Daughter of the Saints: Growing Up in Polygamy

Summary (from the publisher): I am the daughter of my father's fourth plural wife, twenty-eighth of forty-eight children a middle kid, you might say." So begins this astonishing and poignant memoir of life in the family of Utah fundamentalist leader and naturopathic physician Rulon C. Allred. Since polygamy was abolished by manifesto in 1890, this is a story of secrecy and lies, of poverty and imprisonment and government raids. When raids threatened, the families were forced to scatter from their pastoral compound in Salt Lake City to the deserts of Mexico or the wilds of Montana. To follow the Lord's plan as dictated by the Principle, the human cost was huge. Eventually murder in its cruelest form entered when members of a rival fundamentalist group assassinated the author's father. Dorothy Solomon, monogamous herself, broke from the fundamentalist group because she yearned for equality and could not reconcile the laws of God (as practiced by polygamists) with the vastly different laws of the state. This poignant account chronicles her brave quest for personal identity.

 

Review: Author Dorothy Allred Solomon is one of forty-eight children born to her polygamous father and is descended from four generations of polygamy. In this work of non-fiction, she presents a family biography and also a memoir of her childhood and insights of growing up in a world where men where encouraged to take multiple wives.

 

As expected, Solomon shares some sad tales of poverty and violence from her childhood. Her siblings are forced to live on carrots for a month at a time and are hounded by federal authorities, which leads to the family being scattered, an unbearable stint of poverty in Mexico, and her father being imprisoned for a period of time. Indeed, her family became recognizable thanks to their family making the press; "Soon photos of my family dominated double pages of Life magazine" (161). 

 

Yet though Solomon has chosen to live a monogamous life and certainly portrays the negatives to polygamous lifestyles, she seems to work hard to portray an accurate portrait of her family. She seems very fond of her father, whose fault she seems to believe was in trying to get to everyone what they needed and thus spreading himself far, far too thin. Aside from poverty, the greatest sadness of the lives of his wives and children is that they never got enough personal attention from their patriarch, Rulon. When her father is shot and killed, the whole family mourned and her true affection for her father shines through this book, even as the author acknowledges his faults.

 

Particularly interesting to me were the sections where Solomon details her family history, including her Grandfather Harvey, who left detailed records of the period in his life when he chose to take a second wife, despite his first wife's anguish: "Her grief was something I will never forget and so great that I told her I would not cause her such sorrow" (99). Yet he ultimately did, spawning multiple generations of wives experiencing grief and sorrow as their husbands turned to more and more wives.

 

My greatest frustration with this book is that it seemed poorly organized. It jumps around in time and is lacks details on some major points. I wasn't sure in what time period the author was born until I looked her up, since it's never made clear. I also wasn't sure how Grandfather Harvey is related to her exactly - the details of her family tree seem murky at best, although that is partly understandable because of the breadth of each generation of her polygamous family tree. Other sections are just plain vague, summarizing large periods of the family by breezy sentences like, "Some sons were blessed and others disowned. Some daughters were greeted with a kiss, others with a reprimand. After the seeming conclusion of the book, it begins again with scattered stories the author wanted to include but which don't fit into the flow of the narrative at the beginning.  I know she had many family members to tackle, but as a reader, I felt as if this book would have benefitted from more firm editing and shaping of the narrative flow.

 

Stars: 3