Kanes shared desire to help early Mormons

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.\"