I have this weird fascination with fundamentalist Mormon polygamists.

It started, of course, with Big Love. I’m not a particularly huge fan of the show—I find the compound stuff stiflingly boring, and have never been able to muster up any sympathy for Bill Paxton’s character—but there’s something about the lives of the wives and the way they conduct this complex mental arithmetic to explain away human reactions like jealousy which captivates me.

What’s implied on the show—and it’s reality TV counterpart Sister Wives which, yes, I’ve watched willingly—but is never really discussed directly enough for my tastes, is the way that their society values these women, giving little regard for their capacity for work or creativity beyond a mother’s work and past the inherent creativity of becoming a mom. This unstated shift in priorities from the societal norm seems to underscore a lot of the character motivations on the show, but the possible horrific implications of this are rarely more than alluded to—see Barb’s desperation to have the other wives procreate after she’s rendered infertile by cancer, or the way the husband on Sister Wives pressures his first wife to consider in vitro fertilization as their marriage has only produced one child—and never really explored extensively or directly.

I picked up Irene Spencer’s autobiography, Shattered Dreams: My Life as a Polygamist’s Wife hoping to find some direct discussion of these values, though it was with some hesitation. The focus on a family of isolated polygamists in the 1960s had me a bit worried that I’d find something closer to the compound stories on Big Love than a dissection of the daily tensions between men and women in this extremist religion.

Luckily, though it seems that Spencer’s life may have included some of the violence of the fictional Grant family, she makes a conscious decision here to focus instead on her home life (stories about murder plots within her polygamist sect apparently make up the bulk of her companion volume, Cult Insanity). Ultimately, the story of her life proved to be a riveting read, especially for a modern feminist reader like myself.

Irene is interesting; despite the fact that she was raised within a polygamist family herself, she has a very modern sensibility about relationships, and this sensibility is evident early in her life. As a girl, she was courted by an atheist who loved her deeply, and who she loved, in turn. Their relationship was passionate, reciprocal, and physical. However, because of the polygamist dogma of her childhood, she takes a vague “feeling” that she should instead marry her half-sister’s husband and live “The Principle” as testimony to divine intervention. She turns her back on the prospect of a modern, loving, monogamous life and instead moves to Mexico to become the second wife of a man who will eventually have many more.

There’s an interesting tension here between Irene’s monogamous leanings and modern sensibilities, and her life as the de facto head of a massive household of women and children. Irene tells us over and over again of her budding sexuality and her desire to be loved, but her husband won’t sleep with her unless it’s for procreative purposes. Because he thus refuses to use birth control, this means that the poor woman has sex approximately once a year for their many years of marriage, and spends the ensuing time pregnant or nursing her thirteen children.

The narrative becomes stifling here, but really only as stifling as her life. At one point, Irene is offered an out when a farm hand falls in love with her and offers to take her, and her children, away from their impoverished life. As a reader, you can’t help but want her to take him up on this, but unfortunately, according to her religion, this would make her not only a fallen woman but a servant in her husband’s heaven for all eternity—so she says no.

It’s maddening, as is experiencing through her thirteen increasingly-dangerous pregnancies, which her doctor warns her against again and again. But rather than use birth control, her husband simply offers to stop sleeping with her, an impossible-to-consider reality for a love-starved woman. And so she risks her life (though she ultimately has her tubes tied, a choice that she knows will eternally damn her in the eyes of her religion) in order to remain obedient to her husband. Despite the fact that it risks her physical life, and despite the fact that her emotional and spiritual life is really no life at all.

Which gets to the meat of what I find interesting about these stories: this is the danger found not just in Mormon polygamy but in all orthodox religious traditions that place a woman’s value on her procreative capacities alone. This is the same attitude which has Hasidic Jewish women at the head of massive broods of babies, the attitude that has seen the Catholic Church only recently embracing condoms to stop the spread of AIDS despite thousands of lives lost. It’s fascinating, and it’s sad, but I think it’s important to think about the extent of the impact of these religious principles on the lives of women even today.

Irene’s story isn’t always perfectly written—she’s no prose master, and some of her anecdotes (one about her cluelessness about the popular music of the day particularly comes to mind) fall flat. But ultimately, this is a fascinating and worthwhile read about the ugliness of extremist religions and the impact they have on women.