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The article presents literary criticism of the book "This Is A Short Relation of Some of the Cruel Sufferings (For the Truths Sake) of Katharine Evans & Sarah Cheevers" by Katharine Evans and Sarah Cheevers. It focuses on the variety of rhetorical voices present within the text, which the author argues can illuminate the evolution of the Quaker faith and Quaker women's increased self-awareness of their role within the Quaker community. Gender roles, speech, and literary genre are also discussed.

Occasioned by a small, but significant constellation of new materials relating to the Religious Society of Friends, the essay locates these findings along the trajectory of Quakerism's legal and cultural emergence in the Atlantic world, especially in America. This submission examines an emergent pattern within the earliest representations of Quakerism, where the embodied religiosity of Quaker people was increasingly characterized as a form of feminized collusion with the Devil that resulted in a specific strain of physical and spiritual illness. It argues that women are central to the real and representational development of the Religious Society of Friends in the early modern Atlantic world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interactions among the spiritual, emotional, and corporeal were significant factors in the history of white women, childbirth, and child death in the early American republic. Though the social, cultural, and medical meanings of parturiency and motherhood have been studied by historians of early America, the spiritual aspects of reproduction have largely been ignored. Female Friends infused childbearing with religious meaning to contain its accompanying pain and fear as well as to express its joy and pleasure. This form of childbirth incorporated the mind and body into a spirituality built on obedience, modesty, perseverance, and discipline. The succession of pregnancy, delivery, nursing, child rearing, and sickness (both related and unrelated to reproduction) in a Quaker woman's life induced not only physical frailty but also spiritual reflection. Pregnancy and childbirth raised the possibility of an early death at the same time they afforded women the means to interact with God and to ask for his mercy and support. Piety channeled the existential and emotional dilemmas posed by pregnancy, childbirth, and child loss. By surveying the religious significance of bodies, pain, and emotion among early American Friends, this essay contends that the experiential aspects of Quaker motherhood were thoroughly steeped in spirituality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quaker women's plain clothing acquired a special significance in the eighteenth century. This article examines its meaning through an analysis of various kinds of cultural products, including plays, periodicals such as the Spectator, and novels such as Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740). It also addresses writings on the question of appropriate attire by Quaker authors. Women Friends' sartorial choices became a parameter from which to measure the specific kind of cultural shifts that occurred generally in eighteenth-century English society regarding gendered prescriptions for women's conduct and patterns of consumption. These changes are chronicled from the early stages of the movement in the last decades of the seventeenth century through the early decades of the eighteenth century, when Quakerism developed into an established denomination. The acceptance and eventual desirability of Quaker women as spouses, illustrates the ways in which English society began to codify and establish ideal wifely behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout the period 1860–1914, British Quaker women sought to negotiate the incorporation of fashionable attire into their wardrobes to varying degrees, after the religion's hierarchy made prescriptive religious 'Plain' dress optional in 1860. After centuries of restrictive Advices, which used Scripture alongside peer pressure to encourage female Friends to dress ascetically, Quaker women began to interpret their new sartorial freedoms in diverse ways. Through the presentation of three female case studies from across the period, this article will suggest three newly identified distinct stances that Quaker women enacted in responding to the new Advice and adapting to fashionable ensembles, up until the devastating events of the First World War. These three stances were non-adaptive, semi-adaptive and fully adaptive. Based on empirical research conducted in dress collections across Britain, this article will describe and present the garments worn by these women, to illustrate and introduce these distinct sartorial stances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the scale of Quaker women's involvement in humanitarian responses to the First World War, they have received remarkably little attention in either Quaker historiography or the study of global conflict in this period. This article explores the responses of a network of Quaker women in Birmingham and their sense of personal responsibility to intervene on behalf of non-combatants affected by the war at home and abroad. It takes the relief work of Florence Barrow in Russia and Poland as a biographical case study to consider issues of motivation and practice, and how women relief workers found opportunity to exercise leadership and authority within Quaker relief structures. The article concludes with a discussion of the cultural transmission of a tradition of global concern within their families and women's meetings, and the role it played in shaping their identities as Quaker women and legitimising their activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Currency depreciation and inflation during the American Revolution created economic challenges for women in the Delaware Valley. Some women were left to support their families when their male kin were deployed or died in combat, which made the need to earn income particularly acute. The Quaker healer Margaret Hill Morris demonstrates that free women could translate their health-care acumen into an economic asset. In 1779 the widowed Morris opened a medical and apothecary practice in Burlington, New Jersey, to maintain her financial selfsufficiency. Because of the dearth of sources, historians often overlook the healing work of female entrepreneurs like Morris and the women in her health-care networks. Older medical histories imply that women healers were static traditional practitioners destined to fall victim to the onward march of scientific medicine and capitalism. By contrast, this article argues that Morris exemplifies women who embraced the opportunities of a thriving consumer-oriented medical marketplace to develop their healthcare and pharmaceutical practices. Women healers like Morris formed critical ligaments that connected individual health-care consumers to the broader structures of an emerging market for medicines and healing services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article looks at the writings of 17th century Quaker Margaret Fell which defend gender equality in equally radical understandings of theological, spiritual, and political equality. Topics include the problems surrounding the constructions that imply an approach to quality that makes it a part of the government regulation and policy, historical radicalism of Fell's work, and Fell's effort for the recognition of Quaker religious rights and liberties.

