An Elect Lady (to Her Husband)

Why I kind of hate Joseph Smith's "elect lady" revelation to his wife

In the LDS book of scripture known as the Doctrine and Covenants, there are only two women mentioned by name: Emma Hale Smith and Vienna Jaques. Vienna was a wealthy convert commanded to give her money to the church (D&C 90: 28-31). Emma was the prophet Joseph Smith’s first wife and an important witness to the founding of the church.

Emma’s inclusions in the Doctrine and Covenants are bookends to the early LDS church story. In D&C 25, she is called an elect lady; in D&C 132 she is threatened with destruction for not supporting her husband’s polygamy.

This month, LDS congregations across the world will discuss D&C 25 and the famous “elect lady” revelation. Having sat through a lifetime of discussing these verses, I know well what most of those lessons will contain. A few words on Emma, claps for the bread crumbs offered to women in Mormonism, excitement over a book of hymns, and ultimately, praise for Joseph for being nice enough to talk about his wife once.

Just the thought of sitting through it another time makes me want to vomit. I can’t stand by anymore and choke down the faux lessons on Emma and the brief nods she gets in a male-absorbed church curriculum. I can’t stomach how her story has been stripped down to almost nothing, until this remarkably complex women is only a silent wife of a worshiped man.

As a church, we do not recognize or understand the full depth of Emma. We only discuss her as an appendage to her husband’s prophet-story. We fail to see her as her own person. Church curriculum views her only through a faith-promoting lens that oversimplifies a complicated woman and a difficult church history. When we whitewash her lived experiences, we are only seeking to make ourselves feel better about a murky past that proves prophets are fallible in enormous ways.

Portrait of Emma Hale Smith

Joseph dictated D&C 25 in the summer of 1830 while they were living in Harmony, Pennsylvania. Emma’s early married life had been one of upheaval and difficulty. Her parents hated her choice of spouse and she’d already lost one baby. The hoopla around her husband and his gold bible caused contention and even threats. Undoubtably, this was a strenuous period for Emma. It seems this recorded revelation came from a good place: her husband wishing to help her in time of need.

I personally find the 16 verses to be a mixed bag. Some parts are beautiful and I like to hope they were a great comfort to Emma. Others, however, raise my blood pressure.

Emma’s groundbreaking biographers, Linda King Newell and Valeen Tippetts Avery, suggest that Emma believed this was a communication from God and that it probably brought her needed peace (Mormon Enigma: Emma Hale Smith, 32). However, we have no actual records of her personal feelings.

The assurance that her “sins are forgiven thee” would be comforting for a Christian woman trying to understand her own place in God’s kingdom (D&C 25: 3). I remember as a Mormon girl wishing and praying over and over for this same assurance. If I could only get a confirmation that I was good enough for God, then maybe I could hang on a little longer in a church that demanded my perfection for acceptance and eventual salvation.

“Thou shalt be ordained under [Joseph’s] hand to expound scriptures, and to exhort the church,” is a huge promise (D&C 25: 7). Ordination under the hand of a prophet suggests a literal calling of authority; one that was (and still is not) given to women. Today only one man is allowed to exhort the church and that’s the prophet/president. The idea that a woman would be ordained to teach the church is notable. However, I’ve never sat in a Sunday school where members talk about Emma being given priesthood ordination to preach to the church. Instead, we gloss over it or suggest that it means she would do “womanly” callings in the church. Heaven forbid we think about the possibility that Emma might hold a real position of authority in the early church.

In fairness though, we probably rationalize it that way because Joseph ultimately did. Any time Emma gained too much control, he sought to rein it in. The woman’s Relief Society was Emma’s organization with her as the ordained president. But Joseph quickly realized he’d made a mistake giving her that power. She used the Relief Society to root out Joseph’s secret wives and publicly speak against polygamy, which was still being practiced by only select men in Joseph’s inner circle without public knowledge. He condemned the Relief Society as the cause of all his troubles and fought with Emma over the organization’s activities (Joseph Smith Papers, Journal of Discourses, May 26, 1844).

So perhaps in a most faithful reading of D&C 25, God meant Emma to be a leader in the church, but the men around her—especially her husband—held her back from that full potential. How tragic indeed.

A surviving edition of Emma’s first hymnbook, 1835

D&C 25 is best known for the commandment for Emma to compile the first hymnbook for the young church. Newell and Avery point out that this was perfectly suited to Emma’s talents and interests: she “sang as she worked and sang when she worshiped; compiling a hymnal would be a pleasure” (Mormon Enigma, 34).

I know many LDS members (myself included) resonate with this famous verse: “For my soul delighteth in the song of the heart; yea, the song of the righteous is a prayer unto me, and it shall be answered with a blessing upon their heads” (D&C 25: 12). Music is a powerful part of spiritual worship and ritual. I personally feel most connected to a higher power and humanity when I hear music of all kinds. I hope that when Sunday schools discuss this verse we include the personal joy Emma had in music and that this calling was not simply because she was a woman (I’ve heard that eye-rolling explanation too many times). That might seem like a small detail but every piece rebuilds the true woman that Emma was, not just the dutiful, one-dimensional wife we usually paint her as.

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But now we have to talk about the blood-pressure-rising parts of this scripture. The parts that scream at me now, so much so they can taint the entire thing.

At the end of the day, this revelation serves one major purpose in my eyes: to bring Emma to heel under her husband. Whether you personally believe these are the direct words of God or simply the words of Joseph, patriarchy and control run through them like a live wire.

