WHAT GRACE GREENWOOD THINKS OF THE MORMON WOMEN.

Tuapeka Times, Volume III, Issue 208, 25 January 1872, Page 7

WHAT GRACE GREENWOOD THINKS OF THE MORMON WOMEN.

From a letter in tlte "New York Times."

You hear a good deal about that " cross," from both Mormon husbands and wives, but you only see the shadow of it in the faces of the women. Ido not mean to intimate that they all •look decidedly unhappy. There is rather in their faces a quiet, baffling, negative, and abuegative expression, which certainly is far from happy content as it is as from desperate rebellion. Naturally, they are more alive to the outside pressure of public opinion, more sensible to the obloquy and ostracism which their position provokes, than men. Patient and passive as they seem, they feel these things keenly — the more intelligent among them, at least — and though upheld by a sincere aud devout faith in this strange delusion, they have towards strangers a peculiar air of reticence, of mit trust, almost of repulsion. IUo not wonder at it — their hospitality and confidence have often been abused ; they have been intruded upon by impertinent interviewers and their reluctant answers to persistent questions published abroad, with startling additions and dramatic embellishments. Those I have met appear to me, I must say, like good and gentle Christian women. They are singularly simple in dress, and modest in demeanor. What saddens «me is their air of extreme quietude, retirement, and repression. But for the children around them, you would think some of them were women who had done with this world. lam told that the wives of even the highest dignitaries show little pride in their lords. It were perhaps difficult to feel much pride in the sixteenth part of a man, as men go. Even the first wife of a wealthy saint betrays in her husband and household, they say, no exultant joy of possession. An investment in a Mormon heart and home must be rather uncertain stock for a woman. lam assured, though, that the second wife is seldom takrn without the full consent of the first. Not only are the poor women's religious faith and t zeal appealed to, but her magnanimity toward her sisterwoman out in the cold. It must be through great sufferiug that such heights of self-abnegation are reached. The crucifixion of the divine weakness of a loving woman's heart must be a severe process. But there is some sorry comfort in the thought that for these poor polygamous wives there is no wearing uncertainty, no feverish anxiety, that they are spared the bitterest pain of jealousy, the vasjue nightmare torture of suspicion, the grief and horror of a final discovery, the fierce sense of treachery and deception. They know the worst. Perhaps it is the " dead certainty " that gives them the peculiar cold, still look I have referred to. As to the Mormon men whom T have met, mostly leaders in the church, and prominent well-to-do citizens, I must say that they look remarkably care-free and even jolly under the cross. Virgil, I believe, has somewhere the expression, " O three and four times happy ! " Well, that is the way they look.