1900-01-20-New York Tribune-A Deaconess Out in Utah

"New York Tribune, 20 January 1900, p. 7, c. 2

A Deaconess Out in Utah

Her Work Described for St. George's Parishoners.

Interesting Talk by Dr. S. J. Elliott in Mrs. Schirmer's Drawing Room—Some, but not all, Mormon women satisfied with Polygamy.

A large audience of women, many of whom were from St. George's Parish, filled the drawing room of Mrs. Rudolph E. Schirmer, at No. 243 East Seventeenth-st., yesterday afternoon, to listen to a talk by Dr. S. J. Elliott, deaconess of the Protestant Episcopal Diocese of Salt Lake, Utah, on "Conditions in Utah."

Dr. Rainsford preceded Dr. Elliott with some remarks on the work of the deaconesses of the Episcopal Church and of the growth of the order.

Dr. Elliott began by reviewing her work as a deaconess and the causes that led to her location in Utah. While in Johnstown, Penn., in 1889, she said, just after the great flood, she read an article by Dr. Rainsford upon the scope of the work of the deaconesses of the Episcopal Church. She wrote in reply to Dr. Rainsford, "Do you mean all that your article implies, or is it a literary effort?" She received a telegram in response from him asking her to come to New-York. When she met him she told him that she was not willing to take any vows or to work for any man, but she was willing to work with any man.

As a result she became a deaconess of his parish and for several years devoted her time to work among the poor people of the East Side. When she broke down from overexertion she went to Utah to recuperate, "without," as she quaintly put it, "any notion of staying there. I wanted to be in the thickest of the fight—not poked off into some little Western town."

After an invalidism of one year Dr. Elliott visited the little Mormon settlement of Moab, which had a population of about three hundred people, and she has lived there for the last seven years. Her work there was described in The Tribune of January 8.

In the course of her talk she said that fifty years of Mormonism has bred a race of, abnormally patient women. As the only physician in the county, she has committed great numbers of women to the insane asylum, and among them the majority have been first wives.

The older women who came to Utah, she explained, did not understand before their arrival about plural marriages, and while they submitted to seeing other wives come in they were never reconciled to the custom, and many of them became insane as a result.

The Mormon woman of to-day was educated to believe in bigamy, and she expects no lovemaking and no wooing. When a man calls upon her and says, "The president says I must marry you, and I guess we will go to the temple to-morrow," she replies indifferently, "I will walk to the temple with you," or else says, "I have promised to walk to the temple with another man."

A woman came to Dr. Elliott one day and said: "I want you to go to the temple with my husband. It is your only chance of getting into heaven." She told another woman of it, and the latter replied: "Oh, don't marry him. He's not half so nice as my husband. Take him." Instead of adding an extension and putting in another front door, as formerly, the speaker said, separate houses for the different wives are now built "Evidently," she said, "the husband got tired of trying to get along with half a dozen wives under one roof. They are even scattered over whole counties now."

The children, said Dr. Elliott, have plenty of food and fresh air, and are wholesome looking. She finds a great deal of nervous trouble among them, however. The women of Utah are capable and keen, because all the household burdens fall upon them. The homes are fatherless. Hundreds of men who are not polygamists will not abjure the Church, because such a course would seem to throw discredit on their mothers.

A telegram came to Dr. Elliott yesterday, stating that a manifesto was on the way to Washington in the care of three men, saying that the Mormon Church does not approve of Mr Roberts.