were the divine parents. Heavenly
Father, who created and rules over our world, is the same as the biblical God
the Father. But the early Mormon understanding of the Heavenly Mother is
underdeveloped. The first published account of a Heavenly Mother was not
made by the Prophet but by one of his plural wives.
After Smith’s death, Eliza R. Snow mourned not only the loss of a
prophet but also that of a man to whom she was secretly married. An ac-
complished poet, Snow used verse to make sense out of her grief. In 1845
she published “My Father in Heaven,” which laid out the Mormon plan
of salvation. In it, Snow begins by reflecting on her “primeval childhood”
when she resided in a “glorious place” and was nurtured by the side of “my
Father.” She then comes to earth where she is but a stranger from “a more
exalted sphere.” However, when the “key of knowledge was restored” she
learned the answer to her question: “In the heav’ns are parents single?”
Developing the idea of the eternal couple, Snow responds: “No, the thought
makes reason stare!/​Truth is reason; truth eternal/​Tells me I’ve a mother
there.” The poem ends with another rhetorical question: “When I leave
this frail existence/​W hen I lay this mortal by/​Father, Mother, may I meet
you/​In your royal courts on high?”1 For Snow, who would become the
plural wife of Brigham Young and a formidable force in early Mormonism,
there was no question that there was a divine female presence awaiting the
righteous Saints in heaven.
 p o lyg a m y ’s e n d    19

When two volumes of Snow’s poems were published in 1856, the

“Invocation, or The Eternal Father and Mother” appeared on the first page.2
The poem was also put to music, first to a popular song by Stephen Foster
and then to several other tunes. The Deseret News reported that the poem
set to Foster’s tune was Young’s favorite hymn.3 The hymn became known
as “O, My Father,” and when it was sung at Young’s funeral in 1877, the
words (but not the melody) became the classic statement of the hope of
eternal life. At countless funerals, when Saints sought to be uplifted by the
promise of celestial glory, they sang about meeting their divine Mother.
Snow’s poem imagines dwelling with her Mother and her Father “in
the heav’ns.” However, she herself knew that if (as Christianity taught) the
human world was a hazy reflection of the celestial, then “the heav’ns” might
be far more complicated than traditionally portrayed. As early as the mid-​
eighteen-​thirties, Smith had married an additional wife, and plural marriages
were being conducted in Nauvoo ten years later. In the same 1843 revela-
tion that reordered heaven, God reminded Smith of the social structure of
the ancient world. Sarah, the wife of the biblical patriarch Abraham, had
given her handmaid to her husband to wed when she herself had not borne
children. King David also “received many wives and concubines,” as did
Solomon and Moses (D&C 132:34–​39). Consequently, if a man desired
to marry again and his first wife consented, then a second marriage under
the authority of the priesthood would be “justified” (D&C 132:62). The
goal of these marriages was to “multiply and replenish the earth,” enabling
the exaltation of the faithful who would eternally bear more souls (D&C
132:63). For Smith, the celestial cosmos was an ever-​enlarging community
because men—​on earth and in heaven—​could marry multiple women.
Celestial marriage created an eternally expanding and intimate bond be-
tween people, what one historian has termed a great “Chain of Belonging.”4
Both sexes, connected by the authority of the priesthood, were necessary
for exaltation. Without women, there could be no marriage, no eternal net-
work of linked souls. Marriage was not simply an economic necessity or a
romantic compulsion; it was a religious act that prepared one for a revealed
divine eternity.
While Smith’s understanding of plural marriage developed throughout
the eighteen-​thirties and eighteen-​forties, it was not until after his death,
when the Saints were firmly established in Utah, that the practice was
made public. In 1852 Apostle Orson Pratt, with Young by his side, pub-
licly announced why God had revealed the principle of the plurality of
wives. Pratt began with a specifically Mormon revelation, that eternal mar-
riage produced spirit children who assumed earthly bodies (“mortal tab-
ernacles”)—​everyone on earth had previously existed, in spirit form, in
heaven. He then reasoned from the Bible, as had Smith. Drawing from the
 20  Sister Saints

Old Testament, Pratt explained that God promised Abraham as many seed
as a seashore full of sand (Genesis 22:17); therefore, “It would have been
rather a slow process, if Abraham had been confined to one wife, like some
of those narrow, contracted notions of modern Christianity.” Pratt went on
to conclude that it was monogamy rather than polygamy that was unnatural
and often led to sin. Men limited to one wife fell into whoredom, adultery,
fornication, and prostitution. On the other hand, into celestial marriages
would come the noblest spirits of the preexistence, those who had waited
thousands of years to descend to earth. These spirits would become the
children of the faithful Saints, “the most righteous of any other people upon
the earth.”5
Expanding on plural marriage a year later (and probably in response
to Snow’s poem), Pratt speculated on the nature of “a heavenly Mother.”
Because Christian tradition held that earthly things were a dim likeness of
heavenly things, “God associated in the capacity of a husband” with his heav-
enly wife. Heavenly Mother, however, should not be worshiped: the New
Testament described how Jesus prayed to his Heavenly Father, not Mother.
In addition, Pratt explained that given the patriarchal order, Heavenly
Father was the head of his household of wives and children. Without elab-
oration, Pratt had introduced the notion of multiple Heavenly Mothers.
Once the church ended polygamy in 1890, the possibility that Heavenly
Father had several wives faded from church writings, but Heavenly Mother
remained. In 1895 church president Joseph F. Smith asserted that the “great
truth” of a Heavenly Mother and Father came not from Snow but directly
from Joseph Smith.6 Then in 1909 the First Presidency affirmed that “All
men and women are in the similitude of the universal Father and Mother
and are literally the sons and daughters of Deity.”7

In their public writing, women did not contradict the reasoning behind po-
lygamy. Helen Mar Whitney explained in her essay “Why We Practice Plural
Marriage” that God had revealed to Smith a cosmic plan by which heavenly
parents produced children who needed to live on earth to be tested and pre-
pared for eternity. “There were thousands of spirits, yet unborn,” she wrote
in 1884, “who were anxiously waiting for the privilege of coming down to
take tabernacles of flesh, that their glory might be complete.” The more chil-
dren who were brought into the world, the more souls could continue their
eternal progress. “Their greatest punishment,” Whitney explained, “is not
having bodies.” The point of plural marriage was “for the purpose of raising
a righteous seed.”8
As the federal government attempted to rid the nation of polygamy,
Mormon women steadfastly proclaimed their support of plural marriage.
In 1870 five thousand Latter-​day Saint women gathered in Salt Lake City
 p o lyg a m y ’s e n d    21

to rally against proposed antipolygamy legislation. Nine years later, the

women of the village of Fillmore met to send their protests to Washington.
Eliza Marie Lyman penned a fiery address, asserting women’s right to live
as they pleased:

We are happy with our husbands and children and do not need the sympathy of the out-
side world nor do we thank them for it. Let those who would destroy our institutions
travel through the cities of the United States and see if they cannot find some of their
fallen sisters who would gladly receive the sympathy they are so anxious to bestow
upon us.

