Transcript
Speaker: Hello, and welcome to Curious Objects.
Speaker: There is a community, a culture, a way of life that once thrived here in America, that built itself up out of nothing, that invented its own extraordinary moral code, that upheld women as equals to men, that valued work above all else, that required celibacy of its members, its people were admired for their hard work and commitment, their pacifism and love,
Speaker: And despite their strong will, their zealotry, their tight community bonds, today those flourishing communities have all but disappeared.
Speaker: These people are the Shakers.
Speaker: And what they've left us, what more than anything else keeps their memories alive in our culture, is their craft.
Speaker: I will be simple.
Speaker: I will be simple.
Speaker: Over the next two episodes, we're going to take a journey into the world of the Shakers.
Speaker: And when I say that word, it's probably already summoned a mental image for you.
Speaker: An image of a desk, perhaps, or a chair.
Speaker: Maybe it's a sewing table.
Speaker: In any case, you know the type.
Speaker: Wooden furniture defined by its simplicity.
Speaker: With clean lines and minimal ornament.
Speaker: These pieces are legendary in the world of American antiques.
Speaker: Not only that, they've inspired countless reproductions.
Speaker: Your own kitchen may have what they call shaker-style cabinets.
Speaker: Partly that's because so much shaker furniture is undeniably beautiful and masterfully made.
Speaker: Partly it's because the no-frills aesthetic resonates with modern taste.
Speaker: And partly it's because these pieces are more than just furniture.
Speaker: They are the physical record of an idea, an aspiration, a utopian vision of virtuous, hardworking people, and of equality between men and women and races.
Speaker: They were meant to help create, literally, heaven on earth.
Speaker: What can these objects reveal about our own relationship with the objects around us?
Speaker: What do pieces of shaker decorative art signify, morally or philosophically or spiritually?
Speaker: And how much of that significance comes from the shakers themselves?
Speaker: And how much of it comes from us, imputing our own ideas and fantasies onto this expansive and complex group who have merely, but not entirely, vanished?
Speaker: For the Magazine Antiques, I'm Ben Miller.
Speaker: Now, shaker craft is a broad category, including everything from their famous chairs and iconic cylinder boxes to clocks and beds.
Speaker: But there's one object that I think speaks to the core of shaker practice and belief and ideology, the sewing desk.
Speaker: These are intimate, personal objects,
Speaker: that evolved over generations to suit the changing needs of the community.
Speaker: Today, they're prized in highly collectible artifacts of one of the most respected craft traditions in America, but the story they tell is complex and interlaced with the challenges of social progress and cultural identity.
Speaker: And depending on who you ask, you might get very different answers about what they signify.
Speaker: I found out that's especially true if you ask one of the last living Shakers.
Speaker: The truth is, I have a feeling that the Shakers still have something to say to us.
Speaker: And I want to know what that is.
Speaker: And even though their movement is nearly extinct today, many of the objects they made are still here.
Speaker: So I want to see what they have to say.
Speaker: And I've got help from some of the people who know it best to share with me and with you the story of Shaker Craft.
Speaker: Before we dive in, I just want to remind you that, in a very real sense, the future of curious objects is in your hands.
Speaker: If you like what you hear and you want it to continue, there are a few relatively painless things you can do right now to help make that happen.
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Speaker: If you're on Instagram, you can find me at Objective Interest and the magazine Antiques at Antiques Mag.
Speaker: You can send me a message with your feedback about the show or ideas about future episodes.
Speaker: Email me at CuriousObjectsPodcast at gmail.com.
Speaker: And the single most important thing you can do is to tell someone about the show.
Speaker: If you have a friend or family member you think would enjoy Curious Objects, just send them a quick message.
Speaker: Maybe they'd like to listen to an episode or two during their holiday travels.
Speaker: Word of mouth is the most powerful tool we have for growing the Curious Objects world.
Speaker: And I'm so grateful to those of you who have done what you can to spread the word.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: So, where to start with the shakers?
Speaker: Well, why not ask a shaker?
Speaker: Oh yeah, did you know there are still living shakers?
Speaker: Three, to be exact.
Speaker: I spoke with one of them, Brother Arnold Hod of the Sabbath Day Lake community in Maine.
Speaker: For starters, I wanted to know why they're called shakers anyway.
Speaker: It's a derivative term, make fun of.
