It was a domestic battle as ugly and as publicized as Mel Gibson's this July.

Mr. and Mrs. Chapman were an ill-matched couple in New York state with three small children. She was loud and brash. He drank. The whole town knew their troubles. Once financially secure, their home was lost to foreclosure. The Chapmans played out this familiar story with Jerry Springer—style gusto.

Then Mr. Chapman redeemed himself within an obscure religious sect. But Mrs. Chapman did not want to join. What happened next would change history.

Ten years into their fractious marriage, Mr. Chapman collected his kids and hid them from his wife, using his religion society's multistate system of linked communal villages.

With the charisma of a Norma Rae or Erin Brokovich, Mrs. Chapman launched a three-year legal battle to regain her children, calling into question the very foundation of marital and child custody law, as well as religious freedom.

The Chapmans aren't contemporaries of Mel Gibson, and their bitter altercations did not even take place during our lifetime. James and Eunice Chapman were married in 1804.

In "The Great Divorce: A Nineteenth-Century Mother's Extraordinary Fight against Her Husband, the Shakers, and Her Times," Ilyon Woo presents the earliest child custody laws of this country with vivid relevance. Researched using newspapers, records of the Shakers (James' redemptive religious order), legal papers, legislative journals and personal correspondence, Woo creates a tactile portrait of life nearly 200 years ago.

The origins of Shaker faith are explored in detail through founders, practices and invention (the clothespin, the circular saw). The composition of the American family reveals that "the bridal pregnancy rate rose to nearly 30 percent by the last quarter of the eighteenth century."

Both legal and feminist details are fascinating: "Even after her husband died, a woman had no guarantees; a man could appoint his lover, parents, or anyone else to be his children's guardians after his death."

And for tabloid enthusiasts, Eunice has all the splash and charisma of a modern celebrity. In the first of many printed appeals, she writes, "I wish the reader to consider, it is written by a persecuted woman, who has been hurled from a state of wealth and happiness, and now enduring indigence and grief! One who has been tortured in the whirlwind of affliction and woe! Very aggravating and calamitous!"

Move over Kate Gosselin.

Holly Silva is a St. Louis writer.