Lyman pointed out that the Latter-​day Saints had been persecuted and
driven out of their homes even before outsiders knew about plural mar-
riage. She knew that her religion was true and that the “puny arm” of oppo-
sition could not stop its growth. “Every person should have the privilege of
serving God according to the dictates of their own conscience,” she ended
her speech, “and as citizens of these United States we claim that privilege.”9
Wells also upheld the benefits of polygamy in the Woman’s Exponent. In
1876, in a column about the importance of women speaking and writing,
she countered the common belief that polygamy made women inferior to
men. “Polygamy gives women more time for thought, for mental culture,
more freedom of action, a broader field of labor,” she asserted. Polygamy
“inculcates liberality and generosity, develops more fully the spiritual
elements of life, fosters purity of thought and gives wider scope to benev-
olence.” Most importantly, this true principle of marriage “leads women
more directly to God, the fountain of all truth.”10 Plural marriage, by re-
leasing an individual woman from continual childbearing and by allowing
her to share her domestic life with other women, offered women more
possibilities for exercising their talents.
Privately, however, women held diverse opinions about the practice and
experience of polygamy. When Rose Shepard asked her mother why she
married into polygamy, her mother first cited her faith and then suggested
that “she would much rather marry a man she knew to be righteous and
kind then to throw herself away on some young man who might turn out
to be worthless.”11 Mrs. Orson Smith believed that she was always cut out
for polygamy because it was how she was raised. She waited until she found
a family in which “I loved the woman as well as I loved the man.”12 Then,
living as a second wife, she taught school while her sister wife did the bulk
of the housework. A child of polygamists, Esther Huntsman, learned about
a different kind of parental love. “I used to ask father if it was possible for a
man to love more than one woman,” Huntsman told an interviewer. “He al-
ways answered by asking me if a woman could love more than one child.”13
 22  Sister Saints

Lucy Walker Kimball believed that her husband, Heber C. Kimball, “was
capable of loving more than one woman as God himself is capable of loving
all his creations.”14 True love, celestial love, was not exclusive because it was
modeled on divinity.
As can be imagined, the everyday experience of plural marriage was highly
dependent on wealth, social status, and personality. Anthon L. Skanchy, for
instance, was baptized in Norway in 1861 and married a widow with four
children. After his conversion, he left his family several times to do missions
in his country, and then in 1868 the household moved to Utah. For the
first few years, Anthon, his wife Christina, and their multiple children and
stepchildren occupied a four-​room house. Skanchy eventually married
a second and a third wife. After the second marriage, Anthon built a few
smaller rooms for the new wife, but the accommodations remained exceed-
ingly cramped. For fifteen years, the three wives lived together. Ultimately,
Anthon did provide a small adobe house for Christina, the first wife.
According to the son of the second wife (Caroline II), Christina’s
drinking problem was exacerbated by polygamy, and she would “go off on
a toot,” sitting for hours staring at the irrigation ditch in front of the house.
“Once when it was especially bad,” he told an interviewer, “she went out and
threw a shoe through a window in Caroline II’s house.” Skanchy, a bishop
and a prosperous lumber merchant, remonstrated his wife, who reportedly
promised to do better. Christina was well liked and a leader in the ward,
so neighbors blamed her husband for not putting a stop to her drinking.
Eventually, Christina divorced Skanchy, but she died shortly after.15
By the eighteen-​eighties some families had kept “the principle” for two
generations. Scholars estimate that around 25 percent of the Latter-​day
Saints of that time lived in plural families, although that number varied
by region and the practice was declining.16 Just as women had varying
degrees of success living in monogamous relationships, so they did with
polygamy. Some women found comfort and support among their sister
wives while others experienced jealousy and contention. Some men
were fair and generous with their attention while others left their wives
emotionally and physically destitute. Because Young wanted stable and
productive families, he enabled couples whose relationships had broken
down to end their marriages. Utah Territory had some of the most liberal
divorce laws in the nation. The assumption was that the divorced would
quickly remarry and establish new, happier families. Although the age gap
between husband and wife did increase as men married additional wives,
antipolygamists exaggerated the level of discontent among polygamist
women. Far off in the Western desert, the Saints had created families both
radically different from and surprisingly similar to those of the rest of the
country.
 p o lyg a m y ’s e n d    23

It is difficult, however, to describe how women experienced plural mar-

riage per se because of the pressures placed on the institution by anti-​
Mormon reformers and the federal government. Those who practiced or
promoted polygamy were always doing so within a context of criminality.
In 1856 the Republican Party platform termed polygamy and slavery the
“twin relics of barbarism.”17 According to this logic, just as Africans had
been unjustly enslaved, so too were white women imprisoned by depraved
Mormon men. After slavery had been abolished, the nation’s reformers
turned their attention to polygamy. They insisted that the Morrill Anti-​
Bigamy Act (1862), which criminalized “spiritual marriage” and lim-
ited the church’s wealth, be vigorously enforced. In addition, reformers
supported the Cullom Bill (1870), which called for greater federal control
over Utah Territory. It was the possibility that this new legislation would
become law that mobilized the protests of Latter-​day Saint women. While
the Cullom Bill did not pass, the 1874 Poland Act transferred local legal
authority of Utah Territory over to the federal government and banned
polygamists from sitting on juries.
Latter-​day Saints responded with loud cries that practicing plural mar-
riage was constitutionally protected under the freedom of religion clause
of the First Amendment. In addition, local communities should be self-​
governing and the power of the federal government limited. In November
1878, the US Supreme Court heard such arguments for plural marriage—​
and rejected them. The Court concluded that Congress did have the right
to prohibit certain types of marriage when those marriages contravened
acceptable standards of decency and civility. Chief Justice Morrison Waite
maintained that Congress must not legislate religious beliefs, but the gov-
ernment could regulate religious activities when they violated social duties
or were subversive of good order.18 Waite agreed with the antipolygamists
and deemed that Mormon marriage patterns were as uncivilized as those of
“Asiatic” and African people. Congress had a moral responsibility to enact
legislation that would end the unreasonable control that Mormon men
held over women.
The intensified campaign to destroy plural marriage motivated church
leaders to renew their support of it. Young died in 1877 and the new pres-
ident, John Taylor, was an adamant polygamist. At a special priesthood
meeting during the spring 1884 general conference, he told all ward bishops
and stake presidents who were monogamists either to marry an additional
wife or resign from church office.19 Annie Clark Tanner remembered that
ambitious men “felt a compulsion to accept and practice this principle.
Prominent men were counseled by the church leaders to enter this prac-
tice as qualifications for leadership.”20 Having seven wives himself, in 1885
Taylor went into hiding to escape prosecution. He died two years later.
 24  Sister Saints

The decision in Reynolds v. United States and the defiant attitude of the
Latter-​day Saints laid the groundwork for increasingly harsh legislation. The
Edmunds Act (1882) was devised to ban Mormons from voting and cripple
the political and economic power of the church. Everyday life in Utah be-
came increasingly difficult as federal marshals hunted down men suspected
of living with multiple women. Sheriffs broke down doors, dragged men
from hiding spots, and demanded to know the intimate details of a couple’s
sex life. Men left their homes and families in order to escape from the
authorities. Children on their way home from school were questioned
about their neighbors, so parents taught them to avoid strangers. Women
who married did so in secret, often not acknowledging their change in
status to family and friends until after they got pregnant. Although only
men were accused of polygamy, women—​including wives—​were expected
to testify in court. In 1885 Lucy Devereux was put in prison for two months
along with her infant for refusing to reveal who had fathered her baby. Two
years earlier, Belle Harris, also with a nursing infant, had been imprisoned.
Elizabeth Starkey, Eliza Shafer, Lydia Spencer, Annie Gallifant, and Nellie
White all spent months in prison because they refused to “remember” all
the members of their family.21
The most forceful attack on Mormonism came on March 3, 1887, when
the Edmunds-​Tucker Act became law. The act disincorporated the church
and the fund that it used to bring converts to Utah. No longer would the
church be able to own banks, mines, farms, or factories. The federal govern-
ment seized all church property valued at over $50,000. Where once the
church controlled the marriage process, the Edmunds-​Tucker Act required
couples to secure civil marriage licenses, and it prohibited illegitimate chil-
dren (e.g., children of plural wives) from inheriting money or property.
No longer could a wife avoid testifying in court about her marriage. The
legislation increased the fines and sentences for polygamy convictions. It
also required men to take oaths against polygamy in order to vote, serve on
juries, or hold public office. With passage of the Edmunds-​Tucker Act, only
Gentiles would have political power in Utah Territory. By 1889 nearly one
thousand Latter-​day Saints had been convicted of violating federal law.22

