Welcome to New York, you and all your wives.
The women involved may be miserable, but they cannot risk complaining, since they can easily be divorced, kicked out of the community, and stranded. Because they are here illegally and their marriages are not valid in the United States (though they can serve as grounds for deportation of a polygamous husband), the women effectively have no rights. So they often put up with brutal conditions. Among other things, sharing a cramped New York apartment with 11 kids and another woman is far more likely to lead to, say, domestic violence than living in neighboring huts in a traditional village.
Where do they turn for help, these women?
social-service workers have learned not to make an issue of polygamy in handing out benefits and guiding applicants, legal and otherwise, through the bureaucratic mazes of the welfare system. Doctors at hospitals turn a blind eye.
The article makes the important point that polygamy is a threat to all of us --it's a good example of the sense in which marriage matters for the good of the community, not simply as a private expression of attachment.
those nine children, at least some of whom are American by birth — what do they learn of being free citizens in a democracy from the values they imbibe in this familial structure? The boys become autocrats; the girls become servants. They will never be free men and women, equal and responsible. It’s a longer argument for another day, but allowing this barbaric import to thrive in the U.S. will undermine all the advances that women have made in the past 150 years with regard to education, financial independence, and political and sexual equality. Polygamy, like slavery itself, cannot co-exist with true democracy.