Emma is first told to “murmur not because of the things which thou hast not seen” (D&C 25: 4). Newell and Avery echo the commonly held sentiment that this was a reference to the plates, the “gold bible” Joseph dug out of a hill and translated into the Book of Mormon (Mormon Enigma, 33). Emma never saw the plates. According to some testimony, she hefted them while they were covered so she could clean, but she never once saw them. Eleven men were eventually called as official witnesses to the plates, who signed a prepared statement that they saw and handled them. But Emma—Joseph’s faithful wife—never got to see them.

I do not blame her one bit for “murmuring.” She built her entire life on her husband’s gold plates and sacrificed so much—including her own child—to his protection because of them. I see much less of God in this command and more of Joseph. I have a hard time imagining a loving God that would deny such a faithful woman (and potential incredibly powerful witness) the right to see the plates. This is especially painful when realizing that Emma served as Joseph’s scribe for long sections of translation, but Joseph’s other scribes all got to see the plates.

What makes matters worse is that Emma’s complaints were ammunition for later condemnation by Brigham Young. Maybe present-day members don’t realize that for many decades, Emma Smith was a villain in the Mormon origin story. Brigham and Emma fought hard over the legacy of the church after Joseph died. Emma believed (and some witness accounts collaborate) that the church belonged with the Smith family and her eldest son. After all, the church was literally her family business. It was the inheritance both spiritually and financially of her children. Brigham argued it belonged to the brethren, and he ultimately succeeded in controlling the main body of Saints and leading them out of Nauvoo and on to Utah territory.

Brigham continued to slander Emma for years and as a result, many Mormons condemned Emma for her “faithlessness” in not coming west or “obeying the prophet” after her husband died. It wasn’t until the late 20th century that LDS historians reclaimed Emma and her story. Though I doubt members would openly hate on Emma these days, I still hear echoes of that judgment in talks and discussions: that Emma should have just come to Utah. Perhaps they don’t realize that would have probably meant marrying Brigham (or Heber, ugh) and living as a plural wife to a man she hated after fighting polygamy for years. They condemn without context or care for who Emma was as a person or what choices she had.

Image “Purgatory: Joseph, Emma, and the Revelation on Plural Marriage” by Anthony Sweat

What I struggle with the most in D&C 25, is Emma’s “calling” to her husband. On the surface, it sounds sweet: be a comfort, console him, go with him. But if this is a direct message from God—the only one she formally received—it seems God cares more about Joseph than her as an individual person. She’s told to “delight in [her] husband, and the glory which shall come upon him” (D&C 25: 14). Glory for him. She must delight in him in order for him to get his glory, but he has no reciprocal requirement for her.

Joseph is distinctly placed throughout this revelation as the center of Emma’s life. Why are his needs, his wants, his sorrows, his glory the main goals of their marriage? What does Emma want from her life? Being a wife and mother was no doubt part of her life plan as a 19th century woman, but did she have any secret dreams? Longings of her soul that only God would know? Once again in Mormonism a wife is an object, a thing to be used.

This hurts my heart because I was groomed along the same lines as a Mormon woman. I went through the primary, Young Women, and Relief Society lessons where I was taught to build my entire world around my husband and children. Those little hopes and dreams always must come second to being a good wife and mother. I’ve been told in direct and indirect ways that men—especially men with priesthood authority—simply matter more than me.

We sit in our Sunday school classrooms with their scratchy, carpeted walls and metal folding chairs and praise Emma for being a good wife to Joseph. We extol her virtues as an object to be used by a prophet to build what he wanted in a church, family, and legacy. But we never stop to wonder what Emma thought of any of this. We never take into the account the later records of fights, anger, and sadness over his betrayals. Instead, we focus in on her role as an appendage to Joseph. We never let her speak beyond a handful of faith-affirming quotes in our church materials. The real Emma never takes shape for us, only an outline of a woman that lived and breathed for a man.

Worst of all, we completely ignore the real horrors of D&C 132 (the revelation on plural marriage). D&C 132 contains literal threats of Emma’s destruction, ones that were only hinted at in section 25 (D&C 132: 54). We gloss right over Emma’s very real pain over her husband’s lies and manipulations to take on more wives who were often decades younger than him. We say Emma “struggled” but never actually look at the depths of her sorrow and story. That’s probably because it would torture us to be honest about it. It would force us to see that Joseph Smith the beloved prophet was a very flawed man. So Emma must be quiet, her lived experiences gussied up with a big bow or swept under the rug entirely so we won’t have to stare down the reality that plural marriage was a travesty that no loving God would force on Their daughters.

That is the heart of, isn’t it? If we look too closely at Emma and her life, at her real complexities and struggles, then we’ll quickly see Joseph’s wrongs. And Joseph can never be wrong.

So Emma does exactly what she as told in 1830: she gives her life for Joseph’s. She is swallowed up in Joseph so he can be glorified. Emma is nothing but a means to an end, just like so many women in our history.

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If I attend Sunday school in the coming weeks, I will probably cry or silently rage text my husband as Emma is erased again before my eyes. Little lessons will be pulled from the verses and no one will question why every thing in the Doctrine & Covenants must be sucked back to Joseph Smith and his praise like a black hole. Why Emma isn’t even allowed to have one, tiny revelation from God all about herself as a unique human being with wants and desires outside of her husband’s job. Or why it is that the church continues to tell women that they are required to make enormous sacrifices for God’s kingdom that aren’t equally required of men.

If this is the measure of being an elect lady, then perhaps I’d prefer to never be called one.