By Vorjack
The cover story of the latest National Geographic is on the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), the offshoot of the LDS that has retained – and seems to be focused on – polygamous marriage. The article is available here.
The FLDS made headlines in the spring of 2008, when the police raided one of their compounds in West Texas. The raid resulted in twelve of their male members being arrested for charges stemming from their marriages to underage girls. One of those indicted was the leader of the community, Warren Jeffs, who appears to have been a bit of a megalomaniac:
Jeffs’s diary, also seized during the Texas raid, reveals a man who micromanaged the community’s every decision, from chore assignments and housing arrangements to who married whom and which men were ousted—all directed by revelations Jeffs received as he slept. He claimed that God guided his every action, no matter how small. One diary entry reads: “The Lord directed that I go to the sun tanning salon and get sun tanned more evenly on their suntanning beds.”
One persistent question that pops up is why women would stay in such a community, where they are married to a man with multiple wives and expected to produce children nonstop, when they often have the opportunity to run. Part of it is that they have been raised in the culture and know very little else.
Carolyn Jessop, the plural wife of Merril Jessop who did leave the FLDS, likens entering the outside world to “stepping out onto another planet. I was completely unprepared, because I had absolutely no life skills. Most women in the FLDS don’t even know how to balance a checkbook, let alone apply for a job, so contemplating how you’re going to navigate in the outside world is extremely daunting.”
But the author, Scott Anderson, is able to draw from his interviews and produce a more complicated picture:
It would seem there’s another lure for women to stay: power. The FLDS women I spoke with tended to be far more articulate and confident than the men, most of whom seemed paralyzed by bashfulness. It makes sense when one begins to grasp that women are coveted to “multiply and replenish the earth,” while men are in extraordinary competition to be deemed worthy of marriage by the prophet. One way to be deemed worthy, of course, is to not rock the boat, to keep a low profile. As a result, what has all the trappings of a patriarchal culture, actually has many elements of a matriarchal one.
There are limits to that power, of course, for it is subject to the dictates of the prophet. After hearing Melinda’s stout defense of Jeffs, I ask what she would do if she were reassigned.
“I’m confident that wouldn’t happen,” she replies uneasily.
“But what if it did?” I ask. “Would you obey?”
For the only time during our interview, Melinda grows wary. Sitting back in her chair, she gives her head a quarter turn to stare at me out of the corner of one eye.
I’m very skeptical of Anderson’s suggestions that FLDS women have any sort of power. He seems to be basing this idea purely on his perception that the women he interviewed were more ‘articulate and confident’ than the men. My immediate reaction to this is… so what? Firstly, that’s just his perception of things, which could be biased in any number of ways. Secondly, simply seeming articulate and confident does not mean you have power in a society.
When women are being oppressed in a community, there are always some that will argue that no, in actual fact, women have the ‘real’ power. However, when assessing a group’s power in society, the best place to look is at that society’s leadership, and the rights that group has. In the FLDS, do women hold positions of authority? Do they have autonomy? In other words, can they decide how to live their own lives?
Benson & Stangroom in ‘Does God Hate Women?’ write quite a bit about the FLDS. They even speak to one of the Anderson’s interviewees, Carolyn Jessop. Her experience of forced marriage (pimping by any other name) does not exactly paint a picture of a society where women have power. Also, tapes of lectures by Warren Jeffs showed him instructing girls that their only way to salvation, to obtain the power of the ‘holy Priesthood’, is by marrying a man (because only men have that power, you see). They are taught to be celibate until they marry the man they are ‘given’ to. They do not have a choice about who this person may be, and furthermore they are taught to be submissive and obedient, and treat their husband like a god. Otherwise, they’re going to hell! So they have no authority, and no autonomy, and hence, no power.
So what if some men lose out on marriage? No-one said a patriarchal arrangement benefits *all* men. The fact that men are in competition with each other does not make this society even remotely matriarchal. It is revealing that the author uses the word ‘coveted’ when referring to the FLDS women, because this term refers to property, not to people. Indeed that is how women are treated in the FLDS – as property. Walking reproductive organs, to be squabbled over, won and impregnated. Never mind that they actually have brains and desires and rights of their own.
Anderson’s theory about why women stay in the FLDS is a bit like some people’s rationalisations of why people stay in violent relationships: ‘You could leave, but you don’t, so there must be something in it for you.’ These women have internalised the religious messages about submission and accepted their rank in society – some may even be happy with their lives. That doesn’t mean that they have power.
As Benson & Stangroom put it: “This religion puts a glow of sanctity on an arrangement in which older men get to have exclusive sex with a variety of young women and girls, with no arguments, no resistance, no back talk.”
Doesn’t sound much like power to me.
Excellent points. I’ll just add two:
1) I don’t know the exact method by which Anderson selected the women to interview, but it seems like the women voluntered to a personal interview. I’d venture this approach favors powerful women as the more timid and shy women would most likely feel less inclined to participate (it may even be that their husbands didn’t allow them to participate). So Anderson may not have a representative sample.
2) Some women have power over other women in the household. In fact, this is a very typical arrangement in a polygamous household, where there’s often a first wife or favored wife. This doesn’t mean they hold much power in their society, though.
Also, he mentions that the women have more power, and in the next paragraph brings up the point that the leader’s wife could be ‘reassigned’. Doesn’t sound like power to me.
More unibrows!