Reddit reviews More Wives Than One: Transformation of the Mormon Marriage System, 1840-1910

>It was explained by the fact that God, through polygamy, made it possible, when there were more female than male converts, for every female wishing to be married in the covenant to have a husband and children.

I don't want to be prickly, but in a thread about knowing church history and stuff, I feel that I need to point out that this is a common misconception. There were always roughly equal men and women in the early church, and polygamy actually caused a rather severe shortage of marriageable women (which is why some women in Utah ended up marrying so creepily young because men had already married the women their own age and were forced to look to younger and younger women to find anyone available to marry as a second or third wife).

Polygamy, just by the numbers, was utterly unsustainable over more than a generation or two, and in my opinion, if it wasn't for the manifesto, the practice would've died out naturally anyway.

I always recommend Kathryn Daynes, More Wives Than One: Transformation of the Mormon Marriage System, 1840-1910 (University of Illinois Press, 2001) when this issue pops up. It's a statistical study of Utah-era polygamy (so a bit numbers heavy in some chapters), but because it's a statistical study, it gives a much more accurate view of the practice of polygamy than other books that rely on anecdotal sources. (Not that those other books are bad--it's just a different approach and different approaches are more suitable for exploring other facets. For trying to answer questions about numbers--i.e. were there more women than men in the church?--a statistical study is best.)

https://www.amazon.com/More-Wives-Than-One-Transformation/dp/0252075609