Speaker: Nothing we call ourselves.
Speaker: And that's probably true if you think about the Quakers, the Methodists, the Baptists, all of those things.
Speaker: Not the names they call themselves either.
Speaker: So we know that the earliest reference is in 1758 in the Manchester Mercury.
Speaker: They dubbed them the Shaking Quakers.
Speaker: because according to the newspapers, they didn't quake, they shook.
Speaker: Now, of course, if you can figure out what the difference is between that, I would listen to you.
Speaker: But the name followed us.
Speaker: And when we came to America, we were called the Shaken Quakers still by the outside world because of the bodily movements, the Pentecostal experience that we had in meeting.
Speaker: But Americans don't like long words, as we all know.
Speaker: So it just became known as the Shakers.
Speaker: And our official name is the United Society of Believers in Christ Second Appearing.
Speaker: It's been a lot of different things, so we never really could settle on the right name for ourselves.
Speaker: And long ago accepted the word Shakers.
Speaker: We're going to hear more from Brother Arnold later on.
Speaker: So the Shakers have their roots in 18th century England, although the movement really took form in New England around the time of the Revolution, under the spiritual leadership of a woman named Mother Anne Lee.
Speaker: And maybe that's the first extraordinary fact to note about this group.
Speaker: How many religions can you name that were founded by women?
Speaker: What the Shakers created in their communities in New England, and ultimately across the whole eastern United States, was a serious attempt at utopia.
Speaker: A society which, in many ways, their lifestyle, their political structure, their economy, their treatment of women, radically departed from the surrounding world.
Speaker: Through their devotion and labor, they sought to make their part of the earth into something resembling heaven.
Speaker: And a central part of that plan was the physical environment, the buildings they built, the furniture and clothing they crafted.
Speaker: So our guidepost on this journey into the world of the Shakers, our curious object, is a piece of furniture, a sewing desk, an everyday utilitarian object.
Speaker: But for the Shakers, the everyday and utilitarian is the beating heart of belief.
Speaker: And we have a lot to get into about the role this desk played in Shaker Life, but let's start with what it looks like.
Speaker: And let's hear it from the person who first told me about this piece.
Speaker: Actually, she's the one who first suggested that I should bring Shakerism to Curious Objects.
Speaker: My name is Sarah Margolis-Pineo.
Speaker: I am an associate for John Keith Russell Antiques.
Speaker: We specialize in shaker furniture and material culture.
Speaker: So the Enfield shaker sewing desk was made around the 1860s.
Speaker: It's a really lovely little piece.
Speaker: It's made from yellow birch with pine secondary woods.
Speaker: It's painted or stained in a really beautiful red burgundy color, which is definitely within the palette of Shaker Hughes for furniture.
Speaker: One little immediate sidebar is that contrary to the very cultural idea of Shaker furniture being a very spare wood grain, the Shakers lived in a really
Speaker: brilliantly colorful world, their buildings and interiors, furniture, textiles were all really, really colorful.
Speaker: And this really just lovely spectrum of yellow, red, blue, and green.
Speaker: But anyway, so this piece is red.
Speaker: It's comprised of a lower case of drawers made from paneled construction for any woodworking
Speaker: nerds out there.
Speaker: It's on elevated, squared around legs with six molded front drawers with a single turned knob on each.
Speaker: The three larger drawers are on the left side of the case, and then there are three smaller drawers on the front side of the case.
Speaker: Today, I want to try to picture this desk
Speaker: Not as the revered historical artifact it is now, we'll get to that next episode, but as a working object in the midst of a bustling Shaker community in Enfield, New Hampshire in the 19th century.
Speaker: I spoke with Glendene Wurglin, a scholar and author of multiple books about Shaker life and history.
Speaker: Well, I don't necessarily know where it was located.
Speaker: And in fact, if it is light enough to carry from room to room, it may have been located in different rooms at different times.
Speaker: I do know that some sisters, particularly the elderly ones whose bones were brittle, when winter set in and there was ice outside, they didn't leave the dwelling.
Speaker: So they probably had a sewing room where all the sisters who wanted to sew together could sit together and that way they could talk, they could help each other out.
Speaker: If anybody could sew, but they couldn't quite see well enough to thread the needle, which I understand nowadays, because that's my position.
