History of the Shakers

Who were the Shakers? How could a religious group last for over 200 years when its basic rule was celibacy? With no heirs to carry on, winning converts was the only method of perpetuating this austere, sex-free order. The Shaker religion was founded by Ann Lee, known as Mother Ann to her followers. Born to impoverished parents in Manchester, England, about 1736, she was familiar with the abuses of child labour and the sufferings of lower class English society during the early days of the Industrial Revolution. Originally known as the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, the faith included communal living, celibacy, pacifism, confession of sin and the belief that God was a dual personality. This personality was conceived as a masculine spirit embodied in Christ and a female element manifested in the spiritual presence of Mother Ann. As a result of this conception the Shakers practiced equality of the sexes in all their activities and responsibilities, putting then far in advance of their time. Persecuted in England, Mother Ann led a little band of eight loyal followers to the British colony of New York in 1774. Arriving on the eve of the American Revolution, they were greeted with suspicion and they continued to be persecuted. Their first permanent settlement was established near Albany. Others followed in New England, Kentucky, Ohio and Indiana. The religious movement of the early 19th century , especially in the West, provided an hospitable environment for this self denying sect. At their peak they counted 6000 members, located in 19 communities. It was the largest utopian society in the United States and the longest surviving communitarian group in the world. The Shakers excelled in agriculture, marketing, furniture making, spinning and weaving. Their inventions include the common clothes pin, washing machine, rotary harrow, circular saw, flat broom and rotary oven. It was the Shakers who originated the sale of seeds in packets rather than in bulk. Shaker furniture, distinctively sturdy, light and utilitarian, is admired today because its simple, functional lines hold enduring appeal. Shaker ingenuity grew out of their life style, necessitated by their nearly self-sustaining communities as well as their religious fervour towards all work. They laboured diligently and skillfully to achieve perfection in all their tasks. Mother Ann’s counsel to ‘do all your work as if you had a thousand years to live, and yet as if you were going to die tomorrow’, along with her better known maxim, ‘Hands to work and hearts to God,’ served as spiritual guidelines. This was the essence of their ‘consecrated industries’. Following the Civil War the Industrial Revolution had a devastating impact on the Shakers. They could not compete with cheaper factory made items. With the advent of railroads and telephones the Shaker communes no longer offered companionship and protection against a hostile environment. Declining interest in religion made it increasingly difficult to win converts. Today there is only a tiny handful of surviving Shakers. Although Shakerism as a viable institution is a thing of the past, their philosophy and ideals still have an influential impact. To quote Sister Mildred of Sabbathday Lake in Maine, ‘ The principles and ideals which the Shakers were first to expound have gone out into the world and, like a pebble dropped into the water, we cannot measure the distance of their influence they have borne. First in so many things we now take for granted - sex equality, religious and racial tolerance, and so forth - Shakerism is not dying out, nor is it a failure’.