Polygamy Polygamy has survived for hundreds of years in the United States of America. It first started when people were settling in the west. Polygamy is when one man is married to more than one wife. In some cases a woman can be married to more than one man, but this is very rare. It is called polyandry. Polygamy started in the west because there were much more women than men. The women had no …showed first 75 words of 288 total…

…showed last 75 words of 288 total…polygamy in Utah. Utah would have become a state much earlier if polygamy had not been so common there. In nineteenth-century Utah about twenty to twenty-five percent of Mormons practiced polygamy. Arizona has been the site of many polygamous demonstrations and a famous raid in 1953. In 1953 law enforcement raided a polygamous community at Short Creek, Arizona. This big raid took two hundred sixty three kids away from their mothers and put them in foster care.