The strains of living “the principle” became increasingly unbearable as

the federal government stepped up enforcement of its antipolygamy
laws. While Wells put a shiny gloss on celestial marriage in the Woman’s
Exponent, in private she was well aware of the sacrifice that plural marriages
demanded of women like herself. In 1879 her husband Daniel was held
in contempt of court for refusing to answer questions about the marriage
ceremonies he had performed. Tried, sentenced, and fined, he spent two
days in prison. By then, Daniel Wells was a member of the Mormon elite: a
 p o lyg a m y ’s e n d    25

prosperous businessman who at various times was the director of Utah

Central Railroad, a counselor in the First Presidency, the mayor of Salt Lake
City, and the chancellor of the University of Deseret. He also was the hus-
band of seven wives and father to thirty-​seven children. In 1884, in order to
prevent further arrests, church leaders sent Wells to London to take charge
of its European mission. Wells had the position and the financial means to
live in Europe, unlike the many Latter-​day Saint men who hid from fed-
eral marshals or ended up in the territorial penitentiary. Wells was gone for
three years.
During his absence, Wells’s finances failed. In 1887, in order to liquidate
his assets, he decided to sell the home in which Emmeline had been living
for thirty-​seven years, never consulting her. He also sold the large homes of
his other wives and built them smaller ones away from the center of town.23
Emmeline never got over the sale of her home, even when she was living
comfortably elsewhere. In January 1890 she confessed to her diary that she
had walked by her old home and saw “the dear old garden so neglected now
and so forlorn. . . . Heaven help, and I am homeless.” A few months later
she wrote, “my tears fell like rain when I gazed upon my former home now
taken from me, strangers fill the rooms once ours only and I have not the
privilege of entering them.”24 She was inconsolable.
While many nineteenth-​century men made domestic financial decisions
without consulting their wives, plural wives who lived on their own had
a sense of independence. On a day-​to-​day level, they managed their
households, budgeted their money, disciplined their children, and basi-
cally lived as single mothers. When a husband arrived for a visit or to spend
time in their bedroom, wives acknowledged his love, authority, and often
whims. Then he would leave, and the space was theirs again. Until, that is,
he decided differently. Even the formidable Emmeline Wells could not save
her home.
The federal attacks also made it difficult for the church to regulate com-
munity life because plural marriages had to take place in secret, leading to
confusion and, at times, disaster. In November 1884, while Daniel Wells
was safely ensconced in London, a scandal broke in Utah.25 The local anti-​
Mormon newspaper, the Salt Lake Tribune, published a story that accused
Emmeline Wells’s daughter Louie of having become the plural wife of
her sister Annie’s husband. The article reported that the pressure on up-​
and-​coming Latter-​day Saint men to take plural wives had motivated John
Q. Cannon to flirt with and then to secretly marry Louie in the Logan
Temple. Beautiful, talented, and just twenty-​two, Louie had many suitors.
The Tribune asserted that the most eligible of them had been shuttled
off to a mission in Europe in order to pave the way for her brother-​in-​
law’s courtship. Emmeline Wells demanded a retraction of the story as
 26  Sister Saints

contemptible slander. Cannon physically attacked the article’s author and

was thrown briefly in jail. The article was not withdrawn.
Two years later, however, Cannon publicly confessed to having com-
mitted adultery, although he did not name his partner. Maybe that secret
temple marriage had not taken place. Cannon’s admission of guilt and
speedy excommunication shocked the community. Privately, Cannon told
his brother he had earlier gotten Louie pregnant, and she had miscarried. It
seemed that Emmeline’s daughter was now pregnant a second time. None
of the women involved knew that Cannon was going to publicly confess
his indiscretions. The Tribune had a field day, accusing Cannon not only
of polygamy but also of adultery with yet another woman. Cannon then
divorced Annie and married Louie. In the meantime, federal deputies
served Cannon with a warrant for violation of the Edmunds Act, on the
more serious charge of polygamy rather than cohabitation. Both Emmeline
and Annie received subpoenas. Louie tried to hide to avoid arrest, but the
deputies found her and all three women were held until $1,500 in bond was
posted to ensure they would appear as witnesses. They all testified at the
initial grand jury hearing, with both Annie and Emmeline saying that they
had approved of John’s divorce and marriage to Louie.
By the time of the actual polygamy trial, Louie was five months preg-
nant and living with relatives in San Francisco. Most likely she had left for
California in order to avoid another court appearance, as the stress of the
legal procedures had made for a difficult pregnancy. In early April 1887
Louie gave birth to a stillborn son and became gravely ill. Her mother
Emmeline immediately caught a train to California. For the next six weeks,
Emmeline watched a bloated and delirious Louie slowly die. The nights
were particularly unbearable: “Can never forget the fearful night never,
never.” Emmeline wrote in her diary, “Alone with my darling in a far off city
away from home. . . . The look on Louie’s face was the look of death and the
pain was unbearable. Never did I pass such a night, no fear, but sorrow for
my darling.”26 Louie died the next day.
Historical research does not reveal whether Cannon and Louie were
sealed in the Logan Temple or were having an affair. What the history does
reveal is that the federal criminalization of family relationships shattered
existing patterns of plural marriage. In an earlier time, it would not have
been unusual for two sisters to marry one husband or to divorce if they
were unhappy. After Louie’s death, for instance, Cannon remarried Annie
and they had nine more children together. Although he never recovered his
leadership position in the church, Cannon was rebaptized and integrated
back into the community.
Plural marriage tried the faith and the patience of Latter-​day Saints,
but it was the imposition of antipolygamy legislation that made their lives
 p o lyg a m y ’s e n d    27

unbearable. Emmeline Wells’s family’s wealth and position could not shield
her from the emotional trauma of watching her daughter die or losing her
beloved home. Many more Mormon women had to manage homes, farms,
and businesses when their husbands went into hiding. Poor women were
accustomed to coping with the reality of men leaving to find work, but
the shame of their husbands being in prison could not easily be forgotten.
Financial struggles, loneliness, secrecy, disappointment, prosecution, and
imprisonment all tested the endurance of the Saints.
In many ways, the persecution of Mormons in the late nineteenth cen-
tury can be understood as a type of collective trauma. Even if a couple
were monogamous, they observed the harassment of their neighbors and
the debasement of their religion. Such experiences brutally disrupted the
stable structures of family and community life. In order to make sense out
of such suffering, Latter-​day Saints understood their pain in religious terms.
Obedience and authority became highly valued as evidence of one’s will-
ingness to sacrifice for the faith. Secrecy took on spiritual meaning as the
means of preserving a threatened truth. While one might privately harbor
doubts about church activities, members needed to publicly display unity
in order to withstand the attacks of non-​Mormons. Only if the Saints
persevered would their trials and sacrifices eventually be transformed into
blessings and comforts.

One unexpected “blessing” of polygamy was that Utah women were

granted the right to vote. American reformers had begun advocating for
women’s rights in the eighteen-​forties, but the antislavery movement took
precedence. Following the Civil War, women’s rights advocates agitated for
voting rights for both women and free blacks, but neither the Fourteenth
nor Fifteenth Amendments gave women the right to vote. The movement,
however, was rekindled. Some men also began to promote women’s suffrage,
albeit for less egalitarian (often anti-​egalitarian) reasons. In the Western
territories in particular, male political leaders saw female enfranchisement
as a way to draw attention to the needs of their sparsely populated wilder-
ness. Would not women want to settle on the frontier if they had the vote?
Male voters also believed that giving the wives of the Eastern settlers the
vote would help keep political control in the hands of whites. Several ter-
ritorial legislatures attempted to enfranchise women, but it was not until
December 1869 that Wyoming Territory became the first government to
grant women the right to vote.
Hamilton Wilcox, a female suffrage advocate, appeared before the House
Committee on Territories and asked for female suffrage in Utah. If female
voters were granted suffrage, Wilcox and others reasoned, they would then
throw off the chains of polygamy. 27 Given that federal legislation was not
 28  Sister Saints

