"A Woman Mighty to Pull You Down": Married Women's Rights and Female Anger in the Anti-Shaker Narratives of Eunice Chapman and Mary Marshall Dyer

"A Woman Mighty to Pull You Down": Married Women's Rights and Female Anger in the Anti-Shaker Narratives of Eunice Chapman and Mary Marshall Dyer Jean M. Humez For over 200 years, Shaker communitarianism has held a mirror up to developing U.S. Anglo-American culture, from a position at once "outside" and "inside" that culture. Attention to the experience of those who joined and left the communities can help us see more clearly the contested nature of gender roles both within the separatist reUgious society itself and in the northeastern U.S. Protestant world from which its converts came, and to which its seceders returned. Founded by the charismatic Englishwoman Ann Lee and a small group of followers in New York and New England during the Revolutionary War era, the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing developed a network of communities with a membership of several thousand at its peak population in the 1840s. After the death of Ann Lee in 1784, her spiritual heirs evolved a radical dual-gender conception of divinity and a parallel male-female governance system. Both were based on the beUef that a "second coming of Christ" had taken place in and through their female founder, thus accomplishing the full redemption of humanity and ushering in a millennial age. Those who accepted her gospel, confessing former sins and undertaking to follow the self-denying (celibate) models of Christ and Ann Lee, could live a perfectly sinless life on earth. Women were part of the leadership system in almost equal numbers from the outset, but as many students of Shakerism have argued, this resulted more from the practical need to maintain sex segregation within an integrated ceUbate reUgious community than from an egalitarian ideology . While female leaders exercised much greater authority than was possible for most women in the world outside Shakerism, their authority was not unquestioned in the first half of Shakerism's history, and Shaker sisters continued to be confined to traditional "women's work" in the domestic sphere.1 Throughout Shakerism's early history, these communities produced a steady stream of "tumoffs." These were women and men who found it impossible to accept the celibate, highly regulated and hierarchical Shaker religious and social life, and returned to living in "the world." Some of the © 1994 Journal of Women's History, Vol 6 No. ι (Summer) 1994 Jean M. Humez 91 seceders in the early years pubUshed highly critical tracts and books, which inflamed anti-Shaker feeUng among suspicious neighbors with sensational aUegations of the Shakers' heretical reUgious ideas and practices ; tyrannical and corrupt leadership behavior; psychological, sexual and physical abuse of members, particularly of children; and unjust social and economic treatment of seceders.2 Just as gender ideology continued to matter crucially within Shaker communities, it was also formative in the experience of the ex-Shaker and the former spouse of the Shaker convert. Among the most threatening of the early anti-Shaker writers from the perspective of Shaker leadership were two women who published accounts of their experiences with Shakerism in order to generate support for anti-Shaker legislation in the states of New York and New Hampshire, beginning in 1817.3 Presenting themselves publicly as "helpless" women abandoned by their husbands and deprived of their children, the female anti-Shaker writers could appeal for gender-based sympathy in a way that male ex-Shakers could not. The anti-Shaker narratives of Eunice Chapman and Mary MarshaU Dyer are fascinating documents when read in the larger context of the evolution of U.S. female public discourse from its origins in reUgious testimonial into more secular forms of autobiographical self-expression. Like the Anglo-American "Indian captivity narrative" after which these writings were to some extent modelled, the anti-Shaker narrative aUowed minimally literate women of the early nineteenth century to claim the authority to speak pubUcly about their experiences of suffering. In this case the suffering was represented as occasioned not only by a reUgious group stigmatized as aUen—and thus, perhaps easy to scapegoat—but also, more surprisingly, by the private patriarchal family and a male-dominated state government that they saw as providing insufficient protections for...