Speaker: then they would have help there and it would become sort of a communal enterprise.
Speaker: Well, of course, sewing the clothing was always a communal enterprise anyway.
Speaker: You look at the desk and you can see the wider flat drawers on the right in the photograph.
Speaker: and know that there may have been work in progress in there, or there may have been a drawer for patterns in there.
Speaker: And then to the left are the sort of bulky things like maybe a pin cushion, maybe pattern books even would go in there.
Speaker: And then on top, those little drawers look to me like thread drawers.
Speaker: I don't know where the scissors would go, but in my house the scissors are always out.
Speaker: If you put them away, it better be in the same place that they were put away the last time because we need scissors all the time.
Speaker: So if they're out on a surface or somewhere visible, that's handy.
Speaker: And maybe that little shelf underneath the upper drawers would be a good place for scissors to rest
Speaker: Right away, there is something really unusual going on here.
Speaker: Of course, religion has always been closely tied to art and the decorative arts.
Speaker: Think of grand Catholic altarpieces, or statues of the Buddha, or elaborately tiled mosques.
Speaker: But here we have a sewing desk.
Speaker: A functional, utilitarian workpiece configured for efficiency and designed with maximum simplicity.
Speaker: not exactly a stereotypical devotional object.
Speaker: Yet for the Shakers, even a quotidian object like a sewing desk could participate in their grand spiritual project.
Speaker: I spoke about this with Michael O'Connor.
Speaker: He is the curator at the Enfield Shaker Museum, the very place where this desk was made and put to use and where today it's part of their permanent collection.
Speaker: Yeah, no, so that's an excellent question.
Speaker: And that really gets to
Speaker: This whole arc of the community arriving here and what in essence was a rugged frontier, creating a built environment for themselves just for their mere survival, food, clothing, and shelter as their community prospers and expands.
Speaker: And they develop these extensive systems of agriculture and trades that,
Speaker: They're able to create a more and more and more comfortable life for themselves, but also it's more and more specifically unique to themselves.
Speaker: So they are making furniture in the tradition of the world around them.
Speaker: You know, it's the same joinery techniques and basic essential design that the outside world uses.
Speaker: But they are creating something that's a little bit understated.
Speaker: They don't want extraneous ornament.
Speaker: They don't want superfluous decor.
Speaker: They want something that is useful and functional and serves their needs.
Speaker: And they find that to be worshipful.
Speaker: And it's what I think a lot of people notice right away because its asymmetry is pleasing but unexpected.
Speaker: Above the work surface, these desks typically have a gallery of drawers.
Speaker: The desk that I'm speaking of has eight small drawers, two rows of four drawers each.
Speaker: So lots of storage space, lots of utility, plenty of workspace and an extendable work surface, and then larger drawers of storage below.
Speaker: So it's...
Speaker: When I look at it, I see it as being refined.
Speaker: I see it as being highly functional, but it has a delicacy to it and a fineness that's quite extraordinary.
Speaker: But in reality, it's a serious work desk.
Speaker: You could sit down and work away at that.
Speaker: and it's not a piece of parlor furniture that was never made to be used.
Speaker: It's a utilitarian piece that's attractive, functional, and to our eyes, at least in the 20th century, quite pleasing.
Speaker: I was curious, and I asked Sarah, how did this sewing desk form come to be?
Speaker: What did the design process look like?
Speaker: Because I really wanted to know, how did the community-oriented process of the shakers differ from the commercial model in the outside world?
Speaker: Unfortunately, there is no big book like Chippendales-like book.
Speaker: Unfortunately, I wish there was because that would make my job a whole lot easier.
Speaker: But in terms of documentation about the evolution shaker design, what we have is the material record that survives, the objects themselves.
Speaker: And in this case, the sewing desk is our portal to time travel.
Speaker: It's through the sewing desk itself that we can understand or begin to understand the social life of the thing.
Speaker: How it was conceived, prototyped, made, improved on, and then used by generations of shakers.
Speaker: There were a set of laws that were first printed in 1821 called the millennial laws and then revised a few times over the course of the 19th century.
Speaker: These were the first written rules governing Shakerism and they formalized and disseminated much of the work that was put into motion by Meacham as well as his female counterpart, Mother Lucy Wright.
Speaker: I mean, the millennial laws don't provide a whole lot of insight into the design process, but there are certain aspects of shaker design that are codified in print.