Was there a distinct Mid-Atlantic region for either women or gender relations? An examination of women and politics between the early eighteenth century and the early twentieth century suggests the answer is no, there was not. A regional definition for politically active women encompassed the entire northeast, not just the mid-Atlantic and became the center of the suffrage movement. As late as 1915, however, the anti-women's rights forces were dominant and it was the far west that led in the movement for the vote. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the anti-slavery activity of Quaker Eleanor Stephens Clark. It concerns a 'depot' or shop that she ran from 1853 until 1858, selling cotton goods cultivated by free-labour, rather than slave labour. This was part of the 'Free Produce Movement' which promoted a boycott of slave-made goods and thus offered shoppers a practical contribution to abolitionism or even a remedy for the problem of slavery. The political, commercial and social aspects of Clark's shop provide the basis for a discussion of a Quaker women's anti-slavery activity, and the practical impact that it made on free-produce shoppers in the locale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the life and career of artist and Indiana native Olive Rush. It examines the significance of her upbringing in Grant County, Indiana, and her Quaker faith on her work, he education at the Washington, D.C., Corcoran School of Art, her study of art in New York City, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and her association with illustrator Howard Pyle. The article also discusses her move to Santa Fe, New Mexico, and the impact of the Santa Fe art colony on her work.

In 1823 a group of Orthodox Quaker women in Philadelphia formed the Female Prison Association of Friends in Philadelphia, a female auxiliary of the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons (later known as the Pennsylvania Prison Society). For approximately the next fifty years they engaged in organized prison visiting in Philadelphia at Arch Street and Moyamensing prisons and the Eastern State Penitentiary. As visitors they became subtle, understated allies in the operation of the Pennsylvania System of separate confinement with labor. Their work was reformist in nature, in that they pressed for practical measures they deemed significant to improve the condition of female inmates: the institution of matrons and the founding of the Floward Institution, a sort of halfway house for released prisoners. Their main goal, however, was spiritual, and the salvation they sought was their own as well as that of the imprisoned women they aided. As a Quaker women's group that worked quietly in the background during a period usually associated with the more public work of activist Hicksite Quaker women, they were barely officially recognized by the male society in their own day and are almost entirely unknown today. Their story suggests that the spiritual motivation of some nineteenth-century women may be a significant but little-noted force behind their contributions to the history of social reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on two women educator activists based in Birmingham, UK, in the first decades of the twentieth century: Geraldine Southall Cadbury (1865–1941) and Margaret Ann Backhouse (1887–1977). Motivated by a common belief in education as a force for progressive social change Cadbury and Backhouse were both Quakers who shared similar social backgrounds and were active in a range of educational and humanitarian causes. This article presents two episodes from their broader lives of activism to explore how transnational exchanges in which they were involved were inscribed onto a local educational landscape, and the role that their faith, and their profound belief in the power of the personal, played in their agency. The article will conclude with brief reflections on how we might interpret and locate both women’s identities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay examines the rhetorical significance of commonplace books kept by twenty-two Quaker women. Artifacts of remembrance, these books provide us with a detailed portrait of Quaker rhetorical culture during that era. The women who keep these books do more than just catalog and copy rhetorically significant texts. They participate in and help shape their rhetorical culture by reenacting invention practices central to the creation of powerful Quaker discourse. More specifically, they reveal the potential of three practices—prophecy, friendship, and conversation—to function as sites of rhetorical invention. As they weave into their books texts where prophecy, friendship, and conversation frequently give rise to powerful discourse, they affirm the value of these practices to their community, but they also provide insight into the particular purposes and processes at work when a creator engages in such practices. In this essay I analyze these frequent occurrences of prophecy, friendship, and conversation, arguing that early Quakers, especially Quaker women, understood successful invention not as a private and autonomous endeavor, but as a social process. Furthermore, their beliefs about invention have implications for later generations, influencing the rhetorical practices of women both within and outside the Quaker community. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The author examines how women authors have justified their authority in the American society in the 18th century, on the grounds of their Christianity and religious experiences. She explains the factors that contributed to the scarcity of women authors. She looks at the domination of Congregationalist and Quaker women in the list of female authors before the American Revolution in the last half of the 18th century. She also offers a brief profile for Afro-American author Phillis Wheatley.

