God is Father and Mother, and so is the leadership.
Because the divine is understood as dual, every level of Shaker government was doubled: two elders and two eldresses, two trustees of each, with women holding authority over women and men over men and neither over the other. This was in place from the 1780s, a century before American women could vote.
The doubling of every office is one of the most thorough institutional expressions of gender parity in Western religious history, and it long predates any secular equivalent. Each family had two elders and two eldresses with spiritual authority, two deacons and two deaconesses over the work, and the Ministry at New Lebanon that governed the whole society was likewise two men and two women. Authority did not cross: eldresses governed sisters, elders governed brethren. Work was divided along conventional lines — sisters in the kitchen, laundry and textiles, brethren in the fields and shops — and the sisters ran their own enterprises and held their own accounts. Nineteenth-century visitors, including Friedrich Engels and Charles Nordhoff, remarked on it, and American feminists of the 1850s onward cited the Shakers as evidence that the thing could be done.
The same ground, other faiths
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