A Mormon Mother Revisited: Obeisance/Obedience

My great-great-great aunt was a second wife in late-1800s polygamous Utah. Her autobiography first lived on my parents’ bookshelves and then migrated to mine. I read it once, as a teen, but otherwise, it’s been left to age quietly in the background.  

It feels like time to revisit.  

Down that family line, two generations became ensnared in polygamy. Two sisters, daughters of a polygamous marriage, married polygamously, and that was the end of it. Monogamy won. Only two generations ensnared in polygamy, and yet a long, long, long tail of effects.  

Growing up, polygamy was at once something that had to be explained away and also not talked about at all. It was difficult. It was confusing. It was always there, but never fully understood or explored, especially in public. Private conversations, most often with my dad, were one thing, but at church polygamy needed to be tied up a neat little bow and placed on the shelf labeled ‘Already Resolved Issues.’    

In my immediate family, Annie Clark Tanner, whose life story sat on our shelves, was admired because she publicly criticized polygamy in her autobiography.  That was the thing to be proud of, mainly. I used to wear that pride – that progressivism – easily. My family connections to polygamy wouldn’t bother me. They had been on the right side of things by the end of it. And, after all, it’s not something we do anymore.   

I think I’d rather be bothered, a bit.  

The book is a bit faded from sun exposure, but the binding still holds.  

I have to spend a minute on FamilySearch to remember exactly how I’m related to Annie. In typical Mormon fashion, there’s a solid 21 children to wade through between two marriages before I reaffirm that Annie Vilate Clark Tanner, daughter of Susan Leggett, the second wife of Ezra Thompson Clark, is the older sister to my direct ancestor Sarah Lavina Clark.  

Clark became my grandfather’s name and my son’s middle name. The roots reach further than you think they do. 

Annie writes in the chapter describing her childhood, “the principle of obedience dominated the teachings of my girlhood, whether it applied to the home, the State, or the Church” (2).1  

She alludes to her father perhaps being something of a harsh disciplinarian, particularly to her older siblings with his first wife, but also that she loved her father’s praise so much, she never wanted to disobey and therefore enjoyed a good relationship with her father.  

It hits differently today, that obeisance as obedience.  

I know that euphoric feeling, of being so good and knowing, deep down in your soul, that that goodness radiates and you don’t have to worry about a thing because it’s obedience that will keep you safe and well and loved.  

How much of being a Mormon woman is wrapped up in reaching for the approbation of the priesthood – the men – in our lives? How many of us have met the harsh disciplinarian in the friend, family member, or the church leader because we couldn’t take the obeisance/obedience any further without sacrificing something vital? 

Annie wrestled with this cognitive dissonance too.  

She both admired and struggled with an exacting mother, which she attributed to her mother’s origin as an English immigrant, while she was a born and raised American (we may be descended from colonizers on colonizers, but I do get a kick out of the idea that Annie wasn’t immune to the challenges of being a first generation American daughter with an immigrant parent).  

When Annie writes, “it seemed so serious to me that I did not always agree with my mother” (5), she’s representing all of us good girls who make obeisance/obedience their whole personality.      

She loved and respected her father, but notes that her value to him was that she had good manners, dressed well, and could help out when there were social events at the  main house. Her father may have asked her to pick out presents at the local ZCMI, but she also never chose anything without his approval. Several times in her stories about her childhood, she balances out the kindness of her father with the truth that she never tested the strength and endurance of that love.     

The dissonance grows when she describes the state of relationships between the two wives of this family, first claiming that all was well and then immediately describing all the ways in which this polygamous family was, in fact, not well.  

In particular, “Aunt Mary,” the first wife, had complete control of the allotment of monthly supplies to both families. Annie’s father wouldn’t intervene if his second wife told him she wasn’t being given enough, a choice which Annie attributes to her father’s desire to follow the example of Brigham Young.  

Annie writes she was welcome at the home of the first wife, and she was. They couldn’t play with the toys unless the first wife’s children were also playing, they couldn’t eat the apples from the orchard, and the chicken coop was always locked to them, but they were welcome.   

Although she spends a few pages defending Aunt Mary’s actions, Annie balances her defense by noting the difficulties facing her mother, who was often put in the position of begging at the door while her husband turned a blind eye to the situation. 

A family struggling to make polygamy work widens out the lens to the wider community, which operated under what Annie called authoritarian management. She writes, “if one had a surprise party, it was with the consent of the Bishop. Indeed, all public gatherings were under the direction of the Church authorities…” (18). 

I mean, can you imagine such an environment? Who would want to live like that? If we learn nothing from Brigham-Young-era Utah, perhaps it’s that we ought to be fighting very, very hard in our own time to avoid authoritarian government. But I digress.  

Here’s the childhood Annie that I am imagining: 

The second-oldest-and-oldest-daughter of 11 children, with 10 more half-sibling ahead of her, spread across two houses, lives with inequitable hierarchies at home and strict societal demands in her wider community, where religion and state boundaries are blurred enough to be rendered meaningless. She sees the inequities and the challenges of her home life and her community life, but she’s doing the best she can, because sometimes good things happen too. She really, really loves her family. She wants to know that God still loves her when she goes to sleep at night. She reads every edition of The Woman’s Exponent that comes to their home. 

I can hold love and grace for Annie, her mother Susan, and her Aunt Mary in this heightened environment of Obedience/Obeisance and Patriarchy.  

Is Annie’s childhood steeped in obedience really that different from my childhood, which took place in the era of Modesty and Patriarchy?  

There, too, obedience, hierarchy, inequity were at play.  

Annie’s religious leaders taught her “obedience is Heaven’s first law” and mine told me, “blessings bestowed by God are always predicated upon obedience to law.”2

And while I am not going to ever argue that the modesty push is the same as polygamy (polygamy is way worse, full stop), both issues are cut from the same Patriarchy cloth.  

Patriarchy tells us to push aside what we’re seeing, hearing, and feeling in favor of strict obedience. It says to make choices based on the idea that there will be some sort of heavenly reward that will make any and all sacrifices worth it. Patriarchy is all about looking for approval from others for our perfect obedience.   

For me, obedience was covering my shoulders and wearing knee length bottoms. For today’s youth, it’s probably going to be something temple-related. For Annie, it was embracing the Principle. 

When obedience demands that we stop listening to ourselves, that we relinquish our agency, that we lose the ability to critically question, that we look to others, typically those with patriarchal power (read: men), for approval, we get to the heart of what Annie is describing as a throughline in her childhood. 

I don’t know what Annie would think of her great-great-great-grandniece who wears pants and pride pins to church, openly critiques the poor effects of our church policies, and neither sustains nor dissents during those ceremonial sustaining exercises. She probably wouldn’t like my messy-middle boundary-grounded version of Mormon participation.  

Probably, I’m a bit too disobedient for her taste.  

 And yet, I’m someone who also wants to know that God still loves her and reads every edition of The Exponent ii that comes to her home.  

I have to hope that a part of Annie would understand why I don’t see the value in being an obedient and obeisant Mormon woman. She might understand why I couldn’t look away from the inequities and the injustices any  longer, no matter how safe that obedience bubble truly felt at times. It did feel so safe at times. But the rest of Annie’s story might show that obedience isn’t always exactly safe either.

Annie Clark Tanner’s A Mormon Mother published by Tanner Trust Fund University of Utah Library 1976 Russell M. Nelson “Endure and Be Lifted Up” April 1997 General Conference   

Book cover image via Wikimedia

Photo by Mikhail Pavstyuk on Unsplash