I Was a Teenage Shaker
In Sprigg's 25-year career as a scholar of American Shaker culture, she has written ten books, organized a major exhibition on Shaker design and served as curator of collections at the Hancock Shaker Village in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.
- By Smithsonian magazine
- Smithsonian magazine, April 2001, Subscribe
Well, that's a bit of an exaggeration. It's not as if I wanted to join the Shakers, or that they would have accepted me, even if I could have joined. By the summer of 1972, the Shakers at Canterbury, New Hampshire, had long since closed their doors to converts, figuring that it wouldn't do for a young hopeful to enter a celibate, religious community that now consisted of a half dozen old ladies on the decline.
I did live with them, however, for three sweet summers half my lifetime ago. The bond we formed in that first summer led to a friendship that lasted through the next twenty years—as long as they lived. My summer job as a tour guide through the museum part of the village was what had brought me there, but it proved to be the least important aspect of my service.
I was a girl, and these celibate Sisters had spent their young and middle lives caring for girls like me. Brought to communal Shaker villages themselves when their own families had fallen asunder, the Shakers I knew had chosen to spend their lives in the faith when they grew up in spite of the cost—no marriage, no sexual expression, no children of their own. As they grew to womanhood, their motherly hearts found reward in the care of girls.
So when I came and showed enthusiasm for Shaker history and affection for the Sisters, I entered a place in the heart already prepared, although I didn't realize it at the time. I was just glad that they liked me.
At nineteen, like most young people, I felt bewildered by my passage from childhood to adulthood. Overnight, I was an adult, more or less. I could drive, vote, and do all the things that adults did, for better or for worse. But I didn't know who or what to trust. My peers said, "Don't trust anyone over thirty," and I could understand that. The rules handed to me were from another era. They may have worked for Mom in the 1940s or Grandma in the 1920s, but they didn't fit my world. On the other hand some of my generation were going off the deep end with sex, drugs, and rock and roll. I wasn't sure they were so trustworthy either.
By 1972, two years of college had taught me everything from books, but little about life. At nineteen I was half in and half out of the egg, older than my years in some ways, younger in others. I had learned how to work hard and how to play hard, how to swear, and how to drink. But I was more baffled than ever about the single thing that mattered most; how to become an adult, to live at peace with myself and with others, and to live decently and remain undiscouraged in a dirty old world.
I had a long way to go.
That summer with the Shakers gave me something to trust. It's not why I went, and it was the last thing I expected. Who would have thought that a handful of little old ladies who belonged to an offbeat religious sect could make sense to a teenager like me? I could not have explained why at that time, but I knew without question that I hungered for teachers and that they had to be women and old. Why women? Well, how else could I learn to become a woman myself?
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