I was 31, about 6 months pregnant with my third daughter living in a home and a city that echoed with the ghosts of polygamy. Our 900 square foot four-plex had once been a home to a man with many wives long before its remodel. My neighbors liked to tell me that their home also once housed another polygamous family and had secret passages in it for the husband or extra wives to hide in when the law came around. 

These weren’t weird facts to me. I came from a polygamous family generations before. My third great grandpa had 55 children. I came through his 8th wife’s line. This was “in the past,” and something our religion “didn’t practice anymore.” I was safe from this practice….in this life at least.

Many women and men from our religion know these facts (ad nauseam). We know it’s bad to practice polygamy now but that there was a high probability that our husbands could have more than one wife in “heaven” according to our doctrine. In fact, I would bet that many women from our religion have had the same conversation with their husbands as I had.

Me: “You wouldn’t have more than one wife would you?! Like, if I were to die and you remarried…you wouldn’t be ‘sealed’ to her?”

If you’re righteous enough, you too get to live like this! Whoo Hoo!

Husband: “Oh, no way…that would .. be ..awful to have many women in heaven.”

So, as I was living in this small space with 2 little thigh-high kids, husband working 16 hour shifts, 6 days a week, I used books and the newly invented podcasts that I listened to from my laptop (smart phones were new and I didn’t own one yet) to pass the long hard hours.

That year I read a book that many from our faith tradition thought was dubious. It forever changed the course of my life.  Rough Stone Rolling was a historical look at our religion’s founding prophet, Joseph Smith and was written by a believing member. It was dubious because the author/historian, for the first time in my experience, told the Mormon story of its founder without all the reverence and awe. Details that were once said to be “anti-Mormon” rhetoric, were actually true stories just swept under the rug in order to help believing members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints not lose faith. (Want to listen to a great historically accurate podcast and laugh a lot along the way?)

One story mentioned was about my fourth great grandmother, Patty Sessions. I knew this grandmother well, or so I thought. She was a midwife that was well respected and rubbed shoulders with all the “higher ups” in the religion’s leadership. I was proud to be her descendant. I had heard stories from my parents that when Joseph Smith, the founding Prophet, died; “many women were sealed to him.”

Patty Bartlett Sessions

“Oh, of course” I thought as a young kid.

“How silly these women were, but they of course would want to be married to the Prophet…”

However, this was not the case. My midwife ancestor was “sealed” to Joseph while he was alive, while he was married to his wife, while he was married to other girls, and while my ancestor was already married to her own husband. Oh…and her adult daughter married Joseph too…the same day. She also happened to already be married to her living husband. 

Whaaaat? Wait a second. This was now weird. Polygamy was to “help the widowed” to “give support to all the extra pitiful women roaming around without a man.” How was polyandry (married to more than one man) okay? (I hadn’t unpacked the double standard of being -sort of- okay with ‘men sealed to many wives and not okay with women sealed to many husbands’ idea yet). This, of course, is not the worst story of how the prophet pressured young girls to marry him. I learned many details about the practice that were very upsetting. The men violated the women’s trust. They mistreated their wives. They left their wives to take on new wives. They abandoned older women and illegally married teenage girls.

Somehow the most disturbing part was the close relation to my grandmother and the part she played.

This is an important detail to note. I read about many disturbing, true documented details in my religion’s history that I brushed aside. I couldn’t deal with them. I didn’t want to deal with them. 

Around that time I had an experience with one of my daughters that helped me understand myself a little better. It was December, and she had skipped up to me and asked, “Mom, is Santa real?” I had never wanted to give this imaginary man any credit for my hard work and loving efforts to give my kids gifts. I also wanted my kids to trust me and know I would always give them straight forward answers. I responded, “No, he is not real.” To which surprisingly my daughter then said, “Yes, he is!” and skipped off again with a happy giggle and grin on her face, completely unperturbed at my answer.

We can believe in anything we want to, despite the facts that lie before us.

I then learned that my four times great grandmother had written journals, and they had been compiled and published. I read them. I took notes. I read other people’s published journals from the same time period. I read modern historian’s research that compiled journals, histories, documents, and timelines that helped me piece together a clearer understanding of my ancestor’s cultural and religious history in a way that I had never learned before, in a way that my religion actively discouraged and even hid from its members. 

I buried my feelings on polygamy deep down. They’d resurface during Sunday school lessons where someone would invariably try to justify our religion’s racism, or polygamy. I would try and reconcile it all, only to feel angry inside in trying to make true the things that my gut knew were wrong. 

I wrestled with these facts my history brought me, but I was also inspired and impressed with my ancestor. The collections of opposing thoughts and feelings around all the events I had been studying led me to write a graphic novel about Patty Bartlett Sessions- Midwife of the Wild Frontier, my 4th great grandma.  Inspired by Sydney Padua’s graphic novel on Ada Lovelace, as well as the graphic novel Persepolis, I wrote Patty’s story in a similar fashion using her journals, adding historical footnotes to the bottom of each page. 

I wanted the complexity of her story to be easier to navigate than her actual journals. I wanted the experiences she lived to be heard so that young girls of my faith could see more of history. Not as the men in my church had curated it for us to interpret, but from this woman’s pen turned to picture, making a greater impression on one’s mind. 

I started out writing this book as a disgruntled believer of my faith. I finished it as one who had shed the heavy burdens of belief bit by bit, page by page, sluffing off ideas or doctrines that I now had a testimony were not true. I stood at the end of it all holding onto what I could claim as truth and stopped being angry by trying to justify and make true what wasn’t.

This was an eleven year process. Writing the book from conception to finish took six years. People have read it and took from it what they wanted. If it helped them believe what they wanted to be true, it did. If it confirmed what they knew wasn’t, it did that too. Then there’s the group that sees the nuance. It creates anxiety in them.

One such anxious person came in the form of an old boyfriend who in an attempt to “catch up on old times” turned our conversation into an interview where he was the priesthood leader/ man, and I was the misinformed woman who needed saving. I shrugged off his attempts to establish this influence he somehow felt he had over me until he reached out again. 

The second time this old beau reached out, he was very concerned for my salvation and the building up of the kingdom of God. He wanted to share his insight on polygamy and felt sure that what he had come to understand was more clear and correct than my personal study and insight. He was “all for women’s empowerment,” as he stated, but he failed to see that twice he had tried to dominate me and my opinion.  

This was and is my experience in my culture and religion. I’m allowed to study, research, and write but only as long as my conclusions align with the men above me locally and “worldwide.”

We are all aware that women’s histories are not well known. In fact, a writer, Celeste Davis, made the comment on her substack and in a conversation on this podcast ,that women keep reinventing the wheel. We women reach a certain age where we see things a little clearer and want to stand up for what is right, thinking we are the first to realize certain truths. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, known for her great quote, “well-behaved women seldom make history,” wrote that she thought women’s histories were lost perhaps due to practical reasons: their journals got wet next to the laundry, burned in the fire for kindling, etc.

But the main truth behind it all, is that women’s histories have not been valued.

So, here I am. I started reinventing the wheel in all my research until I found other women’s research and other women’s journals. Try this one for starters!

I also offer my book to my own daughters and the women of my religious culture in an attempt to let them jump on the wagon that is already rolling.

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