Samantha Among the Brethren — Volume 7

Samantha Allen, that irrepressibly sharp-tongued New York farmwife, has come to Zoar to study the Shakers firsthand, and what she finds is ripe for her particular brand of amused dismantling. Under the guise of curious visitor, she observes their celibate communes, their ecstatic worship, and their peculiar gender arrangements with an eye both sympathetic and ruthlessly satirical. But the real comedy blooms when Samantha, who has spent a lifetime battling her own husband's patriarchal stubbornness, starts comparing notes between Shaker theology and the Methodist congregation she left behind. She wonders, with devastating logic, why God seems to prefer men's company in the sanctuary when He supposedly made both sexes in His image. Marietta Holley, writing as 'Josiah Allen's Wife,' deploys Samantha's plain-spoken observations like a surgeon's scalpel, exposing the absurdities that hide behind reverence. This is funny, yes, but it's also genuinely radical: a working-class woman using humor to interrogate who gets to speak for God. The book endures because its target hasn't entirely vanished. Samantha is for anyone who has sat through a sermon and thought, 'Wait, why?'