ending plural marriage, surely empowering the victims would be more

successful. In March 1869, Congressman George Washington Julian from
Indiana introduced “A Bill to Discourage Polygamy in Utah” in the House
of Representatives. A Quaker and a women’s rights advocate, Julian also
believed that having the vote would embolden Mormon women to reject
plural marriage. Senator Samuel C. Pomeroy of Kansas introduced a similar
bill in the Senate.28
To the surprise of the bills’ sponsors, both the Utah Territorial repre-
sentative and the press in Utah spoke favorably about the bills. The church-​
owned Deseret News went so far as to call itself an “earnest advocate of
Women’s Rights” and a supporter of the right of suffrage for “the ladies.”29
Such Mormon enthusiasm dampened the antipolygamists’ zeal and the
bills never came up for a vote. However, at the same time Latter-​day Saint
women also were thinking about enfranchisement. At a January 1870 plan­
ning meeting for the upcoming protest against national antipolygamy legisla-
tion, Bathsheba Smith proposed “that we demand of the Gov the right of
franchise.” Her resolution was approved by her fellow Relief Society sisters.
Another influential Saint, Lucy Kimball, remarked in the meeting that she
felt “we had borne in Silence as long as it was our duty to bear, and moved
that we be represented at Washington.”30
The Relief Society women believed that voting would strengthen—​not
deter—​plural marriage. Undoubtedly, they also believed that they were in-
tellectually and morally fit to vote. From their ownership of Relief Society
buildings to their struggles on family farms to their accomplishments in
medicine, Latter-​day Saint women clearly demonstrated that they would be
informed voters. However, it was the preservation of their religious princi-
ples that made female enfranchisement critical to women.
Although it might seem obvious that male church leaders would have
supported female suffrage because it would have more than doubled the
Mormon vote in the territory—​thus maintaining church authority—​
Latter-​day Saints already far outnumbered non-​Mormons. More likely,
church authorities recognized that a suffrage victory might improve the
image of the Latter-​day Saints among women’s rights advocates and their
supporters on the East Coast. In turn, those reformers might pull back
from so enthusiastically promoting antipolygamy legislation. Apostles such
as George Q. Cannon and Franklin D. Richards vocally endorsed women’s
franchise in part because they believed that women’s natural moral au-
thority would serve to uplift civic life. The women’s vote would not only
hasten statehood for Utah, women’s political involvement would make it a
more righteous state.
Significantly, Young also approved of such reasoning. On February 9,
1870, the Utah Territorial Legislature introduced a suffrage bill; three days
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 He should after he is weaned. He will rest more comfortably, and
his sleep will be more refreshing.
192. Supposing a child should not sleep well, what ought to be
done? Would you give him a dose of composing medicine?
Certainly not. Try the effects of exercise. Exercise in the open air is
the best composing medicine in the world. Let the little fellow be well
tired out, and there will be little fear of his not sleeping.
193. Have you any further observations to make on the subject of
sleep?
Send a child joyful to bed. Do not, if you can possibly help it, let
him go to bed crying. Let the last impressions he has at night be of
his happy home, and of his loving father and mother, and let his last
thoughts be those of joy and gladness. He will sleep all the sounder if
he be sent to bed in such a frame of mind, and he will be more
refreshed and nourished in the morning by his sleep.
194. What is the usual cause of a child walking in his sleep, and
what measures, during such times, ought to be adopted to prevent
his injuring himself?
A disordered stomach in a child of nervous temperament is usually
the cause. The means to be adopted to prevent his throwing himself
out of the window are to have bars to his chamber casement, and if
that be not practicable, to have either nails or screws driven into the
window-sash to allow the window to open only for a sufficient space
for ventilation, and to have a screw window-fastening, in order that
he cannot, without difficulty, open the window; to have a trusty
person to sleep in his room, who should have directions given not to
rouse him from his sleep, but to gently lead him back to his bed,
which may frequently be done without awaking him; and to consult a
medical man, who will adopt means to put his stomach into order, to
brace his nerves, and to strengthen his general system. A trip to the
coast and sea bathing, in such a case, is often of great service.

SECOND DENTITION.

195. When does a child begin to cut his SECOND set of teeth?
 Generally at seven years old. He begins to cut them at about that
time; but it should be borne in mind (so wonderful are the works of
God) that the second crop of teeth in embryo is actually bred and
formed from the very commencement of his life, under the first tier
of teeth, but which remain in abeyance for years, and do not come
into play until the first teeth, having done their duty, loosen and fall
out, and thus make room for the more numerous, larger, stronger,
and more permanent teeth, which latter have to last for the
remainder of his existence. The first set is sometimes cut with a great
deal of difficulty, and produces various disease; the second, or
permanent teeth, come easily, and are unaccompanied with any
disorder. The following is the process: one after another of the first
set gradually loosen, and either drop out, or with little pain are
readily pulled out; under these, the second—the permanent teeth—
make their appearance, and fill up the vacant spaces. The fang of the
tooth that has dropped out is nearly all absorbed or eaten away,
leaving little more than the crown. The first set consists of twenty;
the second (including the wise teeth, which are not generally cut
until after the age of twenty-seven) consists of thirty-two.
I would recommend you to pay particular attention to the teeth of
your children; for, besides their being ornamental, their regularity
and soundness are of great importance to the present as well as to
the future health of your offspring. If there be any irregularity in the
appearance of the second set, lose no time in consulting an
experienced and respectable dentist.

DISEASE, Etc.

