The Great Divorce: A Nineteenth-Century Mother's Extraordinary Fight against Her Husband, the Shakers, and Her Times
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Ilyon Woo’s The Great Divorce is the dramatic, richly textured story of one of nineteenth-century America’s most infamous divorce cases, in which a young mother single-handedly challenged her country’s notions of women’s rights, family, and marriage itself.In 1814, Eunice Chapman came home to discover that her three children had been carried off by her estranged husband. He had taken them, she learned, to live among a celibate, religious people known as the Shakers. Defying all expectations, this famously petite and lovely woman mounted an an epic campaign against her husband, the Shakers, and the law. In its confrontation of some of the nation’s most fundamental debates—religious freedom, feminine virtue, the sanctity of marriage—her case struck a nerve with an uncertain new republic. And its culmination—in a stunning legislative decision and a terrifying mob attack— sent shockwaves through the Shaker community and the nation beyond.With a novelist’s eye and a historian’s perspective, Woo delivers the first full account of Eunice Chapman’s remarkable struggle. A moving story about the power of a mother’s love, The Great Divorce is also a memorable portrait of a rousing challenge to the values of a young nation. The Barnes & Noble Review It would have been easy to tell this story as a polemic or a melodrama, but Woo never lets us settle into mere indignation or pity. When we are set to root unconditionally for proto-feminist Eunice, Woo hints that her zeal verged on deranged hysteria. Nor are the Shakers simple villains: Woo points out that for some women who were abandoned by their husbands, they provided a refuge. With The Great Divorce, as with most divorces, there are too many variables to easily apportion blame or victimhood. As for the Shakers? After school on Shaker Day, I see the children walking back home, funny hats in hand. Usually, a mother or father accompanies them. That they go home at the end of the day is important to remember, and celebrate.
