Religious or secular, communitarian experiments attempted to offer alternative in which men and women could live together, within or outside the bounds of marriage. As a result, communitarian societies provided new visions for women’s roles. Shaker communities for example would relieve women of sexual oppression by excluding both marriage and sexual relations. These abstained communities provided an alternative role for women. Within each Shaker community, a set system of sexual segregation succeeded; Shaker men and women lived, ate, worked, and worshiped completely on separate terms. Essentially the Shaker community would provide block from the “perversions of marriage” and “the gross abuses which drag it down”. Although the transcendental
