Beautiful Isles: Mormons, Polygamy, and Exile in the South Pacific

In 1882, the Edmunds Act declared the practice of polygamy a felony. Between 1884 and 1895, over nine hundred Mormons were convicted of charges ranging from adultery to incest. An additional two hundred and fifty men left on missions every year, hoping to escape prosecution, and hundreds more lived in hiding. As a result of federal prosecution, thousands of Mormon families were torn apart as women denied their husbands and claimed to have no idea who had fathered their children. Those who had been left behind as husbands fled the law were forced to manage their farms and business interests. The emphasis of Mormon theology on the family made it even more difficult for Mormon men and women. Mormon theology expanded and deified the family, promising that husbands and wives would be sealed together for eternity and would propagate “their species,” creating numberless “intelligent, immortal beings.”
In this paper, I explore the attempts of Mormon men and women to re-establish domesticity in Hawai’i. Although many Mormon men were forced to abandon their wives to become missionaries, those who traveled to Hawai’i were allowed to take one of their wives with them. As a result, Hawai’i became where Mormon men and women could recreate a domesticity that had temporarily disrupted. The domesticity they created, however, was complicated. Although the Mormon men and women who served as missionaries remained thoroughly committed to polygamy, they lived monogamously. The result of this decision was that the domesticity that white Mormon missionaries families modeled in Hawai’i was not the one that they advocated in Utah. This paper explores the intimate dynamics of life in nineteenth-century Mormon Hawai’i to understand how these tensions manifested themselves in the day-to-day experiences of both indigenous and white men and women living in the communities the church established.