PROVO, Utah — Elizabeth Kane was an anti-polygamist, 36-year-old mother of four from Pennsylvania, hardly the picture of a woman who would pen a smartly written, balanced and fair travelogue about the home lives of Mormon polygamists in the 1870s.But she did, and her book now is the foundation of fresh research that has uncovered two surprising facts about the period, two Utah authors said Wednesday during a lecture at Brigham Young University.First, polygamy was surprisingly prevalent when \"Bessie\" Kane recorded her observations during a lengthy 1872 journey from Salt Lake City to St. George with Brigham Young and her husband, Thomas L. Kane. Second, the architecture of most of the 13 Mormon polygamist homes where she stayed were as ordinary as the practice of polygamy was extraordinary, said historians Lowell \"Ben\" Bennion and Thomas Carter.Two years after her trip through Utah, Elizabeth Kane published the impressions of plural marriage she had written in diaries and letters as \"Twelve Mormon Homes Visited in Succession on a Journey through Utah to Arizona.\"\"Like many of her contemporaries, Mrs. Kane was bothered by polygamy and worried about the subservient position in which it placed women,\" Bennion said. \"How was such a repulsive marital practice possible in America? Were these women victims or in fact willing partners?\"What she found surprised her, beginning in Nephi, where sister-wives Mary and Sarah Pitchforth were the first Mormon women to awaken her sympathy when she stayed with them, Bennion said. \"The more wives she watched and interviewed, the more inclined she was to portray them in sympathetic terms ... . Neither an apologist nor a convert, Elizabeth clung to her anti-polygamist beliefs while gaining respect and admiration for women who entered and endured the system.\"Bennion and Carter were surprised by what they found, too, after they initially began to work with a dozen students to study the 12 homes in the book for one of Carter's architecture seminars at the University of Utah.\"In the 11 towns in her book, not including Salt Lake City, 20 to 25 percent were living in a polygamous household,\" said Bennion, an expert in the historical demographics of polygamy, in an interview Wednesday after the fifth of seven lectures in a series about Thomas Kane at the BYU library this school year. \"It was certainly more prevalent than we've been led to believe. And I can understand why, considering the federal raids in the 1880s.\"Thomas Kane earned a national reputation for his efforts to help presidents and the press understand the intentions and persecution of members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from 1846 to his death in 1883. BYU's lecture series complements a free exhibit at the Harold B. Lee Library that includes a list Brigham Young made of his plural wives as part of the process of completing a will, a task Kane urged him to take up during their 1872 journey.Carter, a U. professor, has written academic articles about Mormon polygamous housing in the 1800s. Most of the homes where the Kanes stayed \"were so normal, in fact, that most of them have gone unnoticed,\" he said. Only two remain, the Dame home in Parowan and the Hinckley home in Cove Fort.Carter said many Utahns and Latter-day Saints believe that old homes in the state with two front doors were a sign of a polygamist household. \"This is wrong,\" he said. \"Double doors were found throughout the United States at the time. There was no way to tell from the outside whether a house was a single-wife or plural-wife dwelling.\"Elizabeth Kane concluded polygamy was so prevalent that persecution only could make Latter-day Saints more determined to maintain the practice. She wrote a long letter to a Pennsylvania senator asking for help to stop the national campaign against polygamy. The plea failed, so she published 250 copies of her book and distributed them to influential Easterners with negative opinions.Most Mormons clearly never saw a work with such limited publication. No record of Young's reaction exists. Elder George Q. Cannon of the First Presidency gave Bessie Kane's balanced book his stamp of approval.\"To make contrasts vivid and striking there must be shadows,\" Cannon wrote to her. \"The people of Utah fully understand that rose-colored notices of them are viewed with distrust and that a journal written as this is will be more acceptable to a large number of readers than one that should contain only kind and flattering descriptions.\"BYU's Kane lecture series will resume Feb. 11 with a lecture by Edward A. Geary titled \"Tom and Bessie Kane & the Mormons.\" The final lecture is scheduled March 12, when Matthew J. Grow, author of a new Kane biography to be released this month, will deliver \"Thomas L. Kane and Nineteenth-Century America.\"BYU Studies plans to publish all the papers in the lecture series as a book.
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