196. Do you think it important that I should be made acquainted

with the symptoms of the SERIOUS diseases of children?
Certainly. I am not advocating the doctrine of a mother treating
serious diseases; far from it; it is not her province, except in certain
cases of extreme urgency where a medical man cannot be procured,
and where delay might be death; but I do insist upon the necessity of
her knowing the symptoms of disease. My belief is, that if parents
were better informed on such subjects, many children’s lives might
be saved, much suffering might be averted, and much sorrow might
be spared. The fact is, the knowledge of the symptoms of disease is,
to a mother, almost a sealed book. If she were better acquainted with
these matters, how much more useful would she be in a sick-room,
and how much more readily would she enter into the plans and views
of the medical man! By her knowledge of the symptoms, and by
having his advice in time, she would nip disease in the bud, and the
fight might end in favor of life, for “sickness is just a fight between
life and death.”[218]
It is really lamentable to contemplate the amount of ignorance that
still exists among mothers in all that appertains to the diseases of
children; although, fortunately, they are beginning to see and to feel
the importance of gaining instruction on such subjects; but the light
is only dawning. A writer of the present day makes the following
remarks, which somewhat bear on the subject in question. He
observes: “In spite of the knowledge and clear views possessed by the
profession on all that concerns the management of children, no fact
is more palpable than that the most grievous ignorance and
incompetency prevail respecting it among the public. We want some
means of making popular the knowledge which is now almost
restricted to medical men, or at most, to the well-educated
classes.”[219]
In the earlier editions of this work, I did not give the treatment of
any serious diseases, however urgent. In the three last editions I have
been induced, for reasons I will presently state, to give the treatment
of some of the more urgent serious diseases, when a medical man
cannot instantly be procured, and where delay might be death.
Sir Charles Locock, who has taken a kind interest in this little
work, has given me valid reasons why a mother should be so
enlightened. The following extracts are from a letter which I received
from Sir Charles on the subject, and which he has courteously
allowed me to publish. He says: “As an old physician of some
experience in complaints of infants and children, I may perhaps be
allowed to suggest that in a future edition you should add a few
words on the actual treatment of some of the more urgent infantile
diseases. It is very right to caution parents against superseding the
doctor, and attempting to manage serious illness themselves; but
your advice, with very small exceptions, always being ‘to lose no time
in sending for a medical man,’ much valuable and often irremediable
time may be lost when a medical man is not to be had. Take, for
instance, a case of croup: there are no directions given at all, except
to send for a medical man, and always to keep medicines in the
house which he may have directed. But how can this apply to a first
attack? You state that a first attack is generally the worst. But why is
it so? Simply because it often occurs when the parents do not
recognize it, and it is allowed to get to a worse point than in
subsequent attacks, when they are thoroughly alive to it. As the very
best remedy, and often the only essential one, if given early, is a full
emetic, surely it is better that you should give some directions as to
this in a future edition, and I can speak from my own experience
when I say that an emetic, given in time, and repeated to free
vomiting, will cut short any case of croup. In nine cases out of ten
the attack takes place in the evening or early night, and when
vomiting is effected the dinner of that day is brought up nearly
undigested, and the severity of the symptoms at once cut short.
Whenever any remedy is valuable, the more by its being
administered in time, it is surely wiser to give directions as to its use,
although, as a general rule, it is much better to advise the sending for
medical advice.”
The above reasons, coming from such a learned and experienced
physician as Sir Charles Locock, are conclusive, and have decided me
to comply with his advice, to enlighten a mother on the treatment of
some of the more urgent diseases of infants and of children.
In a subsequent letter addressed to myself, Sir Charles has given
me the names of those urgent diseases which he considers may be
treated by a mother, “where a medical man cannot be procured
quickly, or not at all;” they are—Croup; Inflammation of the Lungs;
Diphtheria; Dysentery; Diarrhœa; Hooping-cough, in its various
stages; and Shivering Fit. Sir Charles sums up his letter to me by
saying: “Such a book ought to be made as complete as possible, and
the objections to medical treatment being so explained as to induce
mothers to try to avoid medical men is not so serious as that of
leaving them without any guide in those instances where every delay
is dangerous, and yet where medical assistance is not to be obtained
or not to be had quickly.”
In addition to the above, I shall give you the treatment of
Bronchitis, Measles, and Scarlet Fever. Bronchitis is one of the most
common diseases incidental to childhood, and, with judicious
treatment, is, in the absence of the medical man, readily managed by
a sensible mother. Measles is very submissive to treatment. Scarlet
Fever, if it be not malignant, and if certain rules be strictly followed,
is also equally amenable to treatment.
I have been fortunate in treating Scarlet Fever, and therefore think
it desirable to enter fully into the treatment of a disease, which is
looked upon by many parents, and according to the usual mode of
treatment, with just cause, with great consternation and dread. By
giving my plan of treatment fully and simply, and without the
slightest reservation, I am fully persuaded, through God’s blessing,
that I may be the humble means of saving the lives of numbers of
children.
The diseases that might be treated by a mother, in the absence of a
medical, man, will form the subject of future Conversations.
197. At what age does Water on the Brain usually occur, and how
is a mother to know that her child is about to labor under that
disease?
Water on the brain is, as a rule, a disease of childhood; after a child
is seven years old it is comparatively rare. It more frequently attacks
delicate children—children who have been dry-nursed (especially if
they have been improperly fed), or who have been suckled too long,
or who have had consumptive mothers, or who have suffered
severely from teething, or who are naturally of a feeble constitution.
Water on the brain sometimes follows an attack of inflammation of
the lungs, more especially if depressing measures (such as excessive
leeching and the administration of emetic tartar) have been adopted.
It occasionally follows in the train of contagious eruptive diseases,
such as either small-pox or scarlatina. We may divide the symptoms
of water on the brain into two stages. The first—the premonitory
stage—which lasts four or five days, in which medical aid might be of
great avail; the second—the stage of drowsiness and of coma—which
usually ends in death.
I shall dwell on the first—the premonitory stage—in order that a
mother may see the importance without loss of time of calling in a
medical man:
 If her child be feverish and irritable, if his stomach be disordered,
if he have urgent vomitings, if he have a foul breath, if his appetite be
capricious and bad, if his nights be disturbed (screaming out in his
sleep), if his bowels be disordered, more especially if they be
constipated, if he be more than usually excited, if his eye gleam with
unusual brilliancy, if his tongue ran faster than it is wont, if his cheek
be flushed and his head be hot, and if he be constantly putting his
hand to his head, there is cause for suspicion. If to these symptoms
be added, a more than usual carelessness in tumbling about, in
hitching his foot in the carpet, or in dragging one foot after the other;
if, too, he has complained of darting, shooting, lancinating pains in
his head, it may then be known that the first stage of inflammation
(the forerunner of water on the brain) either has taken or is about
taking place. Remember, no time ought to be lost in obtaining
medical aid; for the commencement of the disease is the golden
opportunity, when life might probably be saved.
198. At what age, and in what neighborhood, is a child most
liable to Croup, and when is a mother to know that it is about to
take place?
It is unusual for a child until he be twelve months old to have
croup; but, from that time until the age of two years, he is more liable
to it than at any other period. The liability after two years gradually,
until he be ten years old, lessens, after which time it is rare.
A child is more liable to croup in a low and damp, than in a high
and dry neighborhood; indeed, in some situations, croup is almost an
unknown disease; while in others it is only too well understood.
Croup is more likely to prevail when the wind is either easterly or
northeasterly.
There is no disease that requires more prompt treatment than
croup, and none that creeps on more insidiously. The child at first
seems to be laboring under a slight cold, and is troubled with a little
dry cough; he is hot and fretful, and hoarse when he cries.
Hoarseness is one of the earliest symptoms of croup; and it should be
borne in mind that a young child, unless he be going to have croup, is
seldom hoarse; if, therefore, your child be hoarse, he should be
carefully watched, in order that, as soon as croup be detected, not a
moment be lost in applying the proper remedies.
 His voice at length becomes gruff, he breathes as though it were
through muslin, and the cough becomes crowing. These three
symptoms prove that the disease is now fully formed. These latter
symptoms sometimes come on without any previous warning, the
little fellow going to bed apparently quite well, until the mother is
awakened, perplexed, and frightened, in the middle of the night, by
finding him laboring under the characteristic cough and the other
symptoms of croup. If she delay either to send for assistance, or if
proper medicines be not instantly given, in a few hours it will
probably be of no avail, and in a day or two the little sufferer will be a
corpse!
When once a child has had croup the after-attacks are generally
milder. If he has once had an attack of croup, I should advise you
always to have in the house medicine—a 4 oz. bottle of ipecacuanha
wine, to fly to at a moment’s notice;[220] but never omit, where
practicable, in a case of croup, whether the attack be severe or mild,
to send immediately for medical aid. There is no disease in which
time is more precious than in croup, and where the delay of an hour
may decide either for life or for death.
199. But suppose a medical man is not IMMEDIATELY to be
procured, what then am I to do? more especially, as you say, that
delay might be death.
What to do.—I never in my life lost a child with croup where I was
called in at the commencement of the disease, and where my plans
were carried out to the very letter. Let me begin by saying, Look well
to the goodness and purity of the medicine, for the life of your child
may depend upon the medicine being genuine. What medicine?
Ipecacuanha wine! At the earliest dawn of the disease give a
teaspoonful of ipecacuanha wine every five minutes, until free
vomiting be excited. In croup, before he is safe, free vomiting must
be established, and that without loss of time. If, after the expiration
of an hour, the ipecacuanha wine (having given during that hour a
teaspoonful of it every five minutes) is not sufficiently powerful for
the purpose—although it generally is so (if the ipecacuanha wine be
good)—then let the following mixture be substituted:
 Take of—Powdered Ipecacuanha, one scruple;
Wine of Ipecacuanha, one ounce and a half:

Make a Mixture. A teaspoonful to be given every five minutes, until free

vomiting be excited, first well shaking the bottle.
After the vomiting, place the child for a quarter of an hour in a
warm bath.[221] When out of the bath give him small doses of
ipecacuanha wine every two or three hours. The following is a
palatable form for the mixture:
Take of—Wine of Ipecacuanha, three drachms;
Simple Syrup, three drachms;
Water, six drachms:

Make a Mixture. A teaspoonful to be taken every two or three hours.

