155 years ago today - Jan 13, 1870

Between January and March 1870, thousands of Latter-day Saint women assembled in mass "indignation" meetings to protest federal legislation that proposed to deny U.S. citizenship to anyone practicing plural marriage. On January 13, 1870, between five and six thousand Latter-day Saint women congregated in the Salt Lake City tabernacle. Apparently, no men were present except for reporters. Speaking from the pulpit in the "old" tabernacle, women affirmed that they had become plural wives by their own choice and articulated their vehement objections to the antipolygamy legislation pending in Congress. They declared their rights and appealed for the rights of their husbands, fathers, and brothers.

Public defense of plural marriage by women was potentially the most persuasive form of public relations available to the Saints because it answered the key objection: that plural marriage oppressed women. Latter-day Saints first officially acknowledged their practice of plural marriage in 1852, more than a decade after the first plural marriages were contracted in Nauvoo under the direction of Joseph Smith. After that public announcement, Latter-day Saint women began to defend plural marriage publicly as well as privately. ...

Women in Salt Lake City first held a protest meeting on January 6, 1870, to organize against the Cullom Bill. The bill declared marriage in Utah Territory to be a "civil contract" and modified the territory's judicial structure in order to prosecute, fine, and imprison any man cohabiting "with more than one woman as husband and wife." The Cullom Bill did not become law, though some of its provisions were incorporated into subsequent federal legislation: the 1874 Poland Act, the 1882 Edmunds Act, and the 1887 Edmunds-Tucker Act. ...

[3.13 Minutes of "Great Indignation Meeting," January 13, 1870, as quoted in Matthew J. Grow, Jill Derr, Carol Madsen, and Kate Holbrook, editors, The First Fifty Years of Relief Society: Key Documents in Latter-day Saint Women's History, The Church Historian's Press, 2016, https://churchhistorianspress.org/the-first-fifty-years-of-relief-society/]

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