Women in Spiritual and Communitarian Societies in the United States

by Wendy Chmielewski (Editor), Louis Kern (Editor), Marlyn Klee-Hartzell (Editor)

Overview

A survey of women's experiences in the American communitarian movement from the 19th century to the present. This volume covers a wide range of religious, secular and modern interactive-psychology communities, focusing on women in the complexity and multiplicity of their roles.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780815625698
Publisher:	Syracuse University Press
Publication date:	12/01/1992
Series:	Utopianism and Communitarianism Series
Edition description:	1st ed
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)

Editorial Reviews

This is a delightful contribution to ``the most recent scholarship on women in spiritual and communal societies.'' Essays explore women's experiences from the 18th century to the present in Shaker, Mormon, Catholic, Hasidic, Owenite, and Hutterite communities as well as at the Woman's Commonwealth, Brook Farm, Oneida, Twin Oaks, and the Farm. The result is a careful study of women's work, sexuality, marriage, child rearing, education, artistic expression, and politics in the context of these diverse experimental communities. The 15 contributors to this collection are feminist scholars primarily from the social sciences and the communities. Recent complementary titles include Lawrence Foster's Women, Family, and Utopia (Syracuse Univ. Pr., 1991) and Carol A. Kolmerten's Women in Utopia (Indiana Univ. Pr., 1990). This book is accessible to informed general readers but is especially appropriate for undergraduate and graduate collections in U.S. and women's history and gender studies.-- Linda Carlisle, Southern Illinois Univ. Lib. at Edwardsville

Library Journal

Combining both scholarly views and autobiographical material, the authors survey women's roles and experiences in a wide range of American religions, secular, and modern interactive-psychology communities from the 18th century to the present. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews

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 the number of different types of social experiments and women's experiments in them.ome of these communities, considered racial for their time, like The Northhampton Association of Education and Industry, housed the genesis of egalitarian systems and philosophies later accepted into the mainstream. Others were patriachal 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.
—Ilene Rosoff

WomanSource Catalog & Review: Tools for Connecting the Community for Women