But remember, the emetic which is given at first is pure
ipecacuanha wine, without a drop of either water or of syrup.
A large sponge dipped out of very hot water, and applied to the
throat, and frequently renewed, oftentimes affords great relief in
croup, and ought during the time the emetic is being administered in
all cases to be adopted.
If it be a severe case of croup, and does not in the course of two
hours yield to the free exhibition of the ipecacuanha emetic, apply a
narrow strip of Smith’s tela vesicatoria to the throat, prepared in the
same way as for a case of inflammation of the lungs (see the
Conversation on the treatment of inflammation of the lungs). With
this only difference, let it be a narrower strip, only one-half the width
there recommended, and apply it to the throat instead of to the chest.
If a child has a very short, fat neck, there may not be room for the
tela, then you ought to apply it to the upper part of the chest—just
under the collar bones.
Let it be understood that the tela vesicatoria is not a severe
remedy, that the tela produces very little pain—not nearly so much as
the application of leeches; although, in its action, it is much more
beneficial, and is not nearly so weakening to the system.
Keep the child from all stimulants; let him live on a low diet, such
as milk and water, toast and water, arrow-root, etc.; and let the room
be, if practicable, at a temperate heat—60° Fahrenheit, and be well
ventilated.
So you see that the treatment of croup is very simple, and that the
plan might be carried out by an intelligent mother. Notwithstanding
which, it is your duty, where practicable, to send at the very onset of
the disease for a medical man.
Let me again reiterate that if your child is to be saved the
ipecacuanha wine must be genuine and good. This can only be
effected by having the medicine from a highly respectable chemist.
Again, if ever your child has had croup, let me again urge you always
to have in the house a 4 oz. bottle of ipecacuanha wine, that you may
resort to at a moment’s notice in case there be the slightest return of
the disease.
Ipecacuanha wine, unfortunately, is not a medicine that keeps
well; therefore, every three or four months a fresh bottle ought to be
procured either from a medical man or from a chemist. As long as
the ipecacuanha wine remains clear, it is good; but as soon as it
becomes turbid it is bad, and ought to be replaced by a fresh supply.
An intelligent correspondent of mine makes the following valuable
remarks on the preservation of ipecacuanha wine: “Now, I know that
there are some medicines and chemical preparations which, though
they spoil rapidly when at all exposed to the air, yet will keep
perfectly good for an indefinite time if hermetically sealed up in a
perfectly full bottle. If so, would it not be a valuable suggestion if the
Apothecaries’ Hall, or some other London firm of undoubted
reliability, would put up 1 oz. phials of ipecacuanha wine of
guaranteed purity, sealed up so as to keep good so long as unopened,
and sent out in sealed packages, with the guarantee of their name. By
keeping a few such ounce bottles in an unopened state in one’s
house, one might rely on being ready for any emergency. If you think
this suggestion worth notice, and could induce some first-rate house
to carry it out, and mention the fact in a subsequent edition of your
book, you would, I think, be adding another most valuable item to an
already invaluable book.”
The above suggestion of preserving ipecacuanha wine in ounce
bottles, quite full, and hermetically sealed, is a very good one. The
best way of hermetically sealing the bottle would be to cut the cork
level with the lip of the bottle, and to cover the cork with sealing-wax,
in the same manner wine merchants serve some kinds of their wines,
and then to lay the bottles on their sides in sawdust in the cellar. I
have no doubt, if such a plan were adopted, the ipecacuanha wine
would for a length of time keep good. Of course, if the wine of
ipecacuanha be procured from the Apothecaries’ Hall Company,
London (as suggested by my correspondent), there can be no
question as to the genuineness of the article.
What NOT to do.—Do not give emetic tartar; do not apply leeches;
do not keep the room very warm; do not give stimulants; do not omit
to have always in the house either a 4 oz. bottle, or three or four 1 oz.
bottles of ipecacuanha wine.
200. I have heard Child-crowing mentioned as a formidable
disease; would you describe the symptoms?
Child-crowing, or spurious croup, as it is sometimes called, is
occasionally mistaken for genuine croup. It is a more frequent
disorder than the latter, and requires a different plan of treatment.
Child-crowing is a disease that almost invariably occurs only during
dentition, and is most perilous. But if a child laboring under it can
fortunately escape suffocation until he has cut the whole of his first
set of teeth—twenty—he is then, as a rule, safe.
Child-crowing comes on in paroxysms. The breathing during the
intervals is quite natural—indeed, the child appears perfectly well;
hence the dangerous nature of the disease is either overlooked, or is
lightly thought of, until perhaps a paroxysm worse than common
takes place, and the little patient dies of suffocation, overwhelming
the mother with terror, with confusion, and dismay.
The symptoms in a paroxysm of child-crowing are as follows: The
child suddenly loses and fights for his breath, and in doing so makes
a noise very much like that of crowing; hence the name child-
crowing. The face during the paroxysm becomes bluish or livid. In a
favorable case, after either a few seconds, or even, in some instances,
a minute, and a frightful struggle to breathe, he regains his breath,
and is, until another paroxysm occurs, perfectly well. In an
unfavorable case, the upper part (chink) of the windpipe remains for
a minute or two closed, and the child, not being able to breathe,
drops a corpse in his nurse’s arms. Many children, who are said to
have died of fits, have really died of child-crowing.
 I have entered thus rather fully into the subject, as many lives
might be saved if a mother knew the nature of the complaint, and the
great necessity, during the paroxysms, of prompt and proper
measures. For, too frequently, before a medical man has had time to
arrive, the child has breathed his last, the parent herself being
perfectly ignorant of the necessary treatment; hence the vital
importance of the subject, and the paramount necessity of imparting
information, in a popular style, in a work of this kind.
201. What treatment, then, during a paroxysm of Child-crowing
should you advise?
The first thing, of course, to be done is to send immediately for a
medical man. Have a plentiful supply of cold and of hot water always
at hand, ready at a moment’s notice for use. The instant the
paroxysm is upon the child, plentifully and perseveringly dash cold
water upon his head and face. Put his feet and legs in hot salt,
mustard, and water; and, if necessary, place him up to his neck in a
hot bath, still dashing water upon his face and head. If he does not
quickly come round, sharply smack his back and buttocks.
As soon as a medical man arrives, he will lose no time in
thoroughly lancing the gums and in applying other appropriate
remedies.
Great care and attention ought, during the intervals, to be paid to
the diet. If the child is breathing a smoky, close atmosphere, he
should be immediately removed to a pure one. In this disease,
indeed, there is no remedy equal to a change of air—to a dry, bracing
neighborhood. Change of air, even if it be winter, is the best remedy,
either to the coast or to a healthy farm-house. I am indebted to Mr.
Roberton, of Manchester (who has paid great attention to this
disease, and who has written a valuable essay on the subject[222]), for
the knowledge of this fact. Where, in a case of this kind, it is not
practicable to send a child from home, then let him be sent out of
doors the greater part of every day; let him, in point of fact, almost
live in the open air. I am quite sure, from an extensive experience,
that in this disease, fresh air, and plenty of it, is the best and
principal remedy.
202. When is a mother to know that a cough is not a “tooth-
cough,” but one of the symptoms of Inflammation of the Lungs?
 If the child has had a shivering fit; if his skin be very hot and very
dry; if his lips be parched; if there be great thirst; if his cheeks be
flushed; if he be dull and heavy, wishing to be quiet in his cot or crib;
if his appetite be diminished; if his tongue be furred; if his mouth be
burning hot and dry;[223] if his urine be scanty and high-colored,
staining the napkin or the linen; if his breathing be short, panting,
hurried, and oppressed; if there be a hard, dry cough; and if his
skin be burning hot; then there is no doubt that inflammation of the
lungs has taken place.
No time should be lost in sending for medical aid; indeed, the hot,
dry mouth and skin, and short hurried breathing would be
sufficient cause for your procuring immediate assistance. If
inflammation of the lungs were properly treated at the onset, a child
would scarcely ever be lost by that disease. I say this advisedly, for in
my own practice, provided I am called in early, and if my plans are
strictly carried out, I scarcely ever lose a child from inflammation of
the lungs.
You may ask—What are your plans? I will tell you, in case you
cannot promptly obtain medical advice, as delay might be death.
The treatment of Inflammation of the Lungs, what to do.—Keep
the child to one room, to his bedroom, and to his bed. Let the
chamber be properly ventilated. If the weather be cool, let a small
fire be in the grate; otherwise, he is better without a fire. Let him live
on low diet, such as weak black tea, milk and water, and toast and
water, thin oatmeal gruel, arrow-root, and such like simple
beverages, and give him the following mixture:
Take of—Wine of Ipecacuanha, three drachms;
Simple Syrup, three drachms;
Water, six drachms:

Make a Mixture. A teaspoonful of the mixture to be taken every four hours.

