10 Post-Manifesto Polygamy

of Mary Ann. Estranged from Pratt, she was sealed for eternity in the Nauvoo Temple to a deceased Joseph Smith and for time to Pratt, as Brigham Young directed. She raised four children she had with Pratt, and her only child, Mary Ann Stearns, by her first husband. Daughter Mary Ann, Helen’s mother, married Oscar Winters at the age of nineteen and, although surrounded by practitioners of plural marriage, chose to remain in a monogamous marriage, even though she believed in plural marriage as a tenet of LDS doctrine. She records her personal coming to terms with polygamy in the following excerpt from her autobiography:

It was while located on the boat at St. Louis that I saw the little book published by Martha Brotherton on polygamy. She with her family had visited at our house before they left England, and being acquainted with her made me very curious to know what she had to say about it, so I took the book, went into my berth, drew the curtains, and proceeded to investigate. I had always been taught to believe in the Bible, and when I came to the place where it quoted Abraham, Jacob and others as having more than one wife, I decided that the principle must be true, coming from that source and also, though right for others, not for me was my firm conclusion. An[d] though thus steeled against it for myself, I always honored and respected those living in it.

Accordingly, Mary Ann supported her daughter Hulda Augusta when she became the second wife of Heber J. Grant in 1884 at the age of twenty-eight. Only two of Helen’s letters to Owen prior to 1900 remain, but those letters and other remembrances demonstrate the mutual love and devotion we traditionally associate with monogamous marriage. Their correspondence manifests a physical and emotional intimacy unmatched by many nineteenth-century marriages, as evidenced in the following reminiscence in an October 27, 1903, letter from Helen to Owen:

I have thought and thought of the many sweet experiences of our lives together and have lived again those happy days when first you took me to your heart and then to “our” home. How free from care and sorrow those days. We were children then, boy and girl together. I remember how I used to watch and wa^i^t for your home coming and when you came would always welcome you with a smile and a “bebe kiiss” (I can’t