This article examines how Elizabeth Taylor Cadbury sought to define and perpetuate her family's religious identity and legacy through the production of privately published memoirs celebrating their Quaker heritage and the creation of a personal archive chronicling their contemporary lives devoted to religiously inspired social action. Taylor Cadbury constructed narratives which forged a connection between the Quaker ministry and philanthropy of her ancestors and the religious and social service of more recent generations as a means of consolidating a collective identity among her family. The article considers how Taylor Cadbury shaped her own identity in relation to the religious values of her female Quaker predecessors through the personal papers which she collected. By exploring Taylor Cadbury's efforts to preserve material recording her family's Quaker faithfulness, the article demonstrates the significance of family archives for sustaining Quaker kinship networks and understanding Friends' engagement with Quaker history during the early twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to examine the position of single women within the Religious Society of Friends during the period 1780-1860, suggesting that they had a considerable amount of self-government and choice in the way they organised their lives. In a period in which remaining an unmarried woman was portrayed as being undesirable, it is surprising how many Quaker women apparently chose to remain unmarried. It has to be recognised that demographics played a part in this and they show that in this period it was likely that the Religious Society of Friends had a higher than average percentage of single women. Recent research is questioning the assumption that to be a single woman in this period was undesirable. It is being suggested that for many women, remaining single had advantages both for themselves and for their families. Rather than being a burden, frequently they were essential members of the family enterprise and it was choice rather than the inability to find a husband that was an element in their remaining unmarried. This paper suggests that the ethos of the Religious Society of Friends and the structure of its organisation offered Quaker women opportunities for involvement in a range of activities, both within their own and within the wider community, which encouraged them not to see marriage as being the ultimate achievement of their lives. In choosing to remain single, many Quaker women sought to preserve their autonomy and self-will, allowing them to follow their own path to self-fulfilment and happiness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arguments for popular education in the twentieth century were articulated through a variety of media including publications, exhibitions and the press. Such arguments were also often directly linked to ideas about change and social justice. This article addresses both of these elements - the media and social justice. In so doing it makes a contribution to the largely neglected field of study that is international humanitarian activism by women. It adopts a case-study approach to address one particular aspect of their activism, specifically initiatives in popular education by women who were also relief workers in the field. Throughout her life the British teacher, author and humanitarian activist Francesca Wilson used a variety of strategies to raise public awareness of the plight of refugees and displaced persons affected by war and famine in Europe. Through autobiographical and historical accounts, the press, radio broadcasts, exhibitions, public meetings and educational organisations, she sought to change popular perceptions of the displaced, and to influence the educational and organisational policies and practices of relief agencies. This article begins by locating her within a wider group of comparable female educator activists before going on to explore how she adapted a wide variety of media tools to convey her message to a range of different audiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early modern Quaker women writers reflected, and to some extent aided, the development of the Religious Society of Friends from confrontational, persecuted iconoclasts to an organized group that began to enjoy a measure of tolerance and respect. A more conciliatory approach succeeds to the aggressive proselytizing of Esther Biddle, Dorothy Waugh, Katharine Evans and Sarah Cheevers. The women's meetings organized by Margaret Fell encouraged the composition of intimate spiritual autobiographies, in which survivors of the earliest days recall former, more extreme, attitudes. Some points, however, admit no compromise: adopting plain dress could cause distress, humiliation and misunderstandings when apparel was a mark of status in a hierarchical society; addressing all individuals, regardless of rank, with the familiar “thee” and “thou” instead of the more respectful “you” could have serious consequences. Mary Penington, Barbara Blaugdone and Elizabeth Webb recall how painful it was to conform to these demands. Their intimate narrative voice connects with the eighteenth-century taste for fictions whose readers are expected to empathize with the sufferings of virtuous heroines, rejoice in their achievements and understand their innermost desires. Their insistence that women have independent minds, and that all are equal before God, brings them close to Samuel Richardson's Pamela. