Quaker Women, 1800–1920: Studies of a Changing Landscape

Edited by Robynne Rogers Healey and Carole Dale Spencer. The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2023. 310 pages. $124.95/hardcover; $99.99/eBook.

I had not expected to weep when reading Quaker Women, 1800–1920. My immediate response to this fine book was delight. I rationed myself to one chapter a day, determined not to leap ahead to topics in which I felt particular interest. However, every chapter held my attention, and I was learning all the time.

This deeply researched, elegantly written, and thoughtfully curated volume contributes to the New History of Quakerism series published by Penn State University Press. As a British Quaker, I’m grateful for explanations of the Great Separation that occurred between Hicksite and Orthodox Friends in 1827. The women whose stories are explored in these 12 chapters represent many aspects of the divisions, on both sides of the Atlantic. Coeditors Healey and Spencer, both professors with expertise in history, gender studies, Christian spirituality, and Quakerism, have grouped the contents into four main sections: (1) Engaging Conflict and Separations, (2) Engaging Diversity, (3) Engaging Sacred and Secular Literature, and (4) Engaging the Wider Social and Cultural World.

The women’s voices are heard directly through such sources as flyers and journals, letters, minutes, newspaper articles, and scholarly theses. There are extracts from poems and novels, Bible stories for children, and biographies. In a chapter on British women Friends’ relinquishment of plain dress, black-and-white photographs capture the styles of the day, including one of Geraldine Cadbury’s 1891 silk and lace “Grecian-style aesthetic wedding gown” contrasted with another photo showing the plain dress that Elizabeth Petipher Cash wore around 30 years earlier.

A study of the nineteenth-century “Holiness Quaker” Hannah Whitall Smith and her “mystic sense” teachings on Scripture includes an excerpt from a 1901 letter in which Smith, then 69 years old, shares she’s in the process of writing her autobiography, describing it as:

the story of my soul life from my early Quaker days, on through all the progressive steps of my experience until I reach that peace which cannot fail to come to the soul who has “discovered God”!—I am putting all my heresies into my story, and am trying to show the steps that have led to them; and I flatter myself that it is going to be very convincing! So if you feel afraid of becoming heretics, I advise you not to read it.

Though Smith, a White Friend from Philadelphia, Pa., could introduce her memories of spiritual experience with a smile, such was not the case for Black Quaker Sarah Mapps Douglass, who went to meeting in Philadelphia with her mother and was instructed to sit on a separate bench in the back of the room. Years later, the writer and educator looked back on the experience:

And even when a child, my soul was made sad by hearing five or six times, during the course of our meeting, this language of remonstrance addressed to those who were willing to sit with us. “This bench is for the black people,” “This bench is for the people of color”—and often times I wept, at other times I felt indignant and queried in my own mind, are these people Christians?

She described how she came to understand what had happened to her as a lesson: “Love your enemies, and pray for them who despitefully use you.”

But it was for Isabella, who had been sold three times between the ages of 10 and 13, that I wept. She became the orator, preacher, and political organizer Sojourner Truth.

These voices from time-past pose questions for present-day readers. Isabella’s story shocked me, yet I am concerned but inactive about modern slavery. Hannah Whitall Smith recounts the story of her soul life: would mine qualify for that peace of one who has “discovered God”?

“[W]e need stories that are nuanced, that recognize the complexity of discipleship, of living within a faith tradition while challenging and sometimes transforming it,” Janet Scott, a former head of religious studies at Homerton College of Cambridge University and a member of Britain Yearly Meeting, writes in a foreword. She continues:

These chapters give the reader not only a greater knowledge of Quakers in the nineteenth century but also the material for a deeper perception of the many ways in which individuals have responded to the Spirit of God. Here we find evidence of Friends who have lived as “windows of grace” through whom divine light shines.

I advise you to read it. And a final note to say: for those as shocked by the high price of this academic volume as I was, a more affordable $34.95 paperback edition is due out from the publisher in April 2025.

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Margaret Crompton’s publications include Children, Spirituality, Religion and Social Work (1998) and the Pendle Hill pamphlet Nurturing Children’s Spiritual Well-Being (2012). Recent publications include poems, short stories, and flash fiction. She writes and directs plays for Script-in-Hand Theatre. She is a member of Britain Yearly Meeting.