UC Santa Cruz UC Santa Cruz Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Perfect Child, Perfect Faith: Raising Children in Nineteenth-Century Religious Communities Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/88n1z6z3 Author Gudgeirsson, Meg Elizabeth Publication Date 2016 License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/ 4.0 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA CRUZ PERFECT CHILD, PERFECT FAITH RAISING CHILDREN IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY RELIGIOUS COMMUNITIES A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in HISTORY by Meg Eppel Gudgeirsson June 2016 The Dissertation of Meg Gudgeirsson is approved: ____________________________________ Professor Marilyn Westerkamp, chair ____________________________________ Professor Catherine Jones ____________________________________ Professor Martin Berger _____________________________ Tyrus Miller Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies Copyright © by Meg Eppel Gudgeirsson 2016 TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Illustrations iv Abstract vi Acknowledgments viii Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Define the Child, Define the Community 27 Chapter 2: The Family and its Proxies 77 Chapter 3: Educating for the Future 134 Chapter 4: “The Serious Business” of Play and Work 178 Conclusion: Departures and Transformations 225 Bibliography 249 !iii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Image 1.1 Oneida Children in a Cart, undated 31 Image 1.2 Godfrey Barron Noyes, ca. 1876 32 Image 1.3 Guy Hatch Noyes, ca. 1876 32 Image 1.4 Hilton Van Velzer, ca. 1872 32 Image 1.5 “Group of Pleasant Hill Shakers on an Outing,” May 1887 36 Image 1.6 Jessie Catherine Baker (Kinsley), ca. 1863-1865 64 Image 1.7 Pierrepont Burt Noyes, undated 69 Image 2.1 Oneida Eugenics Children, ca. 1887 82 Image 2.2 “The Drama of the Criminal Court,” 1873 89 Image 2.3 McKay Family, ca. 1870s 90 Image 2.4 Charlotte Leonard with sons Stephen Rose Leonard and John 100 Humphrey Noyes II, ca. 1870s Image 2.5 Tirzah Miller, ca. 1860s 102 Image 2.6 Group Photograph of Women and Children at Sabbathlake 104 Community, Maine, ca. 1895 Image 2.7 Shaker Women and Children, Centre Family Dwelling, ca. 105 1885 !iv Image 2.8 Advertisement for Pear’s Soap, ca. 1895 118 Image 3.1 Shaker School Desk 143 Image 3.2 Centre Family Shakers, undated 173 Image 4.1 Oneida Children’s Hour, 1870 187 Image 4.2 “Croquet on the South Lawn,” ca. 1865-1870 191 Image 4.3 Children’s Anti-Slavery Missionary Association Certificate, 205 1858 Image 4.4 Hoeing Bee, undated 211 Image 4.5 Bag Bee in Big Hall, undated 211 !v ABSTRACT PERFECT CHILD, PERFECT FAITH RAISING CHILDREN IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY RELIGIOUS COMMUNITIES Meg Elizabeth Gudgeirsson “Perfect Child, Perfect Faith” studies how the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the abolitionist and integrationist community of Berea, Kentucky, the Oneida Perfectionists, and the United Society of Believers (better known as Shakers) raised their children in the nineteenth century. Each of these communities incorporated a specific interpretation of Christianity and rejected “traditional” culture and society in favor of their “perfected” alternative. For each of these groups, children acted as a space to write their own identity. Children embodied hope, patriotism, faith, obedience, and goodness. Exploring childhood and children's experience in history can be difficult as retrieving the voices of children can be a daunting task. They produced less sources and materials than their adult contemporaries. And even fewer of these sources have been preserved. This means that much of their experiences, as they happened, are lost to historians. However, many of these children grew up to write memoirs, diaries, and brief histories of their people, which have provided access to children’s experiences. In addition to relying on memoirs, the dissertation uses handbooks and guides on childrearing and practices produced by each of the communities. Finally, it considers non-textual sources, especially photography of families and children, as well as illustrations in literature and periodicals. To understand how the communities raised their child and why these children did not !vi continue their original communal goals, the dissertation is organized into four categories: the symbolic meaning of the child, the definition and role of the family, educational practices, and the connections between work and play. Each section considers both the community’s view of the child and the child’s actual experience. Often a child’s reality differed dramatically from the ideals and expectations of his/ her community. The dissertation argues that Mormons, Bereans, Oneida Perfectionists, and Shakers failed to raise their children in radically different ways and instead raised them similar to nineteenth-century bourgeois America: as innocents with the possibility of perfecting the future. !vii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am thankful for the opportunity to work