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines three themes relating to the beliefs and actions of Mary Morris Knowles (1733-1807) as a devout Quaker woman, incorporates new research and places her in multiple contexts within eighteenth-century Quakerism. Considering Knowles in relation to the themes of self and collective identity, her concepts and practices of womanhood in the private, social and public spheres and her theology and religious practices raises new questions about Quakerliness, or ways of being a Quaker. How wide and diverse was the spectrum of behavior considered appropriate for a Quaker woman and did it change over time? Was it possible for Knowles to be devout as well as worldly and did that make her a 'gay' Quaker? The answers to these questions indicate the need for further research to assess various ways of being a Quaker in eighteenth-century England and the extent and prevalence of Quietism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is based on The Works of Mary Birkett Card 1774-1817, an edition of the manuscript collection made by her son Nathaniel Card in 1834. The collection contains different genres and spans Card's life from childhood to near her death, forming a unique record of one woman's experience at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Themes of self and identity, women's participation in public and private spheres, and ideological differences are apparent in Mary Birkett Card's struggle, in life and text, to become 'the ideal Quaker woman'. One particular focus is on her negotiation of Quaker ideology in relation to her literary creativity. It is argued that dramatic changes in her writing resulted from efforts to contain her literary imagination in line with 'plainer' Quaker aesthetic values and more restrictive ideas about the most appropriate forms of creativity for her as a woman and a Friend. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last three decades, research on eighteenth-century British Quaker women reflects a range of different methodological perspectives. Recent studies focus on female spiritual development and sense of identity in the formative seventeenth century. New influences and changing contexts in the eighteenth century, especially Quietism, engendered new themes: a continuing concern with self and collective identity; theology and practices; and participation in the public and private spheres. The experiences and perceptions of British Quaker women in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries reflect the influence of Deism and Evangelicalism. Despite these valuable studies, further research and systematic analysis is needed, especially concerning the gaps highlighted in the work to date. The majority of this research focuses on English Quaker women, for example. New studies such as those undertaken by Josephine Teakle point to differing experiences of women living in other contexts in the British Isles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2003, Grace Jantzen presented the George Richardson Lecture, the annual international lecture in Quaker studies, entitled 'Choose Life! Early Quaker Women and Violence in Modernity', which was published in Quaker Studies. It was part of her ongoing work on the preoccupation of modernity with death and violence. In the lecture she argued that Margaret Fell and most other early Quaker women encouraged a choice of life over a preoccupation with death, while most male Friends (as Quakers are also called) maintained the violent imagery of the Lamb's War, the spiritual warfare that would usher in the kingdom. While both men and women developed what became the Quaker 'peace testimony' (the witness against war and outward violence), the language used by male and female Friends differed in its description of the inward spiritual life and its consequences and mission. Thus. Grace Jantzen argued that these women Friends were choosing a language counter to modernity, while the male apocalyptic was indeed counter-cultural but still within the frame of modernity. In this article, we take Grace Jantzen's basic thesis, that a female 'Choose Life!' imagery may be set against a male 'Lamb's War' metaphor, and apply it to four sets of Quaker data in other geographic and temporal locations, to explore the extent to which the arguments she sets out can usefully illuminate the nature of Quakerism. This four-fold approach highlights the complexity of the history of Quaker discourse, as well as the continually shifting cultural and social contexts in which Quakers necessarily found themselves embedded. It also brings to the fore how useful an analytical tool Grace Jantzen has given us and not only in situations where we come to agree with her conclusions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses the life of Rasoah Mutuha, a Quaker convert in western Kenya during the twentieth century, to explore the way female Quakers in East Africa participated in pastoral ministry. As an Abaluhya woman living in a patriarchal society, Rasoah maintained an ordinariness to her life: getting married, raising children and farming. However, she was also well educated for her time and sought to become part of the professional ministry of this 'Friends' church brought from the United States, a goal which directly contradicted gender norms for her society. The diverse documentation of Rasoah's story shows how she and others have reinterpreted her life over a fifty-year period to represent shifting paradigms of gender and religion in African history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes the efforts of two respectable, young, Quaker women, Elizabeth McClintock and Anna Southwick, to seek their fortunes in the fabric import business in Philadelphia in 1849. It suggests that the power and fragility of gendered work conventions, middle-class anxieties about preserving gender distinctions, the allocation of gendered space, well-intentioned generational paternalism, and market conditions converged to problematize the process of self-making for women, and argues that the intersection of social practices and economic realities acted both to constrain and expand female attempts to intrude themselves into the male-dominated world of business. By exploring attempts to broaden the context for the exercise of female entrepreneurship in an age that idealized the "self-made man," it expands our understanding of the various strategies that women quite self-consciously used to try to improve their position in American society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article profiles Priscilla Hunt Cadwalader, with her narrative of injustice specially in marriage and divorce. Cadwalader is a Quaker woman suffering at the hands of the courts and other Quakers due to the failings of her husband. Her life shows the lives and experiences of Quaker women. The tribulations of her marriage and its effect on her ministry reached its climax in the Quaker settlements of the Finger Lakes district of New York where Hicksite Separation in Indiana Yearly Meeting of Friends learned how her husband abused her and the response of the Indiana Friends. It notes that considering her life is to do more than reconstruct ancient scandals.