Be careful that you go to a respectable chemist, in order that the
quality of the ipecacuanha wine may be good, as the child’s life may
depend upon it.
If the medicine produces sickness, so much the better; continue it
regularly until the short, oppressed, and hurried breathing has
subsided, and has become natural.
 If the attack be very severe, in addition to the above medicine, at
once apply a blister, not the common blister, but Smith’s tela
vesicatoria—a quarter of a sheet, which ought to be fastened on to a
piece of sticking-plaster, taking care to apply the tela vesicatoria
(which is on paper) to the warmed plaster, so as to securely fasten
the tela vesicatoria on the sticking-plaster. The plaster should be
rather larger than the blister, so as to leave a margin. Any respectable
chemist will understand the above directions, and will prepare the
tela ready for use. If the child be a year old, the blister ought to be
kept on for three hours, and then a piece of dry, soft linen rag should
be applied for another three hours. At the end of which time—six
hours—there will be a beautiful blister, which must then, with a pair
of scissors, be cut, to let out the water; and then let the blister be
dressed, night and morning, with simple cerate spread on lint.
If the little patient be more than one year, say two years old, let the
tela remain on for five hours, and the dry linen rag for five hours
more, before the blister, as above recommended, be cut and dressed.
If in a day or two the inflammation still continue violent, let
another tela vesicatoria be applied, not over the old blister, but let a
narrow slip of it, on sticking-plaster, be applied on each side of the
old blister, and managed in the same manner as before directed.
I cannot speak too highly of Smith’s tela vesicatoria. It has, in my
hands, through God’s blessing, saved the lives of scores of children.
It is far, very far superior to the old-fashioned blistering plaster. It
seldom, if the above rules be strictly observed, fails to rise; it gives
much less pain than the common blister; when it has had the desired
effect, it readily heals, which cannot always be said of the common
fly-blister, more especially with children.
My sheet-anchors, then, in the inflammation of the lungs of
children, are, ipecacuanha wine and Smith’s tela vesicatoria. Let the
greatest care, as I before advised, be observed in obtaining the
ipecacuanha wine genuine and good. This can only be depended
upon by having the medicine from a highly respectable chemist.
Ipecacuanha wine, when genuine and good, is, in many children’s
diseases, one of the most valuable of medicines.
What, in a case of Inflammation of the Lungs, NOT to do.—Do not,
on any account, apply leeches. They draw out the life of the child, but
not his disease. Avoid—emphatically let me say so—giving emetic
tartar. It is one of the most lowering and death-dealing medicines
that can be administered either to an infant or to a child! If you wish
to try the effect of it, take a dose yourself, and I am quite sure that
you will then never be inclined to poison a baby with such an
abominable preparation! In olden times—many, many years ago—I
myself gave it in inflammation of the lungs, and lost many children!
Since leaving it off, the recoveries of patients by the ipecacuanha
treatment, combined with the external application of Smith’s tela
vesicatoria, have been in many cases marvelous. Avoid broths and
wine, and all stimulants. Do not put the child into a warm bath, it
only oppresses the already oppressed breathing. Moreover, after he
is out of the bath, it causes a larger quantity of blood to rush back to
the lungs and to the bronchial tubes, and thus feeds the
inflammation. Do not, by a large fire, keep the temperature of the
room high. A small fire, in the winter time, encourages ventilation,
and in such a case does good. When the little patient is on the
mother’s or on the nurse’s lap, do not burden him either with a
heavy blanket or with a thick shawl. Either a child’s thin blanket, or a
thin woolen shawl, in addition to his usual night-gown, is all the
clothing necessary.
203. Is Bronchitis a more frequent disease than Inflammation of
the Lungs? Which is the most dangerous? What are the symptoms
of Bronchitis?
Bronchitis is a much more frequent disease than inflammation of
the lungs; indeed, it is one of the most common complaints both of
infants and of children, while inflammation of the lungs is
comparatively a rare disease. Bronchitis is not nearly such a
dangerous disease as inflammation of the lungs.
The symptoms.—The child for the first few days labors under
symptoms of a heavy cold; he has not his usual spirits. In two or
three days, instead of the cold leaving him, it becomes more
confirmed; he is now really poorly, fretful, and feverish; his
breathing becomes rather hurried and oppressed; his cough is hard
and dry and loud; he wheezes, and if you put your ear to his naked
back, between his shoulder-blades, you will hear the wheezing more
distinctly. If at the breast, he does not suck with his usual avidity; the
cough, notwithstanding the breast is a great comfort to him, compels
him frequently to loose the nipple; his urine is scanty, and rather
high-colored, staining the napkin, and smelling strongly. He is
generally worse at night.
Well, then, remember if the child be feverish, if he have symptoms
of a heavy cold, if he have an oppression of breathing, if he wheeze,
and if he have a tight, dry, noisy cough, you may be satisfied that he
has an attack of bronchitis.
204. How can I distinguish between Bronchitis and Inflammation
of the Lungs?
In bronchitis the skin is warm but moist; in inflammation of the
lungs it is hot and dry: in bronchitis the mouth is warmer than usual,
but moist; in inflammation of the lungs it is burning hot: in
bronchitis the breathing is rather hurried, and attended with
wheezing; in inflammation of the lungs it is very short and panting,
and is unaccompanied with wheezing, although occasionally a very
slight crackling sound might be heard: in bronchitis the cough is long
and noisy; in inflammation of the lungs it is short and feeble: in
bronchitis the child is cross and fretful; in inflammation of the lungs
he is dull and heavy, and his countenance denotes distress.
We have sometimes a combination of bronchitis and of
inflammation of the lungs, an attack of the latter following the
former. Then the symptoms will be modified, and will partake of the
character of the two diseases.
205. How would you treat a case of Bronchitis?
If a medical man cannot be procured, I will tell you what to do:
Confine the child to his bedroom, and if very ill, to his bed. If it be
winter time, have a little fire in the grate, but be sure that the
temperature of the chamber is not above 60° Fahrenheit, and let the
room be properly ventilated, which may be effected by occasionally
leaving the door a little ajar.
Let him lie either outside the bed or on a sofa; if he be very ill,
inside the bed, with a sheet and a blanket only to cover him, but no
thick coverlid. If he be allowed to lie on the lap, it only heats him and
makes him restless. If he will not lie on the bed, let him rest on a
pillow placed on the lap; the pillow will cause him to lie cooler, and
will more comfortably rest his wearied body. If he be at the breast,
keep him to it; let him have no artificial food, unless, if he be thirsty,
a little toast and water. If he be weaned, let him have either milk and
water, arrow-root made with equal parts of milk and water, toast and
water, barley-water, or weak black, tea, with plenty of new milk in it,
etc.; but, until the inflammation has subsided, neither broth nor
beef-tea.
Now, with regard to medicine, the best medicine is ipecacuanha
wine, given in large doses, so as to produce constant nausea. The
ipecacuanha abates fever, acts on the skin, loosens the cough, and, in
point of fact, in the majority of cases will rapidly effect a cure. I have
in a preceding Conversation[224] given you a prescription for the
ipecacuanha wine mixture. Let a teaspoonful of the mixture be taken
every four hours.
If in a day or two he be no better, but worse, by all means continue
the mixture, whether it produce sickness or otherwise; and put on
the chest a tela vesicatoria, prepared and applied as I recommended
when treating of inflammation of the lungs.[224]
The ipecacuanha wine and the tela vesicatoria are my sheet-
anchors in the bronchitis, both of infants and of children. They
rarely, even in very severe cases, fail to effect a cure, provided the
tela vesicatoria be properly applied, and the ipecacuanha wine be
genuine and of good quality.
If there be any difficulty in procuring good ipecacuanha wine, the
ipecacuanha may be given in powder instead of the wine. The
following is a pleasant form:
Take of—Powder of Ipecacuanha, twelve grains;
White Sugar, thirty-six grains:

