Celibacy is the Shaker rule that fascinated outsiders and the one that ended the society, and Shakers have always said the second part is not the point. Members were separated by sex in dwelling houses with separate staircases and doorways; brethren and sisters did not pass on stairs alone, and union meetings — supervised, seated conversation between small groups of brethren and sisters — were scheduled so that the sexes were not simply strangers. Married converts, of whom there were many, dissolved the marriage in practice and lived as members of separate families. The society took in orphans and children of converts, raised and educated them, and released them at twenty-one to choose; most left. Growth therefore depended entirely on conversion, and when American revivalism stopped producing converts after the Civil War the decline was arithmetical and irreversible.