One, two, three, go.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of the Feminist Mormon Housewives podcast.

I am your fabulous host for the evening, Lindsay.

And tonight, we are continuing our series of a year of polygamy,

just in time for Valentine's Day.

As you will see from tonight's episode, where we cover the story of

Elizabeth Davis Durfee, when polygamy is practiced, not all wives are created equal.

Now, that might seem like a no-brainer, especially since the marriage hierarchy sometimes is already built

on a number. If you're the first wife, you have more rights and privileges. You might be the

headwife as opposed to the second wife, etc., etc. It's not that way in all marriages, but in some,

and especially as early Navu polygamy is getting worked out, it becomes

complicated as far as the nature of relationships go, as we know. But Elizabeth Davis-Durphy would be an

interesting kind of wife, a wife that we call a quote, mother in Israel. She would be a wife that

Joseph married. She was older than Joseph. And I think

that women like her played into the reputation that polygamy was only for the widows and the women who

were not married because Elizabeth would be older and some widows like herself, mothers in in Israel would be married to polygamous men.

We're going to get into the mothers and Israel thing in just a minute, but I just wanted to say that

as we go through this series, you're going to see that the sealing doctrine as it develops,

as Joseph is working it out, as Brigham takes it over, it becomes a lot

more complex and complicated. But we've already talked about how Joseph had sealed some men to him.

I hear arguments sometimes saying that Joseph was not sleeping with his wife's. And Brian Hales

makes a lot of these arguments in his book

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