Life After Community: The Communitarian Women who Transformed Nineteenth-Century American Society

This dissertation examines the lives of women who joined Fourierist intentional communities across the United States throughout the 1840s, highlighting the ways they used their experiences in the communal environment as a launching point to engage in other social reform movements of the period including the women’s rights and abolitionist movements. This dissertation utilizes textual analysis of letters, journals, meeting minutes, and newspaper articles among other written media in order to analyze the experiences of these women during their time in the communal setting and afterward. Particular attention is paid to the religious practices explored within the Fourierist communities and the rituals created within the group as a means of creating social bonds between members that lasted beyond the existence of the communities themselves. The dissertation contends that these female communitarians used the social connections and personal experiences cultivated within intentional communities to engage with other social reform movements and even help shape the ideological underpinnings of those movements. Due to the role of female communitarians in shaping and contributing to various nineteenth-century social reform movements, the dissertation contends that intentional communities should be analyzed as a critical part of the history of social movements in the United States.