Delaware Gender Ways: The Quaker Idea of “Help-Meets for Each Other”

On subject of gender, the Quakers had a saying: “In souls there is no sex.” This epigram captured one of the deepest differences between the founders of the Delaware colonies and their neighbors to the north and south.¹ Of all the English-speaking people in the seventeenth century, the Quakers moved farthest toward the idea of equality between the sexes. Their founder George Fox set the tone, writing in his journal as early as the year 1647:

I met with a sort of people that held women have no souls, adding in a light manner, no more than a goose. I reproved them, and told them that was not right, for Mary said, “My soul doth magnify the Lord.”²

His followers developed this idea into a doctrine that differences of sex were merely carnal, that men and women were equal in the spirit, and that spiritual “power was one in the male and in the female, one spirit, one light, one life, one power, which brings forth the same witness.”³

Most Quakers wholeheartedly subscribed to these principles. A leading historian of their faith writes that “the equality of men and women in spiritual privilege and responsibility has always been one of the glories of Quakerism.”⁴

In consequence, the role of women within the Society of Friends differed fundamentally from other Protestant denominations. Most Christians followed Paul’s teaching: “Let the woman learn in silence, with all subjection … suffer not a woman to preach.”⁵ The Quakers always went another way. From the start, female Friends preached equally with men, and became leading missionaries and “ministers” in their faith. The pattern was set by George Fox’s first convert, a grandmother named Elizabeth Hooten (1600-1672) who also became the Quakers’ first woman preacher and died on a mission to America at the age of seventy-two. In 1658, another Quaker missionary named Mary Fisher traveled alone through the Ottoman Empire, and even attempted to convert the Turkish Sultan Mehmed IV. Other female missionaries preached actively on both sides of the Atlantic, and shared the spiritual labor of their society.⁶

Quaker women suffered persecution equally with men. A serving maid named Dorothy Waugh was dragged through the streets of Carlisle with an iron bridle in her mouth to keep her from preaching to the men of that northern city. In Starford, another Quaker woman who preached to an Anglican congregation was seized by the church officers and locked in a cage, “and there she did sit seven hours, where she was pissed on, and spit on.” Near Ormskirk in Lancashire, a Quaker minister named Rebecca Barnes was beaten to death by an angry mob. In Salem, Massachusetts, Puritan magistrates ordered that Quaker Cassandra Southwick should have her children taken and sold at public auction. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, aged missionary Elizabeth

Hooten was severely flogged with a three-corded whip, then taken to Dedham and Watertown and whipped twice again and abandoned in the woods. Undaunted, she returned to Cambridge where she was assaulted by a mob of Harvard students and faculty, whipped severely at a cart’s tail through four Puritan towns, and left lying in the New England woods once again—bloody, battered and half-naked. An even worse fate was in store for Quaker missionary Mary Dyer, a “comely woman and a grave matron,” who defied a sentence of banishment from Massachusetts, and was hanged on a high hill in Boston, her skirt billowing in the wind “like a flag,” as one Puritan observed.⁷

These acts of violence against Quaker women arose in part from their headlong challenge to an entire system of gender relations. In the seventeenth century, the mere appearance of a female preacher was enough to start a riot. As late as 1763 the spectacle of “she-preaching” seemed perverse and unnatural to many Englishmen, and gave rise to Dr. Samuel Johnson’s famous canard, which was aimed specifically at female Quakers:

Boswell: I told him I had been that morning at a meeting of the People called Quakers, where I had heard a woman preach.

Johnson: Sir, a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.⁸

The Quakers themselves did not entirely escape these conventional prejudices. Their idea of spiritual equality between the sexes had its limits. The early Friends were not modern feminists, and normally expected female preachers to show a measure of modesty and restraint. It was said of Ann Camm, for example:

She had wisdom to know the time and season of her service, in which she was a good example to her sex; for without extraordinary impulse and concern it was rare for her to preach in large meetings, where she knew there were brethren qualified for the service of such meetings; and she was grieved when any, especially of her sex, should be too hasty, forward, or unseasonable in their appearing in such meetings.⁹

Quaker women played larger roles in the Society of Friends during the seventeenth century than did females in any other Christian denomination. This scene from an old print shows a female “tub preacher” expounding Scripture to a rapt audience of both sexes. Puritans and Anglicans forbade women to preach before men.

Ann Camm was no shrinking violet. She was regarded as the “leading woman Friend in Westmorland,” and a strident critic of church tithes. Her attitude suggests the distance between her world and that of modern feminism.¹⁰

The interplay of these ideas gave rise to a unique institutional structure within the Society of Friends, in which Quaker men and women came together for meetings of worship, but sat apart in separate meetings for business. George Fox explained the reason:

There are some dark spirits that would have no women’s meetings, but as men should meet with them, which women cannot for civility and modesty’s sake speak amongst men of women’s matters, neither can modest men desire it and none but Ranters will desire to look into women’s matters.¹¹

William Penn agreed:

Why should women meet apart? We think for a very good reason. The church increaseth, which increaseth the business of the church, and women whose bashfulness will not permit them to say or do much, as to church affairs before men, when by themselves, may exercise their gift of wisdom and understanding, in a direct care of their own sex.¹²

Women’s meetings were introduced to the Delaware Valley by 1681. They kept their own records, enforced their own discipline, exchanged epistles with other meetings throughout the world, ran their own system of charity, and managed their own funds, independent of male control. They became institutions of high importance in the Quaker colonies.¹³

In secular relations between the sexes, Quakers were unable to escape entirely the hierarchical beliefs that surrounded them. But the precept that “in souls there is no sex” proved to be an expansive principle which created a fundamentally different tone in the culture of the Quaker colonies. If the Quakers did not completely realize the ideal of gender equality, they came closer to it than any contemporary religious group in British America. Their continued striving toward that distant goal had important consequences for the regional culture of the Delaware Valley.

