Women, Family, and Utopia: Communal Experiments of the Shakers, the Oneida Community, and the Mormons (Utopianism and Communitarianism)

Why would thousands of Americans before the Civil War have joined new religious movements that rejected conventional monogamous marriage in favor of alternative life-styles? The Shakers created a celibate system that gave women full equality with men in religious leadership. The Oneida Perfectionists set up a form of group marriage, or "free love," that radically changed relations between the sexes. And the Mormons eventually introduced a form of polygamy based on Old Testament models. Lawrence Foster provides the most comprehensive analysis yet written of how and why women's roles were restructured in these three groups and the reasons for the initial success and eventual failure of these efforts to introduce alternatives to monogamous marriage.Foster argues that although none of these groups was explicitly "feminist" in its approach, all of them struggled to reshape and revitalize relations between the sexes in their communal experiments. He offers a coherent, overall perspective, making this an important book for all readers interested in American social history, religious studies, sociology, communalism, and women's studies.