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The United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Coming was a communistic and celibate sect which existed into the 1960s. Earlier sects had experienced something like the trembling, writhing, jumping and dancing that gave the Shakers their name; the Low Countries dancers of the 14th and 15th centuries, the French Convulsionnaires of 1720-1770, and the Welsh Methodist Jumpers.
The Society started in Manchester, U.K., when Ann Lee succeeded to the leadership of a group of "Shaking Quakers" about 1770. Four years later, she had a vision which instructed her to take her followers to America, where they settled near Albany, New York. As they gained converts, 10 communities were formed in New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire and Maine. After 1800, four communities were established in Kentucky and Ohio and in 1894, one in Florida.
The Shaker community is organized into "families" of 60-90 people. The family rises, eats, and works together. The Shakers embraced the principle of complete equality of the sexes and the races. Spiritual and temporal leaders were called elders (or elderesses) and decons (or deaconesses) and were of equal numbers of men and women.
The Society believed that God has male and female halves, that Jesus was the male incarnation of the Christ and that Mother Ann (Lee) was the female incarnation, thus fulfilling the prohecy of the Second Coming of Christ. As there is no marriage nor giving in marriage in Heaven, Shakers abolished it in their communities. They denied the deity of Jesus and the resurrection of the body.
The four rules governing Shaker life were;
1) abstaining from any sexual relations |
2) all property was owned by the community as a whole |
3) public confession of sins, and |
4) separation from the world. |
Some of the writings of the Shakers are still extant.
After 1860, the sect began to decline and numbered about 4000 in 1890, 1000 in 1920 (18 settlements in 9 states), and 50 in 1960.
Today, the Shakers are mainly remembered for their distinctive style of furniture, but this clean, functional, high-quality form also applied to Shaker architecture, tools, plate, indeed, the design of everything they made and used.
The Shakers were the first commercial suppliers of hybrid garden seed. They also invented the circular saw, flat brooms, pointed nails, and metal inkpen tips.
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