| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Suzanne R. Thurman. "O Sisters Ain't You Happy?" Gender, Family, and Community among the Harvard and Shirley Shakers, 1781–1918. (Women and Gender in North American Religions.) Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press. 2002. Pp. xi, 262. Cloth $39.95, paper $19.95.

Scholars of communal societies often measure a group's success quantitatively: how long did they last? How many members did they have? Suzanne R. Thurman asks a more provocative, qualitative question in her study of the Harvard and Shirley Shakers: were the Sisters happy? In this engaging and richly researched work, Thurman argues that, for the most part, the Shaker experience for women was empowering, and, indeed, happy. 1

Thurman advances Shaker scholarship with a comprehensive community study of the Harvard and Shirley, Massachusetts, villages. Drawing on town histories, census records, hymns, and the copious manuscripts left by the Shakers' prolific writers, Thurman seeks to illustrate the "complexity of Shaker identity, an identity not merely conceived in isolation from the world, but developed in reaction to and in interaction with the world" (p. 9, italics in original). Her focus is on gender, family, and community as the key facets of a multilayered Shaker identity; throughout her work she demonstrates how ideas about gender influenced the reimagined family and community the Shakers developed. . . .

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