Speaker: And again, I keep going back to this, but color provides an interesting example.
Speaker: The millennial laws stipulate that meeting houses must be white and blue, dwelling floors are reddish yellow, workshop floors
Speaker: on the contrary, are yellowish red.
Speaker: Buildings closer to the road should be lighter than those further away.
Speaker: Workshops should be a darker shade than dwelling houses.
Speaker: It goes on and on.
Speaker: And so there's this lengthy laundry list of detailing objects that can be painted, can be varnished, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker: And, you know, we know also from the material record that this was adhered to somewhat.
Speaker: I mean, it was by no means exhaustive.
Speaker: And especially in later,
Speaker: decades, I mean, many of these communities just really designed and built to suit their communities, to suit their individual aesthetics.
Speaker: I mean, there's the classic example is that shaker beds are supposed to be painted green, but really, I mean, there are quite a few beds out there and very few were originally green.
Speaker: So that gives an example.
Speaker: So
Speaker: Yes, I mean, we are learning more and more all the time about the design process, but like the tradition,
Speaker: of American craft and craft more broadly.
Speaker: I mean, it really relied on individuals working together in a workshop, the communion between hand and material, hand in hand, you know, all of these ways of designing and making things that are so beyond the written record that we can only just speculate about today.
Speaker: So there's a very interesting aspect of how do these styles evolve in parallel at all these different communities?
Speaker: And I think there's a few theories.
Speaker: There's a theory of emulation that possibly as Mount Lebanon.
Speaker: which is a community in New York State, which is the lead ministry.
Speaker: It's where the head of the Shaker Church was located.
Speaker: Possibly other communities are emulating Mount Lebanon style and that all these communities are developing along these really parallel lines because they're all looking to Mount Lebanon and saying, you know, that that's the goal.
Speaker: I don't know if there are communications saying that you need to do this, this, and this.
Speaker: Mount Lebanon does establish rules and regulations which sometimes specify what furniture should be or shouldn't be.
Speaker: But the rules aren't really detailed.
Speaker: They're not saying that your chair will have a finial and your chair will have three back slats or your sewing desk will have sets of three drawers or anything like that.
Speaker: So there may be folks who have looked into this a little bit more than me, but yes, there's a question.
Speaker: Is it emulation of Mount Lebanon?
Speaker: Is it information being traded back and visitors going back and forth and saying, well, we like what they're doing at Canterbury or we like what they're doing at Enfield and setting down that path?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So how the information is disseminated across the communities, across really broad areas of different traditions.
Speaker: So Maine certainly had a different social culture than Kentucky did or Western New York or Massachusetts.
Speaker: But there's a somewhat parallel among all these communities, and I think it's a
Speaker: I think it's a rich mystery that I would like to know more of.
Speaker: So I think that if we talk about the evolution of what we're calling the classic Enfield sewing desk, or if you would rather categorize it as a work desk, because really you can do any type of work at that desk that you wanted to.
Speaker: It was incremental, it was small, and it was over at least a generation.
Speaker: We're looking at least from the 1820s into well into the 1850s.
Speaker: We don't know what the exact conversation was, but it's clearly people are saying, I can refine a product that came before the one that I'm going to make.
Speaker: And we don't know if it's hinged upon a certain person's cabinetry skills or if there was a dialogue amongst the community because those records haven't survived to this day.
Speaker: But I would love to have a letter that would clarify that.
Speaker: what the objectives were.
Speaker: But I realized when I laid these things out, even when you look at that very first desk, which is a very simple, small side table, it's really, really well made.
Speaker: It's not that they didn't have excellent
Speaker: cabinetry skills and knowledge of the tradition to begin with.
Speaker: But I think by usage, by experimentation, they create something that's quite a sophisticated piece of furniture.
Speaker: When we look at these sewing desks, we see a really beautiful form.
Speaker: We see rows of drawers and draw out work surfaces and real finely made and
Speaker: delicately designed, but when you look inside things, they really shine, because the joinery is complex and it is really well executed.
Speaker: The central idea that has captivated the public imagination about the Shakers, and which has fueled our cultural interest in Shaker decorative arts, is craft as devotion.
Speaker: The notion that here was a group of people for whom making furniture was a divine vocation.
