What about sex? Polygamy was
hardly the simplest way for an American man to arrange intercourse with other
women. At the same time, the accusations of adultery in the wake of his
dalliance with Fanny Alger had sown doubts about Joseph’s leadership. Plural
marriage provided a biblical and theological framework in which sexual relationships
with other women were righteous. (John G. Turner, Joseph Smith: The Rise and
Fall of an American Prophet [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2025], 255)
By the middle of 1842, the
prophet had around a dozen plural wives. At the time of their sealings to
Joseph Smith, the women ranged in age from seventeen to fifty-three. The
majority of women were already married at the time of the sealings, but others
were widowed or previously single. The diversity of cases makes generalization
challenging. One of the few constants in the sealings is that, as he had been
the case with Louisa Beman and the Huntington sisters, Joseph knew these women
well, or at least knew and trusted members of their families. Joseph approached
those he thought would accept the doctrine. Most of them did, though it sometimes
took considerable persuasion and pressure. A significant number of women and
their families were willing to do something that they at first considered
repugnant because they believed so strongly in Joseph as God’s prophet.
In all known instances, already
married women continued to live with their first husbands during Joseph’s
lifetime. At some point, these men learned of their wives’ sealings to Joseph,
if not from their wives or from the prophet himself then through rumor.
Nevertheless, most first husbands remained on good terms with Joseph. Their amicability
suggests that Joseph or their wives told the men that the sealings would not
affect their marriages. Joseph presumably underscored the eternal benefits of
the families of his plural wives, including for those first husbands who
belonged to the church.
What was the nature of these
plural marriages on earth? There is strong evidence that Joseph consummated
many of the sealings to unmarried women, though the fact that none of those
women had children by Joseph suggests that the sexual encounters were limited.
Did Joseph have sex with already married women? In an interview many decades
later, Zina Huntington affirmed that she had become Joseph’s wife “for
eternity<” but she gave terse and contradictory answers when pressed about
whether she was also Joseph’s wife “for time.” Most nineteenth-century
individuals—monogamous or polygamous—did not divulge such intimate matters. It is possible that Joseph had sex with some or even all of the already married
wives, but it is also possible that the sealings were ceremonial, only for
eternity and not for earth. (John G. Turner, Joseph Smith: The Rise and Fall
of an American Prophet [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2025], 264-65)
