Mormon Apologist Historian Defends Joseph Smith’s Child Brides? Reddit Post Claims It Was ‘Normal’—But Is It True?
Apologists are at it again. A post on Reddit’s r/AskHistorians defends Joseph Smith’s marriage to 14-year-old Helen Mar Kimball, claiming it was ‘normal for the time’ and not as scandalous as critics suggest. The post, written by a user u/sowser, provides a detailed argument attempting to justify Smith’s actions using inaccurate historical norms and cultural relativism.
We’re sharing the apologist post in full so you can see their arguments for yourself. But don’t stop here—once you’ve read their take, check out our full rebuttal in the next blogpost that dismantles their claims with hard evidence, historical context, and a critical ethical lens. Spoiler: The truth is far more damning than they’d like you to believe.
Reddit Post:
Sorry I am not quite sure how to cross-post or if it is allowed. A user here u/Dwood15 submitted a question to the r/AskHistorians Reddit and received a really great answer from what I presume is a Non-Mormon.
Here is the question, then followed by the detailed reply. From what I gather from a non-Mormon historian looking at the evidence, he concludes Joseph's marriage to Helen Mar Kimball is not as scandalous given the historical evidence when it concerns her age. Warning: it is a very long and detailed answer.
Title of Question
Question Details
The Mormon prophet Joseph Smith, in his later life, married girls much younger than him.
Were there people from that era who called him out for it?
Was it common for older men to get called out or stigmatized for marrying girls in that 12–17-year age range?
u/sowser Answer
It was normal in the 19th century for men to be older than the women that they married, but it was still the case that women tended not to marry until they were in their 20s. It was only in the mid-20th century that it became the case that the average woman could expect to marry before her 20th birthday. Men would generally be older on the expectation that they were meant to be providers and heads of households for their spouses and so, accordingly, would need time to establish themselves financially or at least in the security of stable work before they were in a position to take a bride. For the vast majority of people, marriage was something that came in their 20s when they had already attained the legal age of adulthood, and not before. Although some of the age gaps that were socially acceptable might arouse concern in us today—there’s an average age gap of around 4 or 5 years between men and women—7 or 8 years would not have been too odd.
However, there were a significant minority of American men who married women who were below the age of majority—and this was not necessarily the taboo practice we now rightly recognize it to be. The concept of "child marriage" doesn’t seem to appear anywhere in American public discourse until the mid-to-late 1800s. There was no cultural understanding that it represented a distinct phenomenon different from regular marriage. In the 19th century, age was something of an ephemeral thing. Many ordinary people may not have known their exact age. While people understood there was such a thing as "childhood" and that children were more vulnerable than adults physically and emotionally, they also understood childhood and adolescence beyond the earliest years of life to be a state of mind or being more than a stage of life, and different individuals could mature into adulthood at different times.
Additionally, marriage in the 1800s was understood to be an unequal institution in which there was supposed to be a power imbalance heavily skewed in favor of the male partner. The idea of the female partner being younger and more impressionable was not the inherent negative we recognize it to be in our modern gender-equal societies today, and a young woman’s freedom to choose a marriage partner was largely dependent on the extent to which her parents and any prospective partner cared about her feelings in the matter. Many women had little to no choice, or only a very limited choice, in who they were married to. In the gender-unequal world of the 19th century, some parents saw arranging marriages for daughters at a young age as a means to "set them up" for the best possible life in terms of security and stability. Marriage itself was thought to have a morally sanctifying and uplifting impact on the people marrying each other also, which served to alleviate anxieties about one partner being young—the spiritually transformative impact of marriage would strengthen the virtue of the man and "mature" the woman.