Quaker Women. Personal Life, Memory and Radicalism in the Lives of Women Friends, 1780–1930

This chapter examines the central role of Quaker women during the years 1675–1710 in developing the first colony founded by members of the Society of Friends in North America. As individuals, women Friends helped to fashion a multicultural society consistent with Quaker beliefs in religious liberty and pacifism by maintaining amicable relations with the Lenape Indians and non-Quaker European settlers. At the same time, however, Friends failed to acknowledge the inconsistency of exploiting enslaved African Americans with Quaker ideals. As leaders of the Salem, Burlington, Chesterfield, and Newton (later Haddonfield) monthly meetings, Quaker women also helped to shape West New Jersey society by strengthening rules of discipline to prevent their children and other Friends from marrying non-Quakers and adopting ‘outward vanities’.

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Stock Characters with Stiff-Brimmed Bonnets

10.1093/oso/9780198814221.003.0006 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Erin Bell

Keyword(s):

Hegemonic Masculinity ◽

Political Influence ◽

Active Role ◽

Male Identity ◽

Continuity And Change ◽

Unusual Position ◽

Representations Of Women ◽

Women Friends ◽

Quaker Women

This chapter examines continuity and change in representations of women Friends by non-Quakers in the first 150 years of Quakerism’s existence. Unsurprisingly, given their active role, including the unusual position of female travelling preachers, a large amount of attention, often negative, was paid to Quaker women by male non-Quakers. Analysis of such depictions reveals that stereotyping of female Friends served a number of different ends: it sought to titillate non-Quaker men with depictions of young Quaker women, and to reinforce non-Quaker men’s self-appointed role as moral guardians with religious, moral, and gendered superiority over Quaker women. The chapter considers how such responses were likely driven by anxious hegemonic masculinity, identified by several scholars as central to mainstream male identity, which led Quaker women to initially be viewed as a potent threat and later as stock figures, created to belittle female Friends’ growing moral and political influence.

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Reason, Season, or Life? Heterorelationality and the Limits of Intimacy between Women Friends

Sociological Research Online ◽

10.1177/1360780418816334 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 24 (3) ◽

pp. 297-313 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Maree Martinussen

Keyword(s):

Personal Life ◽

Sexual Partnership ◽

Sexual Partnerships ◽

Familial Relationships ◽

The Past ◽

Working Through ◽

Competing Demands ◽

Women Friends

Studies of personal life over the past three decades have provided rich accounts of new forms of togetherness, with some pointing to a loosening of hierarchical lines between friends, kin, family, and long-term sexual partnership. While acknowledging the importance of these queering perspectives, I suggest that asking how people use ‘traditional’ relationship distinctions remains valuable. Reporting on research centred on practices of intimacy between women friends in early midlife, I examine how the competing demands of long-term sexual partnerships and family are managed alongside friendship, asking what forms of intimacy between friends are sanctioned or disparaged. I show that the organising logics of heteroromantic orders prevail, working through the contemporary cultural pushes of postfeminism and individualisation. As a result, friendships become constructed as bonus entities in relational life – necessary, but always supplementary to the mainstays of sexual partnership and familial relationships.

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New Critical Studies on Early Quaker Women, 1650-1800

10.1093/oso/9780198814221.001.0001 ◽

2018 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Keyword(s):

Print Culture ◽

Archival Research ◽

Critical Studies ◽

Early American ◽

Religion And Gender ◽

And Gender ◽

Women Friends ◽

Quaker Women

There has never been an interdisciplinary collection of essays that focuses specifically on the women of the Quaker movement—their experiences and their voices, their bodies and their texts. This book, an essential addition to the studies of Quakerism, religion, and gender, offers groundbreaking archival research and analysis about women Friends that ranges from the movement’s British origins to early American revolutions. The fourteen contributors illuminate the issues and challenges early Quaker women faced, addressing such varied topics as the feminization of religion; dissent and identity; transatlantic scribal and print culture; abolitionism and race; and the perception of women Friends by anti-Quaker spectators. Divided into three sections entitled ‘Revolutions’, ‘Disruptions’, and ‘Networks’, this collection explores the subversive and dynamic ways that Quaker women resisted persecution, asserted autonomy, and forged barriers through creative networks. It enhances and expands the position of Quaker women in the early transatlantic world, accentuating their difference from other religious orthodoxies—across time, across cultures, and across continents.

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