[MikeWaters]

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/e...rce_work_.html

Polygamous divorce was a somewhat simpler affair among 19th-century Mormons. Church leaders released women from their marriages regularly, and sometimes even granted them the family cow or a sum of money to help them in their new lives. Divorce wasn’t strongly stigmatized in the culture. Ex-wives remarried, often into other polygamous families. In fact, Utah divorce laws were so lax in the early 1870s that people traveled from faraway states just to dissolve their marriages.

Explainer thanks Adrienne Davis of Washington University in St. Louis, Kathryn Daynes of Brigham Young University, author of More Wives Than One: Transformation of the Mormon Marriage System, 1840-1910, and Rodney R. Parker of Snow, Christensen, and Martineau.