Welcome to Breaking Down Patriarchy. I'm Amy McPhee, all of best. How do you feel when I say the word polygamy?

My guess is that if you don't have any connection to the Church of Jesus Christ to Latter-day Saints,

a K.A. the Mormons, you feel a sense of fascination with the other, a person who is completely foreign to you.

My guess is that if you do have a connection to Mormonism, you also feel fascination, but added to that is a fear of knowing that polygamists

are not the foreign other to you. If you're Mormon or have been Mormon, it's likely that you

have polygamy in your very

own family. I remember the first time that this hit me. I was sitting with my family at the dinner

table when I was about 10 years old, and we had invited over another Mormon family in our

neighborhood in Denver. And my parents and the neighbor parents had recently discovered that

they were distantly related.

And they were laughing at the dinner table because our families were descended from two different plural wives of the same husband.

The adults in the room were laughing, but I remember feeling shocked.

I had gone on a tour with my family of Brigham Young's house in Salt Lake City, and so I had

seen, you know, the living quarters of his dozens of wives, and I had also occasionally glimpsed

children wearing long pioneer dresses when we drove to Utah in the summers. And honestly,

I thought those people were weirdos. I had no idea that plural marriage had happened

in my family. And I remember I kind of laughed because everyone else at the table was laughing,

but inside I was reeling. My parents were acting like this was super normal. And for me,

it was very, very not normal. From that moment, I would say that every time I thought about polygamy, I felt a lot of anxiety.

I was afraid of the polygamy among my ancestors.

I was embarrassed of polygamous Mormons whom the mainstream church vehemently disavowed,

but made their way into the news every once in a while.

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