Faithfull’s identity as a feminist and experiences as a result of the divorce case inspired to undertake a trip to the United States to try to understand the position of women.  She, of course, made the obligatory stop in Utah, where she attended Eliza R. Snow’s 80th birthday party and interviewed polygamist wives.  Faithfull was disgusted by what she saw in Utah and gave anti-Mormon lectures once she returned to Britain.   Although her book is just as acidic and vituperative as Fanny Stenhouse’s, it’s focus is different.  Unlike other anti-Mormon writers, Faithfull was quite open to the possibility that nineteenth-century understandings of domesticity needed revising.  She worried about the effect that property laws, which denied married women access to their earnings, had on the ability of women to survive within abusive relationships and wanted to provide women with the opportunity to work.  Her concern with Mormonism was not necessarily the multiplication of marital bonds but with the fact that men retained control over property.

Faithfull was not the only women with a scandalous sexual past to visit Utah in the 19th C.  Theresa Longworth Yelverton had been involved in a sex scandal in the 1850s, when she had secretly married an Irish peer only to have him marry another woman and then deny that their marriage had ever occurred. The laws of Scotland, where Theresa claimed the marriage had taken place, added ambiguity to the situation.  In Scotland, a marriage needed no witness, no clergy, and no legal documents to be valid.  All a couple had to do was declare their marriage.  Longworth claimed that she had had sex with Yelverton after he had married her in a secret ceremony and that her reputation would be ruined if the judge refused to recognize the validity of their marriage.  During the trial, Yelverton’s lawyers read letters that Longworth had sent to the Irish peer, which painted her as a sexual voracious young woman who had given herself to the Irishman long before any promise of marriage and who had acted as the pursuer rather than as the prey during their courtship.  Although judges in Ireland would accept her marriage, those in Scotland denied it.  Longworth denied the status of being a legitimate wife in parts of Britain but not in others traveled to the United States.  She found Mormonism far more congenial and barely escaped, according to her account, without the noose of polygamy around her neck.

Although quite different, the books that Faithfull and Longworth published about their experiences suggest that they saw Utah and the United States as a type of laboratory in which different relationships between the sexes could be tested.  Neither had been particularly pleased with traditional understandings of domesticity or wanted to defend it absolutely.  Responses to Mormonism in the 19th C were part of a much larger debate about sexuality and marriage.  In the second of the nineteenth century, feminists and more traditional scholars alike were worried about a supposed surplus of women that existed in the Victorian period.  Spinsterhood, poverty, and even prostitution were seen as likely outcomes for such women who had to rely on their family members for support.  Polygamy was offered, and not just by Mormons, as a possible solution.  Looking at the writings of Faithfull and Longworth reminds us of the complexity of nineteenth-century understandings of domesticity.  Polygamy was often placed against the Victorian angel in the house in contemporary newspaper, and the historiography surrounding Mormonism has drawn on this juxtaposition to talk about the ways in which Mormons were racialized by their contemporaries.  It is important to remember, however, the image of the Victorian angel in the house was always under assault and was much more fragile than she appeared.

For the works of Emily Faithfull and Theresa Longworth Yelverton on Mormonism, see Emily Faithfull, “Three Visits to America” (1884) and Theresa Longworth Yelverton, “Teresina in America” (1875).

I have never learned to wield feminine power or barter sexual attractiveness for love. Maybe it is because of my somewhat unconventional feminist literary upbringing. I grew up with the ideal that I could be valued for my mind and for my heart, not just for my body. I learned about the cultural minefield for women and their battles over body image and social acceptability: I was reading about eating disorders in junior high and mean girl behavior in high school.

My mom raised me to not only avoid clothes that were too tight or suggestive but to study some of the strongest women in history. I rolled my eyes when she told me to read Helen Keller’s autobiography, The Story of My Life, but read it and found parts of it extremely touching and inspiring. She also encouraged me to research Amelia Earhart, who became one of my childhood fascinations and heroines. I still have a picture of her taped to my bedroom door at home. And I filled my time reading other tales of women, actual and fictional, which led me to aspire to write and to hope for the day when I might be appreciated for a literary contribution to humanity.

And somehow with all this reading I never really learned about love. I intellectualized it, and like Dorothea Brooks, considered the life of the mind sufficient grounds for romantic attachment. But, we all know how the Casaubons of the world fare in love and how withering it can be to Dorotheas. Thus, like young Dorothea, my sweet little intellectual-appreciation theory of romance has proven insufficient to explain the real-life complexities of love. I begin to despair, that all men really want or notice is a sexy woman. Or that they are more interested in the physical than the intellectual qualities of their partner. Such is the fear of the inept female graduate student. I know it all doesn’t fit into simple binary categories, but let me get to my final questions. What DO men really want? And how can women give it to them without sacrificing their integrity or their authenticity?

And because I love the introduction to Middlemarch so much, here’s an excerpt:

That Spanish woman who lived three hundred years ago, was certainly not the last of her kind. Many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity; perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred poet and sank unwept into oblivion. With dim lights and tangeld circumstance they tried to shape their thought and deed in noble agreement; but after all, to common eyes their struggles seemed mere inconsistency and formlessness; for these later-born Theresas were helped by no coherent social faith and order which could perform the function of knowledge for the ardently willing soul. Their ardor alternated between a vague ideal and the common yearning of womanhood; so that the one was disapproved as extravagance, and the other condemned as a lapse.

Some have felt that these blundering lives are due to the inconvenient indefiniteness with which the Supreme Power has fashioned the natures of women: if there were one level of feminine incompetence as strict as the ability to count three and no more, the social lot of women might be treated with scientific certitude. Meanwhile the indefiniteness remains, and the limits of variation are really much wider than any one would imagine from the sameness of women’s coiffure and the favorite love-stories in prose and verse. Here and there a cygnet is reared uneasily among the ducklings in the brown pond, and never finds the living stream in fellowship with its own oary-footed kind. Here and there is born a Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing, whose loving heartbeats and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed among hindrances, instead of centring in some long-recognizable deed.*

*George Eliot, Middlemarch (New York: John B. Alden, 1883), 5-6.