Glendyne R. Wergland. Sisters in the Faith

Glendyne R. Wergland's main thesis is that, contrary to current scholarly consensus, Shaker women in the period under consideration (1792–1900) enjoyed a freedom from gender-based constraints that was unique in nineteenth-century American culture and was based on reverence for the female founder of the movement, celibacy, and leadership opportunities for women. To support this, she primarily uses unpublished manuscripts written by Shaker women, as well as material written by outside observers of the Shakers. Wergland first examines how the group's founder, Ann Lee, was an “empowering” role model for Shaker women (p. 44). Lee was the architect of a theology of an androgynous god and emphasized the practice of celibacy and joint male/female ecclesiastical government. Freed from the dangers of pregnancy and childbirth and liberated from the sometimes violent domestic world outside of the Shaker villages, Shaker women enjoyed a life that was “safe, peaceful, and predictable” (p. 56). Wergland uses the story of one of Lee's successors, Lucy Wright, and her short and apparently sexless marriage to Elizur Goodrich to illustrate why women found Shakerism attractive. Although Wergland argues that Wright's entry into Shakerism solved the problem of her marriage and eventually placed her in a position of seniority over her former husband, the author fails to account for the fact that joining the Shakers was Goodrich's idea. Wright decided to join only after he did so. Frequently, Wergland attempts to explain how practices that would appear to suggest female subjugation to men actually represent the opposite. Sometimes she is successful, but in places it seems that her argument is controlling her evidence. For example, Wergland devotes a chapter to discussing the case of the Shaker cap. According to tradition, Ann Lee introduced the practice of wearing this cap as a marker of female “virginity.” While Wergland does an excellent job of describing how sacred clothing functions as a boundary marker, she is less convincing in her assertion that the cap symbolized “women's self-government as a substitute for men's self-discipline” (p. 76).

Art history · Celibacy · Fifteenth · Political science · Reverence · Shaker · Sociology · Unison · Wright · Classics · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies