Until the U.S. government got wind of it, the sharpest critic of the Mormon practice of polygamy was Joseph Smith’s legal wife, Emma. But as Laurel Thatcher Ulrich explains in A HOUSE FULL OF FEMALES: PLURAL MARRIAGE AND WOMEN’S RIGHTS IN EARLY MORMONISM, 1835–1870 (Knopf, $35), a lot of Latter-day Saints didn’t cotton to the idea at first — not even Joseph.

John Taylor said it made his flesh crawl. Lucy Walker compared it to “a thunderbolt” and said every feeling of her soul “revolted against it.” Brigham Young claimed it was the…