The Great Divorce: A Nineteenth-Century Mother's Extraordinary Fight against Her Husband, the Shakers, and Her Times, and: Domestic Broils: Shakers, Antebellum Marriage, and the Narratives of Mary and Joseph Dyer (review)

The lives of Eunice Hawley Chapman and Mary Marshall Dyer, as detailed in two recent books by Ilyon Woo and Elizabeth A. De Wolfe, have a great deal to tell us about early-nineteenth-century gender relations, the institution of marriage as it was legally codified at that time, and the burgeoning power of the printed word. They also give great insight into the conflict between utopian societies and the "fallen" world they inhabit (Woo 118)—the difficulty and human cost of substituting one means of social organization for another.

Both Chapman and Dyer were married to men who turned their backs on the "people of the world" to join the utopian communalist religious sect known as the Shakers (Woo 181). Both were forced by their husbands to relinquish their children to Shaker communities—Eunice Chapman for a period of five years, Mary Dyer for life (upon reaching the age of majority, her children chose to remain Shakers). And both wrote powerful, compelling narratives of their ordeals that swayed entire state legislatures to amend or provide exceptions to their own divorce laws.

Eunice Chapman's fight was clearly the more successful of the two, for she obtained both a divorce and full custody of her children. Ilyon Woo's The Great Divorce is a spellbinding chronicle of her fight, hewing closely to biography while pausing frequently to provide historical context and insight into the lives and motivations of James Chapman, Eunice's husband, and the individual Shakers involved in her dilemma, such as Elder Seth Wells and Mother Lucy Wright.

Although the doctrine of coverture subsumed Eunice's legal identity to that of her husband, as it did to all married women in the early nineteenth century, from the very outset of their marriage Eunice resisted James's attempts to assert control in family matters. James, for his part, failed to live up to the role of provider, drinking heavily and losing his small business—the family's only source of income—to creditors. When James sold their house and belongings to pay off his debt and abandoned Eunice and their three children, who ranged in age from two to six years old, he left her in a state of limbo, unable to draw on his support but without rights of contract or property of her own. As Woo observes, "As far as the law was concerned, her identity remained one with her husband's, whether she lived with him or not" (24).

Finding solace with the Shaker community in Watervliet, New York, James embraced Shaker tenets, vowing to give up his family, his property, and all carnal relations and "to open [him]self up fully to a greater, universal, divinely inspired love." Woo acknowledges the unorthodox nature of such requirements in nineteenth-century capitalist American society but suggests that "these self-denying tenets were critical to the Shakers' success," noting that none of the famous "communitarian experiments" of the mid-nineteenth century, such as the Oneida Community, Fruitlands, and New Harmony, survived even half as many years as did the Shakers (29).

Whatever their internal success, Shakers believed their external success relied on conforming to the cultural norms of their era, as Eunice's unfolding story clearly illustrates. Thus, while the Watervliet Shakers accepted James as one of their own, they required him to bring his wife and children into the fold as well, lest they be accused of breaking up a family. In the winter of 1813, Eunice made the first of many trips to...