Marriage – unlawful marriage – was the topic of endless newspaper editorializing in the mid-19th century. “Apart from all religious considerations,” urged one writer, “let us count the social and domestic cost of any indifference to the proposed change in our marriage laws. The first downward step would not be the last!” Tolerating marriages that violated the laws of God and man “would produce social misery and inconvenience to thousands of the community.” “If these marriages were not forbidden in [scripture], the code of marriage was no code at all.” The plea that such marriages provided homes to women who otherwise would remain unmarried moved opponents not at all.

Were these unlawful marriages the polygamous marriages of the Latter-day Saints? Well, no.

These unlawful marriages were monogamous marriages in Great Britain, marriages between Christians, marriages that provided care for children whose mothers had died.

This unlawful form of marriage was contracted between a widower and a sister of his deceased wife, his sister-in-law, who had come into the home to take care of her nieces and nephews.

The prohibition against marrying one’s sister-in-law was based on ancient church law. Marriage between Adam and Eve had made them “one flesh,” according to Genesis 2:24, so a sister-in-law actually became a man’s own flesh-and-blood sister (never mind, of course, that neither Adam nor Eve had sisters …) More directly, the prohibition came from the Mosaic law, Leviticus 18:16 – although that verse prohibited marriage between a man and his [deceased] brother’s wife, the same degree of relationship existed between a man and his wife’s sister, so was also banned.

The Book of Common Prayer used in Great Britain during the 19th century contained a Table of Kindred and Affinity listing every possible relationship within four degrees (daughter’s son’s wife; husband’s mother’s father; mother’s mother’s husband; on and on and on). Marriage between anyone related that closely was considered incest, regardless of whether the relationship was by blood (consanguinity) or by law (affinity) – while anyone reading this would no doubt feel horrified even imagining a brother marrying his sister, anyone raised in a society that followed these ancient ecclesiastical laws would feel equally horrified at the idea of a brother marrying his sister-in-law after his wife had died.

And yet … when a woman died (often in childbirth) leaving young children behind, it was often her unmarried sister who stepped forward to care for the children. Sometimes close association eventually resulted in love between that unmarried sister and the widowed father; sometimes it just seemed not quite right for an unmarried woman to be living under the same roof with a now-unmarried man. In either case, marriage would have been the natural outcome … except for the law against it, a law that, if I’m reading unfamiliar sources correctly, moved from being a church law to a civil law with Britain’s Marriage Act of 1835.

In 1842, a bill was introduced into Parliament that would permit such marriages between a man and his deceased wife’s sister (but not between other people forbidden to marry, on that long list of forbidden relationships). It was still being argued in the 1850s when I began to run into it as I searched English newspapers for Mormon stories.

People who opposed the law had all kinds of “reasonable” arguments: The gentle relationship of brother and sister-in-law would be destroyed even while a man’s wife was alive, because they all realized that someday the man might marry his sister-in-law. His sister-in-law might even turn against his wife, hoping she would die so that there could be a new marriage. The most natural protector of young motherless children was their own mother’s sister – but “by the bill, if it became law, the children of a deceased wife would lose an aunt and gain a stepmother,” one who would natural prefer her own future children to those of her dead sister. Other opponents simply heaped sarcastic contempt on “the pitiful case of widowers who can find no other comfort in the world than that of supplying the places of their wives by marriage with the sisters they have left behind.”

Perhaps the most damning argument against relaxation of the marriage law was this: “Be it remembered that the arguments used by the agents who work this agitation tell as much for the legalisation of polygamy as for the particular change which they advocate. At present the husbands who desire to multiply their wives are obliged to emigrate to the Mormon community in the West. We have no wish to abridge their liberty of travel; we should be heartily glad to see the husbands who wish to marry their sisters companions of the voyage.” Or this: “We may be sure that other relaxations will be wished for as soon as this is gained; and in no long time we shall have the Mormonites contending for the legalisation of polygamy, on the very same grounds and with the very same arguments by which the promoters of the present bill are seeking for licence to marry a wife’s sister or a wife’s niece.” Over and over, opponents to the Deceased Wife’s Sister Bill cast it as the first step on the slippery slope to the most evil marriage imaginable: the Mormon plural marriage.

The Bill was raised and fought through many Parliamentary sessions, and was not passed until 1907. Even then, the law was so specific that it permitted marriage between a man and his deceased wife’s sister, but not between a man and his deceased brother’s wife, or any other forbidden relationship on the Table of Kindred and Affinity. Interestingly for us today, that 1907 law legalizing husband/sister-in-law marriages permitted clergymen to refuse to perform such marriages if they found them distasteful. Other laws were passed in piecemeal fashion to sanction marriages between people with certain other specific relationships (e.g., to permit marriage between a man and the wife of his deceased brother, or between a man and the niece of his deceased wife).

Would any of you consider such marriages to be taboo? Does marriage between in-laws make your skin crawl, or, to use the Bloggernacle phrase, have a serious “ick” factor? Do we mistake taboo/ick as being an inherent part of some forms of marriage – or does the taboo/ick arise only because we’ve been raised to think of certain marriage systems as wrong? Does it say anything about your 21st century emotional response to 19th century Mormon plural marriage?