Polygamy: An Early American History

by Sarah M. S. Pearsall

Overview

A groundbreaking examination of polygamy showing that monogamy was not the only form marriage took in early America

Today we tend to think of polygamy as an unnatural marital arrangement characteristic of fringe sects or uncivilized peoples. Historian Sarah Pearsall shows us that polygamy’s surprising history encompasses numerous colonies, indigenous communities, and segments of the American nation. Polygamy—as well as the fight against it—illuminates many touchstones of American history: the Pueblo Revolt and other uprisings against the Spanish; Catholic missions in New France; New England settlements and King Philip’s War; the entrenchment of African slavery in the Chesapeake; the Atlantic Enlightenment; the American Revolution; missions and settlement in the West; and the rise of Mormonism.
 
Pearsall expertly opens up broader questions about monogamy’s emergence as the only marital option, tracing the impact of colonial events on property, theology, feminism, imperialism, and the regulation of sexuality. She shows that heterosexual monogamy was never the only model of marriage in North America.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780300226843
Publisher:	Yale University Press
Publication date:	08/20/2019
Pages:	416
Sales rank:	632,129
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Sarah M. S. Pearsall teaches the history of early America and the Atlantic world at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of the prizewinning Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Eighteenth Century.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

Part 1 Colonial Clashes

1 "Una Casa, Dos Mujeres" 21

2 "Poligamie/Nintiouiouesaïn" 50

3 "Christians Have Kept 3 Wives" 82

4 "Negroe Mens Wifes" 115

Part 2 Enlightened Encounters

5 "The Natural Violence of Our Passions" 153

6 "Such a Revolution as This" 179

7 "The Repugnance Inherent in Having Multiple Wives" 215

8 "Defence of Polygamy by a Lady" 249

Conclusion 289

Notes 295

Index 387

Editorial Reviews

Cambridge historian Sarah Pearsall has produced a richly sourced, elegantly written, and strikingly original interdisciplinary study of the diverse practices of polygamy in American from ca.1500 to 1900.”—John Witte Jr., Journal of Law and Religion

"Pearsall’s narrative is expansive and stretches over two hundred years. . . . This long view does not allow the author to concentrate on a central cast of characters largely because it cannot. American polygamy was too ubiquitous and amorphous for this to be possible. This is not a shortcoming of the book, however, but a strength, because it allows Pearsall to paint a broader, more dynamic picture of American polygamy."—Christopher M. Gleason, Journal of the History of Sexuality

“This book is essential reading for those in our own times who assume that monogamy is inevitably progressive.”—Sarah Carter, The Journal of Arizona History

“Sarah Pearsall’s work is stunningly original, riveting, shocking.  If anyone still thinks of early modern polygamy as a thread that ran intermittently along the fringes of the Reformation, they have another think coming: African, Native American, Catholic, and, finally, Mormon marital practices upend comforting platitudes about ‘traditional’ marriage in early America.”—Sarah Barringer Gordon, University of Pennsylvania

"By taking polygamy seriously, Sarah Pearsall illuminates the long, tangled history of marriages across four centuries and many cultures in North America.  We see diverse American families in fresh and provocative ways thanks to Pearsall's wide-ranging research and vivid prose."—Alan Taylor, author of American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804

“An innovative and thought-provoking book. Sarah Pearsall uses polygamy as a point of entry to the broader world of marriage and the gender roles that attended to it, making a strong argument that such matters were intertwined with the expression of power at all levels in early America.”—Christopher Hodson, Brigham Young University

“Sarah Pearsall shows great intellectual range and a wonderful ability to communicate complex ideas elegantly.”—Kathleen Brown, University of Pennsylvania

From the Publisher

07/26/2019

Historian Pearsall (Univ. of Cambridge; Atlantic Families) has produced a fascinating exploration of polygamous unions in North America between early European colonization and the advent of plural marriage among the Latter-day Saints. The organization of families and households, Pearsall argues, is crucial to understanding political and social tensions within European and indigenous societies and communities of enslaved people, as well as between the European colonizers and the populations—indigenous and enslaved—they sought to control. Arguments about proper and improper forms of marriage, and the experiences of those within married households tell us much about how gender relations and reproductive labor changed over time in a rapidly shifting and multicultural sociopolitical context. Pearsall's wide-ranging sources—language vocabularies, missionary records, textiles and pottery, captivity and conversion narratives, the physical arrangement of dwellings for enslaved plantation workers—center the voices of Indigenous and enslaved people, particularly women, in the intertwined narratives of family creation and colonial conquest. VERDICT This is a must-read for scholars seeking to understand better the evolving family forms that populated the North American landscape and inflected cross-cultural encounters and tensions, from early European colonization through the early American republic.—Anna J. Clutterbuck-Cook, Massachusetts Historical Soc., Boston

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