FLDS Rules for Women's Roles

FLDS Rules for Women's Roles describes a system in which religious authority and family life are organized around male control. Men alone hold the priesthood and positions of ecclesiastical authority, including the office of prophet; women are expected to serve their husbands, have children, and raise them as obedient members of the faith. In the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, these expectations were reinforced by prophetic control over marriage and family membership, making obedience not simply a spiritual ideal but a rule governing women’s lives.

Religious Authority and Gender

The rules belong to a broader patriarchal structure that the book says exists in both the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. In both, only men enter the priesthood and hold ecclesiastical office, and only prophets may receive revelations directing the faithful. Those revelations could govern conduct down to the design of sacred undergarments worn at all times. The fundamentalist community, however, carried ideas of obedience, control, and distinct roles for men and women to a greater extreme.

Within that structure, questioning religious authorities was treated as an act that undermined faith, rather than as a legitimate challenge to their decisions. The ideal of obedience thus helped protect the prophet’s authority from dissent. Women’s assigned responsibilities were correspondingly specific: serving husbands, bearing as many children as possible, and raising those children to be obedient members of the religion. The evidence presents these expectations as part of a system in which women were assigned duties but excluded from the offices that defined religious authority.

Marriage and the Household

Plural marriage placed women within family arrangements authorized by male leaders. The example of Debbie Palmer shows how prophetic approval could determine the course of a marriage at a young age. At fourteen, Debbie believed she had received an impression from the Lord to marry Ray Blackmore, the community leader. She asked her father to convey that impression to LeRoy Johnson, the prophet, who approved the match. A year later, LeRoy Johnson married her to Blackmore, then fifty-seven, as his sixth wife. Debbie became a stepmother to Blackmore’s thirty-one children, most older than she was. Because Blackmore was also the father of Debbie’s stepmother, she became her stepmother’s stepmother and, in the book’s formulation, her own stepgrandmother.

Rulon Jeffs’s household illustrates the scale of plural marriage under prophetic leadership. He had an estimated seventy-five wives and at least sixty-five children; several wives were married to him when they were fourteen or fifteen, while he was in his eighties. His sermons emphasized submission and presented obedience as the path to freedom and faith. In practice, this ideal coexisted with arrangements in which a prophet could authorize marriages and women’s domestic lives were shaped by decisions made above them.

Civil Law and Religious Marriage

The community’s marriage arrangements also operated across competing systems of authority. Polygamy was illegal in Utah and Arizona, so men typically entered a legal marriage only with their first wife. Other wives were considered spiritually married by the prophet but remained unmarried in the eyes of the state, and therefore legally appeared as single mothers. That status could qualify large families for welfare and other public assistance. The religious community’s recognition of a marriage and the state’s legal recognition did not coincide; women’s family status could differ according to which authority was being applied.

This gap sat within a larger conflict over who had the right to govern the household. Members asserted a right to practice their religion without government interference, while polygamy remained a crime in every U.S. state and in Canada. The rules around marriage therefore did more than define a religious relationship: they affected women’s legal status and their families’ access to public support, even as the community portrayed outside government as hostile to its faith.

Control, Dissent, and Family Separation

Prophetic authority could extend beyond the formation of a household to claims over its members. According to United Effort Plan doctrine, wives did not belong to their husbands and children did not belong to their parents; the priesthood could claim them. When DeLoy Bateman failed to attend a weekly priesthood meeting after deciding to leave the faith, Rulon Jeffs sent someone to his home within twenty-four hours to take away his wives and children, decreeing that they should be given to another man. Both wives refused to leave DeLoy. They and all but the three oldest children became apostates as well. Their refusal shows that women were not merely objects of the rules: in this instance, the wives’ decision directly defied the prophet’s order, despite the consequences attached to leaving the community.

The rules also operated within an environment that restricted access to outside information and relationships. Members were forbidden to watch television or read newspapers and magazines, and residents were prohibited from contact with people outside the United Effort Plan, including relatives who had left the religion. These restrictions were not described as women-only requirements, but they formed part of the same system of communal control in which religious leaders defined acceptable conduct, relationships, and family loyalties.

Significance

Taken together, the rules joined spiritual hierarchy to household organization. Male-only priesthood established who could define religious obligations; prophetic authority shaped marriage; and claims over wives and children could make family membership contingent on obedience. The contrast between Debbie Palmer’s marriage, arranged through prophetic approval, and DeLoy Bateman’s wives’ refusal to be reassigned reveals both the reach of that authority and the possibility of resistance within it. Women’s roles were prescribed in the language of faith and family, while the evidence also shows how those prescriptions could determine personal choices, legal status, and whether a household remained together.