page_title: Zina D. H. Young
section_title: Marriages and children
hierarchical_section_title: Zina D. H. Young / Marriages and children
caption_attribution_description: English: Photograph of a painting depicting Zina Diantha Huntington Jacobs Smith Young an American social activist and religious leader who served as the third general president of the Relief Society of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) from 1888 until her death
context_page_description: Zina Diantha Huntington Young was an American social activist and religious leader who served as the third general president of the Relief Society of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from 1888 until her death. She practiced polyandry as the wife of Joseph Smith, and later Brigham Young, each of whom she married while she was still married to her first husband, Henry Jacobs.
  She is among the most well documented healers in LDS Church history, at one point performing hundreds of washing, anointing, and sealing healing rituals every year.
context_section_description: Zina recorded in her autobiography that when she was eighteen she was courted by Henry Bailey Jacobs. During this time, Joseph Smith, also taught her about plural marriage in private conversations; he proposed that she become his spiritual wife on at least three different occasions. Zina declined the proposals out of her respect for Emma Smith and for traditional Christian monogamy, and because such a union would require secrecy. On March 7, 1841, she married Jacobs, believing she had thus avoided future proposals from Smith. Nauvoo mayor John C. Bennett conducted the ceremony. Her journal from the day of the wedding reads: 
  I was Married to Mr. Henry Bailey Jacobs. He had been a missionary preaching the Gospel for some time. His Father Henry Jacobs was one of the first elders in the Church, faithful and true until the last.
  Zina became pregnant shortly after her marriage. However, she continued to feel concern that she had rejected God by rejecting Joseph, whom she considered a prophet and God's spokesperson. Later she recorded, "I received a testimony for myself from the Lord of this work, and that Joseph Smith was a prophet of God before I ever saw him, while I resided in the state of New York, given in answer to prayer. I knew him in his lifetime, and know him to have been a great true man and a servant of God." Smith wrote to her in October 1841 that he had "put it off till an angel with a drawn sword stood by me and told me if I did not establish that principle [plurality of wives] upon the earth I would lose my position and my life."  She and Smith were married on October 27, 1841.  Her brother Dimick performed the ceremony.  By that time, Joseph was married to five other women, besides his first wife Emma: Fanny Alger, Louisa Beaman, Lucinda Pendleton Morgan, Nancy Marinda Johnson Hyde, and Clarissa Reed Hancock.
  Zina was about seven months pregnant with a Jacobs's child (Zebulon William Jacobs), as confirmed by DNA evidence, when she married Smith. It is not clear when Jacobs was made aware of the wedding to Smith, however, he believed in Smith's prophetic counsel. Zina and Henry Jacobs continued to live together as man and wife, and Zina's "connubial relations with Joseph Smith, if any occurred at all, [were] certainly infrequent and irregular." She never had any children with Joseph, but she and Jacobs had another son, Henry Chariton Jacobs, on March 22, 1846. Her husband Henry was constantly called on missions (he served at least eight between 1839 and 1845) and was thus often absent from the house. In the face of such absences, Zina did not turn to Joseph but rather sought relief from female kin. Her marriage to Henry, riddled with absences as it was, was the only time in her life that she would have a full-time husband. Though many 19th and early 20th century Mormon biographers painted her marriage to Henry as "not proving a happy union" to justify her subsequent marriages to Smith and later to Brigham Young, evidence from her diaries suggests this assertion is unfounded.
  After Smith's death in 1844, Jacobs stood by while Zina was sealed to Smith in the Nauvoo Temple. Later in life, she called herself Joseph's "widow." Zina was present at the meeting at which Brigham Young was chosen to lead the church, after Young spoke with the voice and appearance of Smith. Because she believed him to be God's chosen leader, she consented when Young, 20 years her senior, claimed he acted as Smith's proxy, proposed they be married for time (as many other members of the Quorum of the Twelve did with Smith's other plural wives). They were married February 2, 1846, and at the same time she was re-sealed to Smith for eternity. At this point, Young and other church leaders considered her civil marriage to Jacobs canceled, superseded by the spiritual marriages, though no formal divorce was ever documented. In October 1861, Brigham would go on to assert, "There was another way—in which a woman could leave a man—if the woman preferred—another man higher in authority and he is willing to take her. And her husband gives her up—ther
caption: Painting of Zina Young by John Clawson
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