A ‘Friendly Woman’ Reunion

North Carolina Quaker Women Celebrate Their Work on Periodical

More than three decades after collaborating to produce two years of the quarterly Quaker women’s magazine Friendly Woman, 14 Friends gathered in Greensboro, N.C., for a thirty-fifth reunion celebrating their teamwork. The reunion took place on May 10, 2024, at Friendship Meeting and included a potluck meal.

Quaker women across the country took two-year volunteer turns producing the magazine, which contained articles, fiction, poetry, and art by Quaker women on topics such as friendship, public leadership, and raising children. Every two years, a new group of Quaker women would take over the responsibility for producing the publication, according to Gertrude Beal, who convened the group that worked on the magazine in Greensboro.

The publication began as a newsletter in 1974 following a women’s conference at Pendle Hill Quaker study center in Wallingford, Pa., Beal explained. Sixteen volumes were published before the magazine ended in 2005. After the project was laid down, those who had produced it donated $5,000 from its coffers to Quakers Uniting in Publications in 2018, according to former QUIP treasurer Gabriel Ehri.

Forty-one Quaker women, and one man, from Friendship Meeting and New Garden Meeting worked together on the publication over two-and-a-half years, from 1986 to 1988, including several months spent planning to produce the magazine, Beal explained. Twenty-five women from New Garden Meeting and 16 from Friendship Meeting participated. One woman’s husband helped with computer work. Friends across the country bought subscriptions to the magazine.

Beal first saw Friendly Woman while working in the clerical department of the library at Guilford College. She felt inspired to have women from local meetings accept the task of producing two years of the publication.

“I thought we probably had the talent that we needed to do it, and boy did we ever. We had it in spades,” said Beal, who is a member of New Garden Meeting.

The highlight of the thirty-fifth reunion for attender Darlene Stanley was seeing people with whom she had worked during those years but hadn’t seen since. Stanley primarily handled bulk mailing of the magazine. She was also impressed with the memorabilia presented at the reunion.

Beal brought to the gathering three scrapbooks detailing work on the magazine. Many people took home back issues that Beal provided.

Many of the Friendly Woman participants particularly recalled an issue of the magazine that highlighted three women executives of major Quaker organizations, noted Judith Harvey, another Friend who helped produce Friendly Woman as a member of Friendship Meeting.

The three women executives, Marty Walton of Friends United Meeting, Kara Cole of Friends General Conference (FGC), and Asia Bennett of American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), visited Guilford College for a week in 1987. The executives talked about Quakerism and their career paths, including how they got to their positions. In the 1980s women were not usually leading major Quaker organizations in the United States, so these three leaders were groundbreaking, noted Liz Yeats, who wrote about the visit for Friendly Woman. During that time period, female executives of non-Quaker organizations were also quite rare.

Friends Center at Guilford as well as the college’s Women’s Studies Department cosponsored the 1987 visit. As director of Friends Center, Harvey flew to Philadelphia, Pa., where FGC and AFSC are based, to pre-plan the visit, which featured small discussion groups and public plenaries.

“I happen to know they had totally different styles even though they were all women,” said Yeats. Women leaders were often lumped together in the public mind; by contrast, Yeats’s article for Friendly Woman discussed the executives’ various approaches to their work. Another article Yeats wrote and remembers fondly was about a dear Friend who died in a car accident. Yeats traveled to the reunion in Greensboro from Austin, Tex., where she now lives and is a member of Friends Meeting of Austin.

The content of Friendly Woman reflected consensus-based decision making by the participants. On rare occasions someone blocked consensus. For example, the group decided not to publish an article on skinny dipping because an older Friend was not comfortable with the piece, according to Beal. The magazine sometimes published children’s writing and also the work of retirement home residents.

One piece that meant a lot to New Garden Meeting member and Friendly Woman participant Jane Miller was about a woman raising a three-year-old child with a disability. Miller was unable to attend the reunion.

Stanley, a member of Friendship Meeting, found the articles on family impactful because she was a new mother at the time she worked on and read the magazine. Then in her late 20s with a daughter in kindergarten, she very much valued meeting other Quaker mothers through her work with Friendly Woman, she said.

During the time Beal worked on Friendly Woman, her father was bedridden with brain cancer. “It really gave me something to do,” Beal said of working on the magazine.

Each volunteer often did multiple jobs. Sue Books volunteered to edit, stuff envelopes, and mail the magazine. Books worshiped with New Garden Meeting at the time she worked on the magazine. She traveled from New York State to attend the reunion.

Stanley drew on her experience in the mailroom of Greensboro College to organize bulk mailings, which involved sorting the magazine by ZIP code to take advantage of a nonprofit discount.

The group was very supportive. They held parties to celebrate the publication of each issue.

Those gathered at the reunion remembered feeling connected to women from their meetings as well as Friends from other Quaker congregations.

“It just felt like we were sort of knitted together with women across the country,” said Stanley.

Volume 8 of Friendly Woman, published quarterly from 1987 to 1988, is archived on JSTOR:  jstor.org/site/guilford/friendly-woman.

The Spotlight column aims to highlight notable small-scale works or ministry being carried out by individual Friends and meetings around the world. Do you know about a Spirit-led project, community relationship, or local activism you think we should cover? We want to hear about it! Learn more and submit ideas at Friendsjournal.org/spotlight.