Description
Textbook: Ch. 11. “Gender.” (Cultural Anthropology book)
Other: Williams, Walter. 1986. “The Berdache Tradition” in The Spirit and the Flesh. Beacon Press. [Excerpted in Angeloni, E. 2019. Anthropology. McGraw Hill].
Textbook: Ch. 10. “Marriage, Family, and Domestic Groups.” (Cultural anthropology book)
Other: Dicou, Nicole. 2014. The Real Polygamous, Feminist Wives of Salt Lake City. The Atlantic. (Available in Course Content Folder Week 11).
Dreger, Alice. 2013. When Taking Multiple Husbands Makes Sense. The
Atlantic. (Available in Course Content Folder Week 11).
Goldstein, Melvin. When Brothers Share a Wife. 1987. Natural History.
March, pp. 39-48. [Excerpted in Angeloni, E. 2019. Anthropology. McGraw
Hill].
Ethnography: Ch. 6. “Fiorentinitá in a Post-Florentine Market.”
Textbook: Ch. 9. “Kinship.” (Cultural Anthropology)
Textbook: Ch. 12. “Religion.” (Cultural Anthropology)
Nanda, Serena, and Stephen Warms. 2019. Cultural Anthropology. Twelfth edition. ( This is the textbook its too big to add here)
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publishing. (Textbook – Print ISBN: 9781544368085, 1544368089; eText ISBN: 9781544368078, 1544368070) [Please note: We are using the 12th edition, not the 13th
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The Real Polygamous, Feminist Wives of Salt
Lake City
The stars of a new reality TV show want to show the world that a man can have an
egalitarian relationship with a wife—and a wife, and a wife, and a wife, and a wife.
By Natalie Dicou
Brady Williams (center) with his five wives and 24 children (TLC)
MARCH 8, 2014
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It’s among the most patriarchal domestic arrangements you can sign up for. In
polygamy, husbands are king.
But one polygamist family is insisting that it’s the exception. The Williams clan,
which lives outside Salt Lake City, comprises wives Paulie, Robyn, Rosemary, Nonie,
and Rhonda. There are 24 children. And, one other person … oh, right, husband
Brady. He’s a construction manager and philosophy major who’s currently enrolled in
a feminist theory course at a local college and who refuses to accept the title “head of
the household.” He doesn’t like the sexist connotation.
A one-hour special about the Williamses aired on TLC last fall, and the family’s new
9-part series, My Five Wives, is set to debut on Sunday. Earlier this week, the six
parents sat down for an interview.
When asked who among them identified as a “feminist,” six hands shot up as if
propelled by jack-in-the-box springs. For the wives, this brand of feminism involves
sleeping with their spouse only every fifth night, consulting their husband’s other
wives if they want to adopt a child, and—as Rosemary puts it—fighting their own
psyches to keep jealousy locked in a cage like the wild animal it is.
Brady insists that he’s about equality in his relationships. “And that can exist with
more than a man and a wife. That can exist with a man and a wife and a wife and a
wife and a wife and a wife.”
For the wives, this brand of feminism involves
sleeping with their spouse only every fifth night and
keeping jealousy locked in a cage like a wild animal.
Only, in TLC’s edit, Brady comes across as the center of everyone’s everything. In
Sunday’s episode, he must pull an unexpected all-nighter to finish a school paper. The
problem? It’s Robyn’s night with him. She was looking forward to her one-on-one
time, had circled it on her calendar, and is devastated when she learns she’ll have to
curl up alone yet again.
“When something likes this happens, we don’t change nights,” Brady tells the camera.
“The wife I’m with just has to deal with it.”
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As he leaves Robyn in the bedroom to go work at the kitchen table, he lamely tells
her, “You can come see me any time you want.” Translation: She’s free to come watch
him type. Dejected, she tells the camera in her soft, timid-sounding, polygamist-wife
voice that she and Brady now have to go 10 days without spending time as a couple.
Is this scenario anti-feminist, or is it simply what happens when one partner’s time
must be split to accommodate the needs of several others?
It helps to consider the family’s baseline. Eight years ago, the Williamses were
members of the Apostolic United Brethren, a fundamentalist Mormon sect that
presents plural marriage as the ticket to heaven. The church’s male-dominated
doctrines didn’t sit right with the evolving Williams parents who, over time,
concluded they didn’t want their kids to feel compelled to rack up spouses to please
God. They saw how men in the church ruled their families, favoring certain wives
over others—so they ditched their fundamentalist ways and went indie largely for the
sake of the kids.
“I think we kind of went from an exclusive viewpoint to an inclusive one,” Robyn
said. “Instead of thinking, ‘Only these people are accepted by God and can be
accepted by us and loved by us,’ we went to where it’s like, ‘there’s good people
everywhere.’ We wanted that whole world opened up to our kids.”
The Williamses teach their children that gender doesn’t determine a person’s value,
that girls can be anything boys can be, and that it’s okay to be gay — or even have
“multiple husbands,” Nonie noted — if that’s your jam.
“Whatever form marriage and family comes in, as long as it’s about love and
commitment, that’s okay,” Brady said. “Where no one’s a victim. Where no one’s
being compelled to be in it. Consenting adults who love each other should be able to
express that in a family setting.”
For monogamists who were raised in mainstream America, these are hardly
breakthrough ideas. But to the church they grew up with, the Williamses are radicals.
Either way, having left the Brethren, they’re now left to carve out their adult lives
within a family structure they adopted years ago. Polygamy, they all seem to agree, is
often lonely, jealousy-fueling, and downright maddening, but it’s the lifestyle they
choose. It’s not ideal, but they’re working with what they’ve got.
“We’ve had people ask us, ‘If you don’t believe you have to live this way, why would
you choose it?’” Robyn said. “But we’ve spent years building this family, and every
person in it makes it what it is, and why would we throw that away just because we
don’t believe we have to do it to go to heaven? If you’re happy and you’re in love, why
do something to destroy that just because society thinks you’re crazy?”
Natalie Dicou is a writer living in Salt Lake City, Utah.
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