The Female Line: A Perspective on Women's Equality and Economy in Communal Ascetic Life

This paper compares and contrasts Shaker communal life with the Oneida Community and the Hutterian Brethern. While each of these communities withdrew from the world to pursue its unique religious beliefs and engaged in a type of socialist economy, they differed in their norms governing relationships between men and women and in families within the context of communal life. Factors involved in each group’s survival, prosperity, and/or demise will be discussed. However, the primary focus of this paper is to understand why women joined religious communal societies, and to evaluate whether or not any of these groups offered women a better way of life or any real alternatives to the limited status and roles they occupied in the United States in the nineteenth century. The Shakers are unique among the three communities in that they alone were founded and led by a woman, and they believed in equality of the sexes. The Shakers, the Oneida Community, and the Hutterian Brethern were selected for this study for three reasons. They were religious communities. They lived according to the belief of having all things in common. They lived according to their varied understandings of God’s will governing familial and sexual relations.Master'sCollege of Arts and Sciences: Liberal StudiesUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/118037/1/Flemming.pd