ABSTRACT
This chapter examines five of the most famous nineteenth-century American religious communes: Oneida, Amana, Harmony, Zoar, and the largest of all, the Shakers. The five communal movements represent the ultimate in schism. They broke away as thoroughly as they could from the rest of humanity and sought to establish their own autonomous societies based in agriculture and simple industry. The German communes had gained their membership in the vast migration of people to North America in the nineteenth century, and both the Shakers and Oneida came into being by recruiting Americans. In varying degrees, the communes attempted to create alternatives to the conventional family system. Amana and Zoar embedded ordinary nuclear families within an all-embracing larger socioeconomic unit. The Harmonists and Shakers suppressed sexuality and childbearing altogether, a choice which coupled with their failure to recruit many new members after 1850 lead to their extinction.
