Plural Wife

This autobiography is slated as volume 13 in USU Press's Life Writings of Frontier Women series. The frontiers that Mabel Finlayson Allred experienced were social and religious more than geographical, but it could be fairly said that she lived much of her life on the edgeon the borders of the religion in which she believed, of the social propriety agreed on by most of her fellow citizens, of the law that threatened her and her family, and of the domestic tranquility, economic and otherwise, that she clearly longed for. Mabel Finlayson was one of the several wives of Rulon Allred, who was leader of the Apostolic United Brethren and was murdered in 1977 on the orders of the leader of a different sect. Allred's group and the FLDS, recently led by Warren Jeffs, are the two largest organized groups of those fundamentalist Mormons who since about the 1930s have practiced polygyny, or polygamy, as separatists from the mainstream Latter-day Saints Church. In a remarkably cheerful voice, Mabel Allred gives an insider's look at the growth of, and her life in, the fundamentalist polygamist movement.