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WOMEN IN COMMUNITARIAN SOCIETIES
- Indiana University Press
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707 WOMEN IN COMMUNITARIAN SOCIETIES Rosemary Radford Ruether COMMUNITARIAN SOCIETIES IN America have a long history, going back to pre–Revolutionary War settlements . In the 1840s and again in the 1960s communitarian movements arose that claimed to emancipate women. Women’s marginalization was seen as stemming from the separation of work from home, productive labor from unpaid domestic work, segregating women in the domestic sphere and cutting them off from the larger world of work and politics. Communal societies saw themselves as overcoming this split. Home and work, domestic and productive work, daily life and political leadership would be integrated into one community, overcoming the separation of male and female spheres and roles. Communal child raising would overcome the women’s exclusive responsibility for children and make this the work of the whole community, men as much as women. However, the actual record of communal societies in America has been ambiguous in regard to gender equality . Most have been male founded and male dominated. Even those founded by women, including some womanonly groups, have been hierarchical in their concept of leadership. Still communalism continues to proclaim the possibility of utopia in American society and, with it, the hope of more just relations among all humans, overcoming both class and gender hierarchy. The communitarian impulse in the Christian tradition is an ancient one, having roots in Jewish religious communitarians, such as the Essenes, in the first century c.e. The New Testament book of Acts describes the first Christians in Jerusalem as “having all things in common ” and laying their possessions at the feet of the apostles for distribution to those in need (4:32–34). This text became an inspiration to future generations of Christians who saw the communal life as a renewal of the original apostolic community. Western Christian monasticism, following the Rule of St. Benedict in the fifth century, brought together communal living, prayer, and work, inspiring continual renewals through the Middle Ages. Monastic life for both men and women came to the Americas with the Spanish in the sixteenth century. Nineteenth-century immigration planted new seeds of Catholic monastic life in the United States. Today , active orders of social service and cloistered contemplative orders, such as the Benedictines and the Cistercians , dot the American landscape from coast to coast. The mainstream of the Reformation, while rejecting both celibacy and monastic life, saw a renewal of communitarianism by Anabaptist Protestants. Some, such as the Hutterites, followers of Jakob Hutter, adopted communal life in the Tyrol in 1528, consciously imitating the apostolic example by laying their worldly goods on a cloak before their leaders. In 1530 the Hutterites fled persecution into Moravia and in the eighteenth century migrated to Russia. Beginning in 1874, renewed persecution drove thousands to immigrate to the United States and Canada. Here they have faced hostility because of their pacifist refusal of military service. Today Hutterites are both the longest-lasting and most successful group of religious communitarians, numbering some 400 communities, averaging 100 per community, mostly spread across the northern plains of Alberta, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, South Dakota, and Montana. Communitarian movements in North America often have been seen as short-lived failures, but this ignores the long history of both Catholic monasticism and communal Anabaptists. Many experimental communities were only one stage in a longer life of a religious community . After the communal phase ended, organizations founded by the movement, such as joint stock companies , schools, cooperatives, and credit unions, remained. Many Christian communitarians have been pacifist and have seen their movement as the beginning of the realization of the millennium, the thousand-year reign of Christ on earth. Open lands, religious freedom, the vision of America as a “new world” where millenarian hopes could be realized, attracted many such movements . Already in the colonial period a number of communitarian experiments were planted on these shores. Jean Labadie, a mystical French Calvinist, founded the celibate double (male and female) monastery of Bohemia Manor in Maryland in 1683. German pietists, inspired by the mystic Jacob Boehme, founded the community of the Woman in the Wilderness (the name inspired by Revelation 12:6) near Philadelphia in 1694. They saw themselves as imitating the first Christians who fled into the wilderness to await the return of Christ. Each of these colonies lasted about a decade and a half. A longer-lasting colony, Ephrata Cloister, was founded by German Baptist Conrad Beissel, in 1732, in the Germantown, Pennsylvania, area. It took the form of celibate orders...