One non-LDS historian wrote the following about the benefits Mormon women had while living under polygamy as opposed to what they could have expected outside nineteenth-century Utah:
Ironically, though women were ideologically excluded under Mormonism from the major sources of power they wielded in nineteenth-century America at large, they achieved significant gains under Mormon polygamy. Some gains were consciously granted as a means of combating Gentile opponents and correcting the abuses in the anomalous legal status of polygamy; female suffrage, the right of women to their property, and a relatively liberal divorce policy. Others were unconscious aspects of the marital system itself: the apparent decline in the maternal death rate in childbirth, a division of domestic labor, and the social security involved in provision for wives in their old age. Also, for women married to polygamists with over five wives, there was a decline (compared to the national average) in the average number of pregnancies a woman underwent.
But a polygamous wife had little chance to exert any power or agitate for rights. The treatment she could expect from Gentiles was much less attractive than her situation under polygamy. She had either to remain under polygamy as at best a breeder and a supplement to a scanty work force, and more frequently as an inferior, a seductive threat to male supremacy; or to declare herself a whore and her children bastards, and give up all hope of support and all legitimate claim to happiness and life itself. It is not surprising that Mormon women, caught between their polygamous lords and Gentile blandishments, should have chosen to remain subject “Angel,” preferring the chthonic deities they served to what seemed to them a vast uncertain future in a godless and hostile universe. (Louis J. Kern, An Ordered Love: Sex Roles and Sexuality in Victorian Utopias—The Shakers, The Mormons, and The Oneida Community [Chapel Hill, N.C.: The University of North Carolina Press, 1981], 204)
