Bigamists meet polygamists: Confronting the popular image of bigamists in Canadian society

In 1985, the Canadian Law Reform Commission recommended to keep both polygamy and bigamy as criminal offences. Its rational to still outlaw polygamy rested on the grounds that such an accommodation would support patriarchal religious practices denigrating women, while bigamy as a criminal offence had its roots in two fundamental institutions of Canadian society: marriage and the family. Two different crimes, but in the mind of the Canadian population they are often blurred.

The popular image of bigamists involve family men juggling two wives, a few children, and two homes, each family not knowing of the existence of the other. If we do not imagine this kind of “double life”, at the very least, the first impulse is to picture a male villain, a scoundrel. This hardly corresponds to the reality. A systematic study of bigamy cases brought to legal authorities in a number of Canadian local jurisdictions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries reveals that very few of the prosecuted bigamists led a “double life”.