Several years ago, I interviewed a Brigham Young University professor about the doctrine of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, more commonly called Mormons. I was researching my novel about Ann Eliza Young, the plural wife of Brigham Young (the man who succeeded Joseph Smith as the second prophet). Ann Eliza was either Brigham’s 19th or 27th or 56th wife – the records can seem willfully confusing. When I brought up the subject of Mormon polygamy, the professor dismissed it as a sideshow.

“It wasn’t a sideshow if you were one of those women,” I said.

The first of Joseph Smith’s wives was Emma: no one disputes her place on the list. Then Fanny, who, when asked by her brother about the rumors that she was also married to Smith said, “That is all a matter of my own.” Fanny was followed by – we think – Lucinda, Louisa and Zina. Presendia married Smith while still married to another man, and speculated that the prophet, Smith, might be the father of her son (a photo suggests she was right). Agnes preceded Sylvia. Sylvia’s mother, Patty, followed her daughter by a month. At 84, Mary swore in an affidavit she had married the Mormon leader as a teen. There was Marinda, and probably Elizabeth. Then Sarah – the first of three Sarahs. Soon after her came Delcena, a widow. Initially Eliza found the idea of marrying Smith “repugnant” – the idea of plural marriage was so foreign to her – but eventually assented. Martha, Ruth and then Flora married Joseph between the summer of 1842 and the spring of 1843. Sisters Emily and Eliza both married Smith, but whether or not they squabbled over him, we cannot know. When Smith told Lucy that God had commanded him to take her as a plural wife she said, “my astonishment knew no bounds.” Maria and Sarah, another pair of sisters, were sealed to Smith in the spring of 1843. Not long after – or was it before? – Helen became one of Smith’s wives at age 14. The list of Smith’s plural wives continues: Hanna, Elvira, Rhoda, Desdemona, Olive, Melissa, Nancy, two more Fannys. There are incomplete accounts about Jane, Sophia, Phoebe, Vienna and Clarissa. There are probably other women whose names never made it into the historical record. The exact chronological order of the Smith wives is unclear. Some of the evidence about the relationships these women had with Smith is indisputable. In the case of others the documentation is more circumstantial or completely absent.

What we do know, and what the LDS church recently acknowledged after nearly two centuries, is that, by the time he was assassinated in a Carthage, Illinois, jailhouse in June 1844, Joseph Smith had married an unknown (and maybe unknowable) number of women – possibly 40, and quite possibly more.



Why does such Mormon marital recounting matter? For the dignity of the women involved, and the value of truth in history.



For some 180 years the church has discouraged any kind of discussion of Smith’s plural marriages despite the historical evidence – letters and affidavits, temple records and family trees, diaries and deeply personal testimonies. Some of these women were Smith’s wives only in a spiritual sense – married, or “sealed”, to him in a temple ceremony intended for their souls’ afterlife. Others were what we would today call mistresses, their adultery elevated by “celestial marriage”. When I was writing my book, I struggled to accept that a question so basic about a man – whom did he marry? – was, to a certain degree, unanswerable when it came to Smith and scores or all but unasked women.

By disputing Smith’s plural marriages, and asking its followers to ignore the evidence, the church was denying the experiences of many women — some of whom were among its most loyal believers.

Despite the church’s latest acknowledgements, questions about Smith and his wives will remain: some of the women’s stories have been lost, and some were purposefully never put into the historical record in the first place. Even today, if you wanted to review a list of Smith’s or Young’s wives, you will at best encounter fragmentary and sometimes conflicting evidence about their names and dates and, for many of them,even less about their lives. The church’s next step must be giving historians open access to its archives to create a full account of the women Smith married.



We may never know the complete stories of Smith’s marriages or his wives, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. Can the LDS church withstand such historical scrutiny? Of course. Will it reduce the church’s authority when it moralizes about the intimate lives of others? Probably – and the church will be only stronger for it.



Origin stories are often messy: the new testament, for example, provides four official versions of Christ and Christianity’s earliest days (and of course more versions exist). Sometimes the only way to understand the past is to accept conflicting facts and interpretations. In many ways, that is the definition of faith: accepting as true the inherently unknowable.



Fawn Brodie’s controversial 1945 biography of Smith, No Man Knows My History, opens with a scene two months before Smith’s death: he stood up at a funeral and said, “You don’t know me; you never knew my heart. No man knows my history.” The book, which included an appendix of Smith’s 48 wives (she wrote that there were probably more), resulted in Brodie’s excommunication for apostasy by the LDS church after its release. Brodie didn’t get everything right, but she was part of a tradition of historians pursuing the truth about the church’s early years no matter where it led them.

Now, after 180 years of discrediting the evidence and those who spoke of it, the church has acknowledged that dozens of women — Joseph’s wives — knew far more of Smith’s history than either the man or his church wanted to acknowledge. And the more we know of Joseph’s history, the more we can know of the history of these women, each of whom has not only a name but also a story of her own.

• This article was amended on 14 November 2014 to clarify the wording of the subheading.