Speaker: And one of the questions I want to address is, how true is that idea anyway?
Speaker: Because yes, the Shakers were in pursuit of perfection and paradise, but they also just needed clothes to wear.
Speaker: And they needed sewing desks where they could make those clothes.
Speaker: Here's Sarah again.
Speaker: I guess it's always important to remember that Shakerism is and was a strict religion of Protestant descent.
Speaker: And so when Anne Lee and her cohort came to the States and said, well, what would shortly be the States in 1774, their ideology was really radical, as I mentioned earlier.
Speaker: It didn't fit within the confines of Congregational New England.
Speaker: And so through the last decades of the 18th century into the 19th,
Speaker: The Shakers were formalizing their religious beliefs and practices in tandem with designing and building their villages.
Speaker: It was all inherently integrated as a single process.
Speaker: And the material was a manifestation of belief.
Speaker: in many ways.
Speaker: And so in terms of Shaker design and its evolution, there is not a whole lot that is within the written record, but it's my understanding that it was Father Joseph Meacham, who before joining the Shakers was a New Light Baptist creature actually, had a heavy hand in developing and defining Shaker design.
Speaker: Father Joseph was the first American born leader of the Shakers and he was appointed father following the death of James Whitaker in 1787, who assumed leadership of the sect after the death of Mother Anne Lee in 1784.
Speaker: And so it was Meechan's belief that a well-ordered environment would cultivate well-ordered citizens.
Speaker: And so through his tenure as father, he was really the force behind mobilizing these very disparate groupings of people.
Speaker: believers, Shaker believers, these folks who had formed into ad hoc communities following sort of Mother Anne's preaching journey throughout New England.
Speaker: He really organized them into communities by the time that he died in 1796, including included 11 societies across five states.
Speaker: Two, Meacham was the one who really instituted hierarchies of governance, both spiritual and temporal, that allowed the entire Shaker diaspora to thrive together in union.
Speaker: And so he was the one who really instituted this radical vision, merging ideology and built environment.
Speaker: He is said to have said, all things made well, all work done, plain and without superfluidity, which is still a very core principle behind Shaker Design.
Speaker: He really advocated for using these clean lines, vibrant color and absolute symmetry
Speaker: So one of the defining features of shaker carpentry was its practicality.
Speaker: If you have a moral and spiritual obligation to be productive, you're certainly going to want your physical space and your tools and furniture to be as useful and efficient as they can be.
Speaker: And here I think the sewing desk in particular can help shed light on what shaker craftspeople were really thinking when they were making these objects.
Speaker: These desks were made by carpenters, but they were made to be used by seamstresses.
Speaker: And it was important for the carpenter to understand exactly what the seamstress needed out of her desk.
Speaker: I talked about this idea with Clendine.
Speaker: Every sister was assigned a brother to do things that she needed done.
Speaker: So if she was...
Speaker: say, a tailoress, and she needed a lot of bone buttons or horn buttons made for the clothes that she would be tailoring, that brother was in charge of making them for her.
Speaker: And I'm thinking now of Sarah Bates, who was a tailoress, and Isaac Newton Youngs, who was a tailor.
Speaker: And they did these favors for each other.
Speaker: So if Sarah needed buttons, they didn't go out and buy buttons.
Speaker: They made buttons because they certainly had horn and bone from the animals that they slaughtered.
Speaker: And that was easy enough to do, except that, you know, he might have made 100,000 buttons on a button lathe.
Speaker: Although Sarah would have not used all of those buttons, he would have shared some of them with other villages also if they needed some.
Speaker: So when Sarah needed her eyeglasses fixed, she went to Isaac and he would either procure new lenses for her or grind lenses to order.
Speaker: When her knitting needles got too dull to knit with, he would sharpen knitting needles.
Speaker: And I think Isaac was so diligent.
Speaker: He typically had more than one union meeting partner, so more than one sister that he was working for.
Speaker: And then, of course, as the number of brethren dwindled in the 19th century, you know, the brethren who were left might have to help out more than one sister.
Speaker: So they might end up with two or three sisters.
Speaker: And those, you know, that brother may have made also the sewing desk.
Speaker: Isaac may have made a sewing desk for
Speaker: Sarah Bates, because she would inevitably end up sitting to sew after all the cutting was done.
Speaker: So there were a lot of little gendered chores, you could say, that might involve mechanical work.
