Smith, Eliza Roxey Snow (1804–1887)

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Smith, Eliza Roxey Snow (1804–1887)

American poet and influential member of the early Mormon Church. Name variations: Eliza Roxey Snow; middle name sometimes spelled "Roxcy" or "Roxcey." Born Eliza Roxey Snow on January 21, 1804, in Becket, Berkshire County, Massachusetts; died on December 5, 1887, in Salt Lake City, Utah; daughter of Oliver Snow III (a farmer) and Rosetta Leonora (Pettibone) Snow; sister of Lorenzo Snow (president of the Mormon Church, 1898–1901); attended grammar school in Mantua, Ohio; became a plural wife of Joseph Smith (1805–1844, founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints), in June 1842 (died June 1844); became a plural wife of Brigham Young (1801–1877, leader of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints), in June 1849; no children.

Eliza Roxey Snow Smith was born in 1804, the second of seven children of deeply religious parents who were both descended from early Puritan settlers. Two years after her birth, the family moved from Massachusetts to a farm in Mantua, Ohio, where they quickly grew prosperous. When Eliza was still young, they left the Baptist Church for the Campbellite (or Reformed Baptist) Church. Eliza received her formal and domestic education at a local school and excelled in weaving; she also took her Bible studies very seriously. During her teen years, she began writing poetry, some of which was published in local journals, including the Ravenna Courier and the Ohio Star.

In 1831, Joseph Smith, founder of the newly established Mormon Church, visited the Snows' home. Joseph, as well as his views on religion, made a marked impression on Eliza and her family. Many Campbellites in Ohio converted to Mormonism around this time, and in 1835 Eliza's mother and sister did so as well. Shortly thereafter, Eliza accompanied them to the Mormon settlement in Kirtland, Ohio, and that April she was baptized into the church by Joseph Smith. Her brother Lorenzo Snow converted the following year; many years later, he would become president of the church. Toward the end of 1836, Eliza moved from her parents' home in Mantua to Joseph Smith's home in Kirtland, where she served as a governess to his children and a companion to his wife Emma Hale Smith . Contributions she made from her family's considerable funds helped erect the Mormon temple in Kirtland; she also conducted a school for girls. With many other Mormons from Kirtland, a few years later she moved to Jackson County, Missouri, which Joseph Smith thought would be fertile ground for his church. Locals were suspicious, however, and in the face of persecution the Mormons fled to Illinois, to recently secured land on the Mississippi. Here, in a town they named Nauvoo, the church enjoyed a measure of security and attracted thousands of new followers.

In 1841, Joseph Smith quietly introduced the concept of polygamy into the Mormon religion, although he would not offer it as a public "revelation" for over a year. In a secret ceremony that June, Eliza became one of his plural wives. (Some have estimated that he eventually had some 50 wives.) Intelligent and well educated for the time and place, Eliza Smith became an important member of Nauvoo society, and played a crucial part in establishing the role of women in the Mormon Church. She was a founding member of the charitable Women's Relief Society in 1842, and pioneered "temple work" that became part of the religion's permanent tradition. As word of the practice of polygamy spread, however, it gave further ammunition to the church's detractors. Smith was one of several women who publicly denied that they were involved in plural marriages, although this did nothing to quiet the controversy. Emma Hale Smith, as well, did not take kindly to the practice, despite a revelation through Joseph instructing her to welcome "all those that have been given unto" her husband. One story, perhaps apocryphal, has Emma attacking a pregnant Eliza in 1844 with sufficient force to cause her to miscarry. In June of that year, Joseph was arrested and jailed in nearby Carthage after ordering the destruction of the printing presses of a local newspaper that had charged him with adultery. On June 27, a mob broke into the jail and murdered both Joseph and his brother.

While the church became riven with factionalism in the aftermath of Joseph's death, Smith went to live in the family home of Brigham Young, who had inherited the position of church leader. In 1846–47, she was one of the thousands of Mormons who traveled west with him from Nauvoo to the Salt Lake Valley, where they settled. In 1849, she became one of Young's many plural wives. Six years later, he appointed her president of the Endowment House, where church work was carried out before the temples were built. Having continued to work with the Women's Relief Society in Utah, in 1866 she became the society's general president. In this post she directed the development of hygiene classes, a women's newspaper, numerous charitable projects, and cooperative stores that sold homemade Mormon goods. In 1882, she also oversaw the opening of the Deseret Hospital for women, the frontier community's first hospital, which was staffed with three women physicians. Smith traveled throughout Utah in connection with these projects, and remained president of the Relief Society until her death.

In 1869, Brigham Young gave Smith charge of the newly formed Young Ladies' Retrenchment Association, a group organized to fight a decline in societal behavior. Under her guidance, it evolved into the Young Ladies' Mutual Improvement Association, one of the main women's organizations in the church. In 1878, she organized and directed a meeting in defense of polygamy that was attended by 15,000 Mormon women. Smith was a dedicated advocate of the practice, and staunchly refuted critics of Mormonism who used it as an example of the subjugation of women by the church, pointing out that the territory had granted women the right to vote in 1870. In 1880, she was named president of Mormon women's organizations throughout the world. As well, she never gave up writing. Her work includes Poems, Religious, Historical and Political (1856 and 1877) and Biography and Family Record of Lorenzo Snow (1884), the life story of her brother, whom she had accompanied to Palestine on a missionary tour in 1872. She also wrote a number of hymns, the best known being "O My Father, Thou That Dwellest." Called the "mother of Mormonism," she died in Salt Lake City in December 1887.