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Women and Mothers
"Thinking to give the Prophet some light on home management, I said to him, Brother Joseph, my wife does more hard work than does your wife. Brother Joseph replied by telling me that if a man cannot learn in this life to appreciate a wife and do his duty by her, in properly taking care of her, he need not expect to be given one in the hereafter. His words shut my mouth as tight as a clam. I took them as terrible reproof. After that I tried to do better by the good wife I had and tried to lighten her labors."
This advice by the Prophet to a misguided follower was in part a consequence of all he had seen Mormon women, including his wife and his mother, endure over the past ten years. And yet as he gave this advice, Joseph well knew how difficult it would be to make life easier for the sister Saints for many years to come.
The founding mothers of Nauvoo had suffered considerable persecution and hardships before establishing their crude homes on the flats of Nauvoo. Many of them had been driven from or burned out of their homes two or three times in the last five years, each time losing what little they had gathered since the last mobbing. Joseph's own wife and his aged parents had been driven most recently from their homes in Far West, Missouri, and in the winter of 1838-39, they walked most of the distance across the state and crossed the Mississippi River to sanctuary in Illinois. Seven years later, after building up the new city of Nauvoo, making homes for their families, sending husbands, brothers, and sons away on missions, and building a temple that cost a million dollars, the Saints were again forced from their homes and driven into an unknown and dangerous wilderness to build their lives and homes all over again.
All their hardships did not deter these courageous sisters from reaching out to help those even more unfortunate. Many individual acts of charity highlight those seven short and trouble-filled years in Nauvoo. Children orphaned by Missouri mobbers were adopted, education provided for children of destitute families, goods shared with the families of brethren called to distant missions, the aged and feeble cared for, and the poor given useful employment.
In some ways Nauvoo was unlike other cities in the old Northwest Territory. Frontier communities almost invariably had twenty to sixty percent more males than females between the ages of twenty and thirty years. Nauvoo had almost equal numbers of women and men. This factor influenced the orientation toward family in Nauvoo and created both problems and advantages found in eastern communities. For example, schooling was a more pressing concern in a community with more families, especially in light of the Mormon emphasis on education.
In other frontier communities, the ratio of children under five years to women between fifteen and forty-five years of age was one child for every two women. In Nauvoo the ratio was one to one.