Mix well together, and divide into twelve powders. One of the powders to be put
dry on the tongue every four hours.
The ipecacuanha powder will keep better than the wine, an
important consideration to those living in country places;
nevertheless, if the wine can be procured fresh and good, I far prefer
the wine to the powder.
When the bronchitis has disappeared, the diet ought gradually to
be improved—rice, sago, tapioca, and light batter pudding, etc.; and
in a few days, either a little chicken or a mutton-chop, mixed with a
well-mashed potato and crumb of bread, should be given. But let the
improvement in his diet be gradual, or the inflammation might
return.
What NOT to do.—Do not apply leeches. Do not give either emetic
tartar, or antimonial wine, which is emetic tartar dissolved in wine.
Do not administer either paregoric or syrup of poppies, either of
which would stop the cough, and would thus prevent the expulsion of
the phlegm. Any fool can stop a cough, but it requires a wise man to
rectify the mischief. A cough is an effort of nature to bring up the
phlegm, which would otherwise accumulate, and in the end cause
death. Again, therefore, let me urge upon you the immense
importance of not stopping the cough of a child. The ipecacuanha
wine will, by loosening the phlegm, loosen the cough, which is the
only right way to get rid of a cough. Let what I have now said be
impressed deeply upon your memory, as thousands of children in
England are annually destroyed by having their coughs stopped.
Avoid, until the bronchitis be relieved, giving him broths, and meat,
and stimulants of all kinds. For further observations on what NOT to
do in bronchitis, I beg to refer you to a previous Conversation we had
on what NOT to do in inflammation of the lungs. That which is
injurious in the one case is equally so in the other.
206. What are the symptoms of Diphtheria, or, as it is sometimes
called, Boulogne sore-throat?
This terrible disease, although by many considered to be a new
complaint, is, in point of fact, of very ancient origin. Homer, and
Hippocrates, the father of physic, have both described it. Diphtheria
first appeared in England in the beginning of the year 1857, since
which time it has never totally left our shores.
The symptoms.—The little patient, before the disease really shows
itself, feels poorly, and is “out of sorts.” A shivering fit, though not
severe, may generally be noticed. There is heaviness, and slight
headache, principally over the eyes. Sometimes, but not always, there
is a mild attack of delirium at night. The next day he complains of
slight difficulty of swallowing. If old enough, he will complain of
constriction about the swallow. On examining the throat the tonsils
will be found to be swollen and redder—more darkly red than usual.
Slight specks will be noticed on the tonsils. In a day or two an
exudation will cover them, the back of the swallow, the palate, the
tongue, and sometimes the inside of the cheeks and the nostrils. This
exudation of lymph gradually increases until it becomes a regular
membrane, which puts on the appearance of leather; hence its name
diphtheria. This membrane peels off in pieces; and if the child be old
and strong enough he will sometimes spit it up in quantities, the
membrane again and again rapidly forming as before. The discharges
from the throat are occasionally, but not always offensive. There is
danger of croup from the extension of the membrane into the
windpipe. The glands about the neck and under the jaw are generally
much swollen; the skin is rather cold and clammy; the urine is scanty
and usually pale; the bowels at first are frequently relaxed. This
diarrhœa may or may not cease as the disease advances.
The child is now in a perilous condition, and it becomes a battle
between his constitution and the disease. If, unfortunately, as is too
often the case—diphtheria being more likely to attack the weakly—
the child be very delicate, there is but slight hope of recovery. The
danger of the disease is not always to be measured by the state of the
throat. Sometimes, when the patient appears to be getting well, a
sudden change for the worse rapidly carries him off. Hence the
importance of great caution, in such cases, in giving an opinion as to
ultimate recovery. I have said enough to prove the terrible nature of
the disease, and to show the necessity of calling in, at the earliest
period of the symptoms, an experienced and skillful medical man.
207. Is Diphtheria contagious?
Decidedly. Therefore, when practicable, the rest of the children
ought instantly to be removed to a distance. I say children, for it is
emphatically a disease of childhood. When adults have it, it is the
exception, and not the rule. “Thus it will be seen, in the account
given of the Boulogne epidemic, that of 366 deaths from this cause,
341 occurred among children under ten years of age. In the
Lincolnshire epidemic, in the autumn of 1858, all the deaths at
Horncastle, 25 in number, occurred among children under twelve
years of age.”[225]
208. What are the causes of Diphtheria?
Bad and imperfect drainage;[226] want of ventilation; overflowing
privies; low neighborhoods in the vicinity of rivers; stagnant waters;
indeed, everything that vitiates the air and thus depresses the
system, more especially if the weather be close and muggy; poor and
improper food; and last, though not least, contagion. Bear in mind,
too, that a delicate child is much more predisposed to the disease
than a strong one.
209. What is the treatment of Diphtheria?
What to do.—Examine well into the ventilation, for as diphtheria is
frequently caused by deficient ventilation, the best remedy is
thorough ventilation. Look well both to the drains and to the privies,
and see that the drains from the water-closets and from the privies
do not in any way contaminate the pump-water. If the drains be
defective or the privies be full, the disease in your child will be
generated, fed, and fostered. Not only so, but the disease will spread
in your family and all around you.
Keep the child to his bedroom and to his bed. For the first two or
three days, while the fever runs high, put him on a low diet, such as
milk, tea, arrow-root, etc.
Apply to his throat every four hours a warm barm and oatmeal
poultice. If he be old enough to have the knowledge to use a gargle,
the following will be found serviceable:
Take of—Powdered Alum, one drachm;
Simple Syrup, one ounce;
Water, seven ounces:

To make a Gargle.
The best medicine for the first few days of the attack, is one of the
following mixtures:
Take of—Chlorate of Potash, two drachms;
Boiling Water, seven ounces and a half;
Syrup of Red Poppy, half an ounce:

To make a Mixture. A tablespoonful to be taken every four hours.

Or,
Take of—Diluted Sulphuric Acid, one drachm;
Simple Syrup, one ounce and a half;
Infusion of Roses,[227] four ounces and a half;

To make a Mixture. A tablespoonful to be given every four hours.

As soon as the skin has lost its preternatural heat, beef-tea and
chicken broth ought to be given. Or if great prostration should
supervene, in addition to the beef-tea, port wine, a tablespoonful
every four hours, should be administered. If the child be cold, and
there be great sinking of the vital powers, brandy and water should
be substituted for the port wine. Remember, in ordinary cases, port
wine and brandy are not necessary, but in cases of extreme
exhaustion they are most valuable.
As soon as the great heat of the skin has abated and the debility
has set in, one of the following mixtures will be found useful:
Take of—Wine of Iron, one ounce and a half;
Simple Syrup, one ounce;
Water, three ounces and a half:

To make a Mixture. A tablespoonful to be taken every four hours.

Or,
Take of—Muriated Tincture of Iron, half a drachm;
Simple Syrup, one ounce;
Water, three ounces:

To make a Mixture. A tablespoonful to be taken three times a day.

If the disease should travel downward, it will cause all the
symptoms of croup, then it must be treated as croup; with this only
difference, that a blister (tela vesicatoria) must not be applied, or the
blistered surface may be attacked by the membrane of diphtheria,
which may either cause death or hasten that catastrophe. In every
other respect treat the case as croup, by giving an emetic, a
teaspoonful of ipecacuanha wine every five minutes, until free
vomiting be excited, and then administer smaller doses of
ipecacuanha wine every two or three hours, as I recommended when
conversing with you on the treatment of croup.
What Not to do.—Do not, on any account, apply either leeches or a
blister. If the latter be applied, it is almost sure to be covered with
the membrane of diphtheria, similar to that inside of the mouth and
of the throat, which would be a serious complication. Do not give
either calomel or emetic tartar. Do not depress the system by
aperients, for diphtheria is an awfully depressing complaint of itself;
the patient, in point of fact, is laboring under the depressing effects
of poison, for the blood has been poisoned either by the drinking
water being contaminated by fecal matter from either a privy or from