The 1986 Swarthmore Lecture, given by the Quaker Women's Group, was essentially a consciousness-raising exercise. It was intended to 'bring into the light' the experience of women in the Society of Friends; experience which had frequently been under-valued or ignored. Writing centred around a number of different topics including women and violence, feminist theology, women and peace, and sexism in language and education. Bringing the Invisible into the Light made a huge impact at the time of its delivery, but despite the enormous interest that it engendered, it did not lead to any major changes and no real effort was made to combat sexism within the Religious Society of Friends or to embrace gender equality in its totality. This article explores why the 1986 Swarthmore Lecture failed to live up to the hopes and expectations of so many of those who heard it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Exhorted by George Fox to live a 'Civil and useful life', educated middle-class Quaker women who did not feel called to undertake a recognised ministerial role within the Religious Society of Friends still used their education and skills to the benefit of the wider community. This article examines the engagement of Quaker women with education by focussing on the work of Mariabella and Rachel Howard (mother and daughter), who were involved in several educational charities between 1800 and 1835. The article seeks to address the irony of two educational campaigners who as non-professional women sought to professionalise the work of women in teaching. Through the use of their journals, letters and published texts, the article explores how they sought to transmit their knowledge and provide a system of training for other women to emulate, particularly those women who wanted to gain employment as professional teachers. In examining the professionalisation of teaching, my work seeks to add to that of Christina de Bellaigue (2001) and Joyce Goodman and Jane Martin (2004) by looking at professionalisation processes in teaching through the lens of Quakerism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1851, Sarah Williams received a friendship quilt on the occasion of her wedding to Samuel Emlen in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Sarah, Samuel, and their families were Quakers, or members of the Religious Society of Friends. The pieced silk quilt was signed by ninety-one of Sarah's friends and family members, illustrating a young nineteenth-century Quaker woman's family circle and social networks. It also shows the effects of the Orthodox-Hicksite split on Quaker women's social networks over twenty years after that theological dispute divided the Quaker community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I trace widespread popular representations of Quaker women's bonnets from the 1850s through the 1930s in fiction, image, film, and music. Although American Quaker women began to abandon their plain clothing as early as the 1860s, the public remained fascinated with the bonnet for decades after. Wherever Quaker women were imagined, descriptions of their sensual, fetching, outsized bonnets usually were privileged over any notice of their person. Observers saw in the bonnet a host of alluring traits, which muted the potential spiritual and political virtuosity of the Quaker woman beneath it. The bonnet itself became a convenient and erotic shorthand for Quaker women in general, and today provides a helpful lens for understanding the ways in which public memory shapes the religious feminine in American culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the work of two Quaker women, Priscilla Wakefield (1750–1832) and Maria Hack (1777–1844) as popularizers of science and in the context of the development of scientific literacy. Both women were writers who specialized in scientific educational texts for children and young adults. As Quakers their community and culture played a significant part in their understanding of, and approach to, the study of science. Hence this article will consider how and why Quakers encouraged scientific education for their children. It will also consider how Quakers, in their support for science, avoided the theological discord that was beginning to arise between religion and science in other Christian denominations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author reflects on her teaching experience with Elizabeth Ashbridge's Quaker autobiography, "Some Account of the Fore Part of the Life of Elizabeth Ashbridge." Students particularly were drawn to the drama of Ashbridge's personal life and to the memorable character of Sullivan. I thus decided to build on students' impulse to connect the Charlotte Temple narrative to fiction, as a way to get them excited about Ashbridge and, in the process, to help them become close readers of the self and the characters she creates in her spiritual autobiography. Without reading secondary criticism as a class, we nonetheless addressed key issues in the narrative about the significance of Ashbridge's rebellions and of her turn toward Quakerism. This approach also gave us a chance to consider the relationship between fiction and autobiography, leading in turn to a more complicated theoretical understanding of the genre of autobiography. Students seem to be better readers of autobiography when they use their skills analyzing characters and dramatic action in first-person narratives. The abundance of remarkable events in Ashbridge's life gives students entry into the narrative. So I begin with questions about how Ashbridge creates characters and how she represents relationships in this narrative. I also ask students to focus on Ashbridge's self-presentation and voice and to catalogue the passages in which they see Ashbridge resisting others around her and taking a stand. What emerges, then, for students, as they pay attention to drama in Ashbridge's life, is precisely what emerges in the criticism on Ashbridge: students recognize her strength and rebellion and her quest for not only spiritual truth but a voice and identity.