An example was the way in which Quakers struggled with the problem of authority within the family. Attitudes were mixed. One conservative Friend addressed husbands in the traditional Pauline language as those “who in the ordinances of God are placed to be a head over your wives.” He urged men to “rule over your wives as the weaker vessel, not domineering over them in your own perverse will, but ruling them in the fear of the lord, as those who hope to be fellow heirs with them of eternal life.”¹⁴ Some Quaker meetings also recognized special responsibilities in male heads of families. In 1677, for example, the Morley Meeting in Cheshire agreed that “It is thought good and also judged meet that every man friend who is a ruler of a family do give in a public testimony against tithes and steeplehouse lands.”¹⁵ But the meetings explicitly included wives as “rulers.” Their epistles addressed both parents as “heads of family,” and spoke of “male heads” and “female heads.” This differed from the customs of other people in the same period.¹⁶ Quakers also modified another biblical precept in the book of Genesis where woman was created as the help-meet for a man. George Fox insisted that each gender was meant to help the other. “They are helps-meet, man and woman,” he declared.¹⁷

As a rule, Quaker households were less male-dominant than those of Puritans or Anglicans. Men and women in Massachusetts and Virginia were apt to speak of their homes as “my father’s house.” Quakers spoke of “my father and mother’s house.” Father came first, but the values of the Quakers were reflected in this semantical equality among husbands and wives.

Similar attitudes also entered the institutional fabric of the Delaware colonies. The laws of the Quaker provinces were the first in America to use routinely the double pronoun “he or she.” In the culture of the Delaware Valley, women had exceptionally high status, and sometimes much power and influence as well. A good example was Susannah Wright, who inherited the property of Samuel Blunston, one of the richest Quakers in the first generation. One who knew her wrote:

Susanna Wright was a person of note in this place. Her education was superior to most in her day. She was consulted on all difficult matters, did the writings necessary in the place, was charitable to the poor in a great degree, gave medicine gratis to all the neighborhood. She lived and died in the principles of Friends.¹⁸

For a woman to be “consulted on all difficult matters” was very rare in New England and virtually unknown in Virginia. Here was another indicator that women did indeed have exceptionally high status in the Quaker colonies.

Actual practices in this region, of course, varied broadly from one ethnic group to another and even from one family to the next. Some Quaker women in Pennsylvania complained bitterly in their diaries of the soul-destroying drudgery of their lives. The Quaker Anne Cooper Whit all quoted the biblical lament:

I am like a pelican of the wilderness. I am like an owl of the desert … and am as a sparrow alone upon the house top. Mine enemies reproach me all the day and they are all against me. My days are like a shadow that declineth. I am withered like the grass. … I think there is no comfort anywhere; nothing but sorrow at home … I was very unwell and often thinks I can’t live long.¹⁹

Still more wretched was Anne Cooper Whitall’s friend Alice Hayes, who suffered many indignities from her overbearing husband:

Many trials she met with from her husband. She says sometimes when I have been going to dress my best to go to meeting, my husband would take away my clothes from me; but that I valued not and would go with such as I had, so that he soon left off that.²⁰

Anne Cooper Whitall commented,

I do believe there is much to met with now from the men as she met with, and where will the truth get to, or who will dare to say they have it.²¹

But other households came closer to the ideal. Some Quaker husbands actively supported their wives in social activities that were forbidden outright to women in other Christian cultures. In Wrightstown, Pennsylvania, for example, Samuel Bownas recalled a woman who “had something to say, though but little, as a minister, and her husband thought she did not give way to her gift as [often as] she ought.” He encouraged her to speak out, and to take a leading role in her community. The range of custom was very broad in the Delaware Valley. But it was not the same range as in other English colonies.²²

These gender ways arose not only from the religious beliefs of the Quakers, but also from the regional culture of England’s North Midlands. In the mother country, Quaker teachings on gender (and many other questions) found their strongest following within an area which had a distinct ethnic character, as a consequence of having been heavily settled from Scandinavia. The coastline of Lancashire and Cheshire, with its many rivers and sheltered bays, provided easy access for Norse invaders who colonized the North Midlands more densely than any other part of England. Scholars have noted a striking spatial correlation between the north midland region where Quakers flourished and the area of Viking colonization.²³

In Scandinavian culture, women enjoyed positions of high social status, with full legal rights. The burial mounds of females were on a par with males of the same rank. The Norse sagas were full of strong-minded and independent women who were not culturally equal to men in all respects but who expected to be treated with equality of esteem. A notable example in Njal’s Saga was Hallgerd, a “hard-willed” and high-spoken Viking lady who talked with “confidence and ease” in the presence of men. In the Laxdaela Saga there was Unn the Deep Minded who led her male kin from Britain to Iceland. And there was the great Viking heroine Gudrun, “the loveliest woman in Iceland … the shrewdest and best spoken of women,” who inspired men with her dreams.²⁴

In many respects the Viking women who settled England’s North Midlands were very different from the Quakers who came after them. Before the arrival of Christianity, Norse females carried daggers in their dresses and did not hesitate to use them when treated with disrespect. The sagas tell of more than one Norse warrior who returned in triumph from some epic slaughter only to be murdered by his Viking wife for a minor act of domestic incivility. But even as Quaker women turned against this violent past, they preserved the strength of character, independence of mind, tenacity of purpose and high courage of their Scandinavian ancestors, and also demanded in their different way to be treated with respect. If the Quaker doctrine that “in souls there is no sex” arose from a religious belief, that religion in turn developed within an ethnic and a regional culture which had important consequences for Anglo-American history.