(SevenDays, Vermont) In her decades of researching polygamy, Janet
Bennion, a professor of anthropology and sociology at Lyndon State
College, recalls three times she was “courted” by married women. One
wrote her “love letters.” Another took her to a restaurant “to determine
whether I was wifely material,” Bennion writes in her new book,
Polygamy in Primetime.
These women were devout members of fundamentalist Mormon sects, not
swingers. Like many examples in Bennion’s illuminating study, they defy
the popular perception that the practice of men taking multiple wives is
solely about the male libido.
Liberal Vermonters have cheered on the progress of marriage rights
this election season. But what would we say to a woman who sought to
unite herself in matrimony to a man and another woman?