The peace testimony of the early Quakers was developed in a context where war, killing and death were a major preoccupation. In this article I show how Margaret Fell and other early Quaker women encouraged a choice of life rather than a preoccupation with death. While both women and men Friends developed the peace testimony, in the case of the men, the language of war (albeit the 'Lamb's War') was retained, while many women (though not all) looked for language that was more nurturing and less violent. I suggest that it is the radical choice of life, not just the renunciation of violence, that is ultimately central to the peace testimony, especially in relation to its emphasis on justice and flourishing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a study of the development and role of early Quaker women's Meetings during the second half of the seventeenth century. It is based upon the contemporary records of the Owstwick women's Monthly Meeting, held in the East Riding of Yorkshire. Rather than focussing upon the individual travelling Quaker female ministers or their writings, as the historiography has tended to, it examines the everyday organisation and responsibilities that were held by early Quaker women. It argues that although the women's Meetings were regarded as inferior to those of the men, they evolved alongside each other and operated in tandem, each with their own areas of responsibility. This allowed women to gain status as a group, rather than as individuals, in the early Quaker movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to suggest ways in which Quaker women Ministers, in a period of considerable doctrinal and secular change, used their journal writings as a tool to maintain their position within the Society of Friends. Expanding on previous work on Quaker women's spiritual autobiography, it suggests that these writings were not only written for spiritual purposes but also had a temporal dimension, providing women with an authorized 'voice' through which to express their concerns. The paper explores how in these writings Quaker women represented themselves, their work and their struggles when confronted with a male hierarchy, which for both doctrinal and temporal reasons, was progressively more determined to reduce their role and influence. Using both published and unpublished journals, this study suggests that Quaker women ministers knowingly promulgated their views and concerns through their journals to a wider audience and that their writing provided a useful and powerful medium for consciousness raising, ensuring that their readers were not only alerted to the women's concerns but were also encouraged to maintain the position of women within the organisation of the Society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deals with the role of literature in the expression of visionary ecstacy that characterized the earliest Quaker women prophets in England. Treatment given to women's prophecies during the 17th century; Information on George Fox, leader of the religious group the Society of Friends; Characteristics of Quaker women.