with the faculty in the History Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz over the past seven years. I have learned from each professor and lecturer with whom I had the opportunity of taking a class and serving as a teaching assistant. However, in particular I want to recognize the contributions of my dissertation committee. First, I extend my appreciation to my committee chair and advisor, Professor Marilyn Westerkamp, for her guidance, knowledge, and support throughout my graduate career at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Prof. Westerkamp has helped me to develop my historical knowledge of religious culture and gender in the United States as well as constantly challenged me to improve as a both scholar and a writer. I would also like thank Professor Catherine Jones for her willingness to be a part of this committee. I am grateful for the knowledge she as given me in the field of children’s history and nineteenth-century United States history. I am also appreciative for the pedagogical lessons I have learned while working with her in the classroom. Finally, I want to acknowledge Professor Martin Berger. In his History of Art and Visual Culture classes I first considered the nineteenth-century child. Prof. Berger consistently has encouraged me to push my interpretations and readings further. His feedback has been invaluable to this project. !viii INTRODUCTION “As we value the future of Communism, we must see to it that our children - the rising generation - are brought up in ‘the nurture and admonition of the Lord,’ else they will some day rise up against us and become a curse.”1 — The nineteenth century was a period of remarkable change in the United States. In social, economic, geographic, and political arenas, Americans redefined who they were and what their future would look like. Following the War of 1812, the United States embarked on a period of cultural and economic growth. With President James Madison’s speech on the American System, the federal government officially lent its support to growing capitalism, commonly known as the Market Revolution (1815-1846).2 The economic growth embraced regionalization of goods and products. It relied on wage labor, particularly in the Northeast where manufacturing grew and slave labor in the South, where much of the raw materials, particularly cotton was produced. The transformation of labor in the North and the beginning of urbanization led to some instability. More and more Americans, due to lack of inherited land and economic crises such as the Panic of 1819 and 1837 left the rural countryside for the urban landscape. Vice and entertainment of various values surrounded family members. Such radical change caused great concern for many. 1 “Community Journal: Oneida,” Circular, Vol. 11, No. 24, (June 8, 1874), 189. 2 James Madison quickly rescinded strong support for the American System and it is more accurate to credit it to senators John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay. The term “Market Revolution” was coined by historian, Charles Sellers in The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). !1 As a partial response to the dramatic changes and upheavals in the nineteenth- century United States, utopian communities grew in popularity. Many of these communities used religion as a foundation for their organization. The Americans who joined such communities made up a significant number but always remained a small minority of the larger national population. However, they represent the overall need for Americans to reassert some type of control in their own lives when it seemed that the economy, government, and larger society dictated much of their everyday life. By leaving their rural or urban homes in favor of a communal lifestyle, these Americans illustrated their extreme need to reconstruct family life, gender roles, racial attitudes, and social morality that seemed to be thrown to the way side by the Market Revolution. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons), the Perfectionist Community (Oneida or Perfectionists), the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing (Shakers), and the abolitionist community of Berea are four examples of such communities. The movement that eventually became the Shakers began in eighteenth- century England with a group that Ann Lee joined known as the Shaking Quakers. They received their nickname, the Shakers, from their earliest days when the small group trembled and shook as they felt the spirit move them in worship. Shaker historian Stephen J. Stein described “that sometimes their heads jerked so rapidly that their facial features were ‘not distinguishable.’” The shaking gave way to singing and !2 dancing and their meetings ended when the participants were exhausted.3 Later this shaking became uniformed and controlled, like all aspects of Shaker life. After relocating to the American colonies, the Shakers gave their first public testimony in 1780. Between 1781 and 1783, Ann Lee shared the Shaker vision through itinerant evangelicalism and began to share the idea of celibacy.