Shakers - Communal Spiritual Family

Communal Spiritual Family

Shakers did not practice procreation themselves. Children were added to their communities through indenture, adoption, or conversion. Occasionally a foundling was anonymously left on a Shaker doorstep. They welcomed all, often taking in orphans and the homeless. For children, Shaker life was structured, safe, and predictable, with no shortage of adults who cared about their young charges.

When Shaker youngsters, girls and boys, reached the age of twenty-one, they were free to leave or to remain with the Shakers. Unwilling to remain celibate, many chose to leave; today there are thousands of descendants of Shaker-raised seceders.

Shakers lived in "families," each family sharing a large house with separate entrances for women and men. A cluster of families constituted a Shaker village. Every family was designed to be self-supporting with its own farm and businesses, but in times of hardship, other Shaker villages pitched in to help the afflicted.

Shaker religion valued women and men equally in religious leadership. The church was hierarchical, and at each level women and men shared authority. This was reflective of the Shaker belief that God was both female and male. They believed men and women were equal in the sight of God, and should be treated equally on earth, too. Thus two Elders and two Eldresses formed the Ministry at the top of the administrative structure. Two lower-ranking Elders and two Eldresses led each family, women overseeing women and men overseeing men.

In their temporal labor, Shakers followed traditional gender work-related roles. Their homes were segregated by sex, as were women and men’s work areas. Women worked indoors spinning, weaving, cooking, sewing, cleaning, washing, and making or packaging goods for sale. In good weather, groups of Shaker women were outdoors, gardening and gathering wild herbs for sale or home consumption. Men worked in the fields doing farm work and in their shops at crafts and trades. Shakers thus simultaneously valued women’s status in society and realized the importance and difficulty of women's work, not following traditional prejudices that would consider women a "weaker sex" simply to elevate the male, as it was unnecessary in their egalitarian social structure to do so. This also allowed the continuation of church leadership when there was a shortage of men.

Shakers worshipped in meetinghouses painted white and unadorned; pulpits and decorations were eschewed as worldly things. In meeting, they marched, sang, danced, and sometimes turned, twitched, jerked, or shouted. The earliest Shaker worship services were unstructured, loud, chaotic and emotional. However, Shakers later developed precisely choreographed dances and orderly marches accompanied by symbolic gestures. Many outsiders disapproved of Shakers' mode of worship without understanding the symbolism of their movements or the content of their songs.