Review
Title: Let’s Talk About Polygamy
Author: Brittany Chapman Nash
Publisher: Deseret book
Genre: History
Year Published: 2021
Number of Pages: 144
ISBN: 9781629728230
Price: 11.99
Reviewed by Erin Cowles
Back in 2006, I had my first major faith crisis, centered around the position of women in my religion, past and present. I particularly was grappling with polygamy in our history. As I was wrestling with this, I had a life-altering flash of revelation – for all my angst about it, I had never once in my life read what one of these women had to say about her experiences or her life. In fact, if you asked me to come up with the names of five of them, I couldn’t do it. I realized that if I was going to experience angst, I should have a better understanding of what I had angst about, and whom I was feeling it on behalf of.
My journey to learn about these women was a wild ride, let me tell you. Let’s just say books like this didn’t exist back then, and most of the people writing about it at the time had an axe to grind. I basically pieced together my understanding of this practice one woman’s story at a time, gathering history books and article collections through interlibrary loan, reading old Utah women’s newspapers, reading people’s family history stories, any little scrap I could get my hands on in a small college town in Indiana. I saw all kinds of good, bad, and really ugly things connected to the experience. Shockingly, these women’s stories were exactly what I needed to learn how to deal with spiritual complexity in my own life. I found surprisingly empowered, imminently capable, and articulate women, learning to navigate messy and painful questions of faith, and creating lives of beauty and purpose despite all the unknown and the sorrow. These complicated women spoke to me in a way that the picture-perfect angel mother ideal never did.
I’m so happy that when this generation of women come up against the same questions I did, they have someone as wise and frank as Brittany Chapman Nash to guide them through. I would have benefitted so much from a framework to move within as I went on my journey, as well as a model for a faithful person who knew the history inside and out and came out the other end with a stronger testimony.
This book is succinct and well-organized; it shoves nothing under the rug to make the church look better, nor does it have an axe to grind; it is primary-source heavy and lets women share their own experiences as much as possible; it highlights the surprising diversity of experiences women had connected to the practice, providing counterexamples to many of the stories told; it has confidence in the reader’s ability to make their own decisions about this very complicated history; and I love the respect she feels for the strength of these women as they lived their faith to the best of their ability.
Highly recommended to anyone that wants a deeper understanding of what actually went down in the early church.