Speaker: that the sisters wouldn't or couldn't do, but the brothers could do.
Speaker: And the sisters would reciprocate with the jobs that they could do.
Speaker: I believe there's somewhere there is a sewing desk or sewing table that was inscribed by the brother who made it to one of the sisters.
Speaker: And he made that specifically for that sister.
Speaker: So that
Speaker: also is that's an intriguing thing.
Speaker: It shows a certain appreciation.
Speaker: Whether the artifact is inscribed or not, the fact that it was made with care, loving care, one might say, suggests that there was an ongoing relationship between the brethren and the sisters they made furniture for.
Speaker: And I don't mean that in any sense in a sexual way.
Speaker: I mean that it was a matter of this is your sister.
Speaker: She's your sister in the faith and you're going to do the best you can for her because you know she's gonna help you out in other ways.
Speaker: So it was sort of a one hand washes the other, but in some cases the union meeting partner maybe,
Speaker: who made the furniture for the sister, showed a little more than just one hand washing the other.
Speaker: One of the fundamental principles of Shaker belief, and one of the most radical, is the equality of all human souls.
Speaker: Now, in principle, that may not be so controversial to our ears, but
Speaker: But can you imagine, at a time when the right to vote was restricted to property-owning white males, here was a community that professed equal standing for its male and female members?
Speaker: And to take it a step further, imagine stepping out of that deeply racist and sexist culture and into the Shaker community where you were expected to cast off those prejudices.
Speaker: I think it's an impossible psychological bridge for some people.
Speaker: And I will also say it would depend on the Shaker community because I'm certain that not all Shaker villages tried to enforce equality of the sexes the way Mount Lebanon did.
Speaker: In fact, I've seen some evidence that some of the Western Shaker villages, the men were in charge.
Speaker: The men took power and they had it and the women...
Speaker: either didn't resist enough or they went along with it.
Speaker: I don't know because I don't know enough about those villages.
Speaker: But at Mount Lebanon, there was, because that's where the ministry lived, the spiritual leaders for the entire communal society lived there and they tried to set the example and they made an effort.
Speaker: Well, a new person coming into there
Speaker: For a woman who came in who had been beaten by her husband or had run away from her husband and come to the Shakers, coming into a Shaker village was a relief.
Speaker: She found sanctuary there and no man ever had the right to tell her what to do.
Speaker: So that was astounding.
Speaker: And
Speaker: Some women probably really appreciated that.
Speaker: Others might not have cared that much one way or another because it just wasn't a problem either way to them.
Speaker: I think for men, it would, for some men, I shouldn't make a blanket statement about men because all men are different just the way all shakers are different and all women are different.
Speaker: But some men would find it a shock
Speaker: and they referred to Shaker society.
Speaker: Living in Shaker society was living under petticoat government, and that was not meant in a complimentary way.
Speaker: And truthfully, there were women such as Mother Lucy Wright who imposed her will on everyone around her,
Speaker: as far as I can see.
Speaker: I mean, she just scared me.
Speaker: It scared me to read about her, but I was only reading from Isaac Newton Young's point of view.
Speaker: But she was a very forceful personality.
Speaker: But her successor stayed in the background and didn't put her foot down the way Mother Lucy did.
Speaker: So I think you can't make a blanket statement about how women exercised their power across all Shaker villages.
Speaker: The basic view of the Shakers who wrote about this was that all people were equal in the sight of God.
Speaker: So they should be
Speaker: in practice also treated equally.
Speaker: That didn't mean they were going to do the same work.
Speaker: For the Shakers, I would have to say that just because women and men did different work didn't mean that women's work was worth less.
Speaker: None of them were being paid.
Speaker: None of them were favored in the sort of way that you would be favored in a hierarchy today if you were a man doing the same job as a woman.
Speaker: To us, equality is equality.
Speaker: It's the equality of male and female, but it's also whatever color you happen to be.
Speaker: We just looked upon people as people.
Speaker: as all being equal as children of God.
Speaker: But it wasn't the mixing of the races, it was that women were equal.
Speaker: And that was an abomination, more so than the color of your skin, it was your gender.
Speaker: And it had been really since the very beginning that the sisters had their own industries, their own money, their own everything, they were independent.
Speaker: And that was something we saw as, again, God made us all equal.
