Doug Winiarski

So did her earliest English followers.

But remember, the shakers are breaking apart families.

So that is to say, when husbands and wives join the shakers, they have to dissolve their marriage, essentially.

They don't get divorced.

They just simply live together as separate brothers and sisters.

But in situations where one but not both of a couple joins the shakers, that's where a lot of legal troubles come in.

So there are a fair number of Shaker divorce cases, many of them are very acrimonious, in which, for example, a husband would join the Shakers and leave the wife behind and then take all of his family's assets with them.

It results in a series of legal battles that result in some very stiff state laws.

that target the shakers in which legislatures attempt to create avenues for women who have been abandoned by their husbands who have joined a celibate religious group like the shakers to deem back their legal rights that they wouldn't have otherwise as married women, rights over child custody, rights over control of property.

And those laws directly attack the shakers.

So the shakers are one of the few religious groups in the United States, including the more, and I

We could put the Mormons in that same area that experience legal action by state legislatures that directly targets their particular and peculiar faith practices.

One of the things that happens after the American Revolution in the generations that follow in the early United States of the 19th century, as the United States expands by dispossessing Native Americans and urbanizes and industrializes, is that people feel certain atomization of their lives.

They feel suddenly that the things that in the colonial era, that farm family is sort of falling apart.

And so one of the ironies is that all of these white hot seekers who have stepped out of their inherited religious traditions and converted to shakerism suddenly find themselves in religious communities where what they really want most is to combine and unite and be associated with like-minded people.

And they're very much willing to give up their personal freedoms to live in a tightly organized religious community.

So the surfer community

is one of the big tropes in early 19th century American religious history.

And we find it in all the utopian experiments that are going on at the same time.

The brook farms, the fruit lands, the foyerist phalanxes, right?