Historians of the early British women's movement have frequently drawn connections between the theology and practice of Quakerism and the involvement of female Friends in nineteenth-century 'women's rights' campaigns. These connections are usually expressed in terms of religious, organizational and environmental factors particular to Quakerism, and embody the assumption that the cultural milieu of Quaker women was peculiarly conducive to the development of 'feminist consciousness'. This article examines the complexity of these assumed links, through an exploration of the life and writings of Anna Deborah Richardson (1832-1872) of Newcastle Monthly Meeting. Through her close association with Emily Davies, who established the first women's college at Cambridge, Anna was part of the first organized British women's movement in the 1860s. The article considers how far her feminist activities were motivated and inspired by her membership of the Society of Friends, or whether factors outside her religious community exercised a more significant influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the views of Quaker educationist Priscilla Wakefield on the role of women in the construction of British national identity at the end of the 18th century. Influence of Quaker beliefs on Wakefield's book `Reflections on the Present Condition of the Female Sex, with Suggestions for its Improvement'; Claims of Wakefield that women have social and economic significance; Comparison between the views of Wakefield and Anglican Hannah Moore on women's education.

The article discusses the characteristic of women on various films related to nonviolence. According to the author, a Quaker woman in the film "High Noon" casts out her beliefs by killing one of her husband's offenders. In the film "The Quiet Man," a man is forced into a violent action to secure his wife's dowry. The film "Witness" by Peter Weir depicts the possibility of understanding the meaning and power of nonviolence that is depicted in the interplay between the observer and the committed participant. It reveals that the film started with its lead actress Rachel Lapp who was surrounded by members of her community as she grieves her husbands death.

Presents information on an essay written to demonstrate the sufferings of the Quaker women in Malta. Writer of the essay; What the essay consists of; Sections the essay is divided into; Proclamation issued by the House of Commons after reviewing a case; What was offered by the House; Analogy between family and state; Analysis of the Short Relation; Adoption of forms for representing the spiritual of every-day life.

Features the role of Quaker women in creating Philadelphia's charities from 1790 to 1810. Creation of a new role for women; Adoption of tasks commonly performed by men; Contribution to the reformed attitude towards poverty and the poor; Extension of women's role in the home to the charitable organizations for worship and business; Moral role and responsibility of women.

Looks at Margaret Fell's defense of women in religion. Information on her argument; Considered importance of tradition; Criticisms made by Fell.

Argues that the style and substance of the speech "Discourse on Woman" by Lucretia Coffin Mott suggest her role as a participant in a cultural conversation. Discussion of cultural conversation; Establishment of Coffin Mott's knowledge of literary texts about women's rights; Impact of being a Quaker minister on the public discourse of Coffin Mott.

Introduces a series of articles on Quaker communities and Quaker women.