May 14, 2007
R
aised in a polygamous home, Spencer was barely 16 when she married her sister's husband, a young Mormon who went on to marry eight more women. Since the Church of Latter-Day Saints renounced polygamy in 1904, these fundamentalist Mormons had to keep their practice covert. Spencer's husband's family moved to a remote part of Mexico to build a community, but familial insanity and grinding poverty kept them moving from place to place. Spencer was willing to work hard and was willing to do without decent clothing or food—but she couldn't stand limited access to her husband's affections. Their sect proscribed all but procreational sex, and since she was constantly pregnant or nursing, she never seemed to have much sex with her husband. Finally, after 28 years of marriage and bearing 13 children, she knew that although she loved her husband, she had to leave him. She moved to Alaska, where she became a born-again Christian with a monogamous husband. Spencer's story has everything—a strangely complicated religious sect, a plucky heroine, a conflicted but good-hearted man and even a reasonably happy ending.