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“Dearly Loved Mother Eunice”: Gender, Motherhood, and Shaker Spirituality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Suzanne Thurman
Suzanne Thurman
Affiliation:
Ms. Thurman is assistant professor of history at Mesa State College, Grand Junction, Colorado.
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Extract

In June 1808, at the age of fourteen, Eunice Bathrick confessed her sins and joined the Shakers (also known as the Believers), a celibate religious community founded by Ann Lee in the late eighteenth century. Although largely unknown to modern scholars, Bathrick played many roles in the Shaker village of Harvard, Massachusetts, where she lived her entire Shaker life. A prolific visionist, a creative thinker, and a dedicated writer, she became an authoritative figure at Harvard and a symbol of the empowering opportunities for women found within the religious structure, particularly the spirituality, of Shakerism. Her work—in the form of an autobiography, several biographies, visions and spirit messages, oral histories, hymn collections, and a web of correspondence with other Shakers and the outside world—provides a unique opportunity to study both this interrelationship between gender, spirituality, and female empowerment in Shaker communities and Bathrick's own individual spiritual journey as a Shaker sister.

Type
Research Article
Information
Church History , Volume 66 , Issue 4 , December 1997 , pp. 750 - 761
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1997

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References

1. I have discussed both celibacy and the “androgynous ideal” and their relationship to gender concerns and female empowerment with Shakerism in Thurman, Suzanne, “The Order of Nature, the Order of Grace: Community Formation, Female Status, and Relations with the World in the Shaker Villages of Harvard and Shirley, Massachusetts, 1781–1875,” (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1994).Google Scholar

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5. The Shakers did use the title “Father,” but fatherhood imagery did not predominate in Shaker thought.

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12. “Autobiography of Eunice Bathrick” (VI.A.5), pp. 27, 31, 33–34, WRHS.

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22. For an extended analysis of the Grosvenors' heresy, see Thurman, , “Shaker Women and Sexual Power: Heresy and Orthodoxy in the Shaker Village of Harvard, Massachusetts,” Journal of Women's History, forthcoming.Google Scholar

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