Women in Spiritual and Communitarian Societies in the United States (Utopianism and Communitarianism Series)

xix, 275 pp. 'Most people are probably unaware that communitarian lifestyles existed in this country long before the attention they received in the 1960s. In fact, this book looks at women in communitarian and spiritual societies as far back as the 1700s. This is a multi-faceted study of a number of different types of social experiments and women's experiences in them. Some of these communities, considered radical for their time, like The Northampton Association of Education and Industry, housed the genesis of egalitarian systems and philosophies later accepted into the mainstream. Others were patriarchal in the extreme. Some, like the Shakers and the various Catholic sisterhoods, were based on achieving a pure religious vision. This is a fascinating glimpse at a variety of functional communities, their power structures and leadership, what they created and achieved, and the women's personal perceptions.' - The WomanSource Catalog & Review