Speaker: We seem to be still wrestling with that problem today, I'm afraid.
Speaker: It's telling that our sewing desk from the Enfield Shaker community exhibits just as much care in its materials and design and construction as the chairs and tables used by men.
Speaker: They weren't just paying lip service to an abstract idea of sex equality.
Speaker: They were living out those principles.
Speaker: What interests me is the fact, the sheer fact that this desk exists illustrates a really core Shaker Valley, which is the value of equality.
Speaker: The Shakers from the outset practiced racial and gender parity within their communities.
Speaker: And this was a time when basic human rights
Speaker: I mean, the very humanity didn't exist for large swaths of the American population.
Speaker: How this idea of equality, this intention of equality played out day to day within a Sikh community is questionable.
Speaker: It's something that scholars are always thinking through.
Speaker: But regardless, the fact that the sewing desk even exists as a bespoke utilitarian object
Speaker: illustrates the value that the Shakers placed on the work of women.
Speaker: Their labor had an equal commercial and communal value to the work of men.
Speaker: at that time.
Speaker: And sure, I mentioned earlier, worldly women had sewing desks as well to complete embroidery or what have you, but shaker sewing desks had intention behind their form.
Speaker: They had, you know, slim drawers for patterns.
Speaker: They had expandable work surfaces.
Speaker: They had a left or right orientation so they could place back to back to create a collaborative workstation.
Speaker: The customization not only facilitated production, making it more efficient, but it also meant that the sister was more comfortable, healthy, and happy while she worked, which benefited the social life of the community in a larger sense.
Speaker: I need to point out here just what an astonishing thing was happening in these Shaker communities.
Speaker: Here we have a non-proselytizing celibate community
Speaker: which demands of its members that they relinquish entirely the structures and hierarchies of society.
Speaker: Giving up on sex is a pretty big sacrifice on its own, but add to that money, status, ambition, all these qualities that for us outsiders are core to our identities.
Speaker: It's hard not to describe as extreme or radical,
Speaker: But I don't know, is there such a thing as extremist tolerance, inequality, and pacifism?
Speaker: It's such a fine line between dangerous cult behavior.
Speaker: And so this is a whole other question, can of worms with the shakers, because I do think about this a lot as well.
Speaker: And I mean, where is the line drawn between cult and these very sort of toxic forms of narcissism and self-serving and a very productive,
Speaker: community, a group, you know?
Speaker: And it is, it's, the line is gray and it's always in motion.
Speaker: It's a moving target.
Speaker: But I think in the case of the Shakers, it truly is, they had a very set hierarchy of power and governance, but within that, there is very little, at least in the historic record, there's very little space for abuse.
Speaker: of that power.
Speaker: It's very evenly dispersed and there are checks.
Speaker: And so there is no one charismatic Keith Ramirez who can get out of control and create a harem.
Speaker: Although I'm sure there are circumstances where that could have evolved in the case of the Shakers, but it didn't.
Speaker: And so,
Speaker: the governance as it was established and as it evolved, I mean, I think it was very, very careful about checking those power dynamics.
Speaker: And it was effective because they're still around, as you know.
Speaker: And so I don't know, but that is a question I do think about often.
Speaker: There's no question that part of the appeal of an object like our sewing desk is its participation, not just in a tradition of craft, but in the very idea of shakerism.
Speaker: And yet, the idea itself, Shakerism, has found fewer and fewer adherents.
Speaker: And it's not unlikely that within a generation or two, there will be no adherents at all.
Speaker: What happened?
Speaker: How is it that our cultural interest in the Shakers has grown and grown?
Speaker: That our excitement about their craft continues to expand at the very same time that the community itself has faded and faded?
Speaker: In the next episode, I want to look at what happened to this desk as the thriving and robust world of the Shakers began to dwindle.
Speaker: Because at the same time that the population of Shakers started to decline, the interest that outsiders were taking in that world was just beginning to blossom.
Speaker: And the life of this sewing desk, intended as a place for believers to do the necessary but also sacred daily work of the community,
Speaker: That life was about to change dramatically.
Speaker: for now you've been listening to curious objects brought to you by the magazine antiques today's episode was edited and produced by sammy delati our social media and web support is by sarah bellotta mateo solis prada is our digital media assistant our theme song is by trap rabbit and i'm ben miller
