CAPÍTULO III: IMPLEMENTACIÓN Y VALORACIÓN DEL MODELO
3.4 Valoración del Modelo comportamental
We are thus confronted with a picture of early Quakerism that shows us that Friends did not live solely within the confines of a specific local or religious community. Instead, their experiences and identities were defined by participation in a series of mutually interlocking and overlapping communities, each generating its own loyalties and intensity at specific times. Comparisons will therefore be drawn between the experiences of British and American Friends, investigating the extent to which frontier life impacted upon women’s lives and exchanges in different contexts.
This ‘trans-Atlantic’ methodology, which draws attention to both broader Atlantic developments and distinct geographical variations, has been advocated by David Armitage as particularly useful for historians to view developments from a broadly international perspective, whilst enabling them to draw meaningful comparisons between specific locations within the Atlantic world.74 This is because unified states and nations had not yet fully developed
and continued to rely upon other influences, including social and economic formations.75 Quakerism matured within a culture of exchange where American
74 David Armitage, ‘Three Concepts of Atlantic History’, in David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick (eds.), The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (Basingstoke, 2002), p. 18.
75 Armitage, ‘Three Concepts of Atlantic History’, pp. 18–19. Linda Colley has been particularly influential in suggesting that the sense of identity forged between inhabitants of the British Isles was defined by social and cultural factors, rather than political developments. It was the external threat of Catholicism, she argues, that solidified a collective Protestant national identity within eighteenth-century Britain. Her assessment, however, has rightly faced criticism for its tendency to overemphasise the level of harmony that existed between different Protestant denominations. Interaction between different groups was not uncomplicated and the Quaker case stands as testament to their continually fraught relations with other Protestant groups, which led to the development of a distinct Quaker (and not national) identity. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837,new ed. (London, 2003), pp. 5, 22–23.
Introduction 27
Quakerism was never isolated from its English past and its members retained close contacts with Friends in the British Isles.
Breaking down fixed geographical boundaries and placing women, domesticity, and religion at the centre of the discussion, the thesis will show how less-known women who did not travel could nonetheless also actively contribute towards a transatlantic cultural exchange and thus influence group identity. Indeed, the place of women in both the American colonies and the Atlantic community of Quakerism is only just coming to be acknowledged as a valid field of study in the historiography. Daniella Kostroun and Lisa Vollendorf realised in their 2009 study of Women, Religion, and the Atlantic World that little sustained effort had been made to ask what could be learnt about the Atlantic world ‘through the lens of women, gender and religion.’76 The chapters that
follow highlight how women were both accountable and central figures in shaping the transatlantic Quaker community.
Much recent debate has revolved around the ‘conceptual utility’ of the Atlantic as a model for understanding issues of gender and the family. This has been facilitated in part by Bianco Premo, Karin Wulf, and Julie Hardwick’s attempts to rethink the challenges of inserting the family and the study of gender into ‘the Atlantic’ as both a conceptual place and a historical practice.77
As a result of their discussions, it has even been suggested that the concept of ‘fluidity’ in terms of understanding the exchange of peoples, ideas, and objects
76 Daniella Kostroun and Lisa Vollendorf, ‘Introduction’, in Daniella Kostroun and Lisa Vollendorf (eds.), Women, Religion, and the Atlantic World (1600–1800) (Toronto, 2009) p. 6. 77 Resulting from a roundtable discussion at the 14th Conference on the History of Women, the essays that were published in a special edition of History Compass were intended ‘to inspire debate about the conceptual utility of the Atlantic as a paradigm for understanding issues of gender, family and sexuality, as well as its ramifications for feminist scholarship’. Karin Wulf, ‘Women and Families in Early (North) America and the Wider (Atlantic) World’, History Compass,vol. 8, no. 3 (2010), p. 1.
‘may be distracting us from the ways that stasis was a dominant experience and mode for women.’78 A number of recent studies have nevertheless highlighted
the importance of adopting an Atlantic perspective in assessing the place of women and religion in early modern life. Recent contributions, including those from Nora E. Jaffary, Susan E. Dinan and Debra Meyers, and Daniella Kostroun and Lisa Vollendorf, have been effective in highlighting the complexities of the Atlantic world, as well as the places of divergence and continuity in women’s experiences.79 Emily Clark and Mary Laven’s recent edited collection on Women
and Religion in the Atlantic Age, 1500–1900, has shown the dynamic place of women within the Atlantic world, by mapping how confessional difference shaped gender roles, whilst also acknowledging that the ways women ‘acted out their faith influenced the ways in which societies developed’.80 Sarah M. Pearsall
has been particularly influential in showing the key role of families in the eighteenth century, emphasizing their agency (as glimpsed through their letters) in shaping the political and economic language of the Atlantic.81 A
similar approach has been pursued by Kate Chedgzoy in her study of women’s writings, which she argues helped shape national identities by giving expression to the major conflicts and changes taking place within the British Atlantic world. An Atlantic perspective, she writes, ‘allows the telling of more complex stories about the variety of ways in which people experienced the early modern period’s transformative process of nation-building and state
78 Wulf, ‘Women and Families in Early (North) America’, p. 242.
79 Nora E. Jaffary (ed.), Gender, Race and Religion in the Colonization of the Americas (Aldershot, 2007); Dinan and Meyers (eds.), Women and Religion in Old and New Worlds; Kostroun and Vollendorf (eds.), Women, Religion, and the Atlantic World.
80 Emily Clark and Mary Laven, ‘Introduction’, in Clark and Laven (eds.), Women and Religion in the Atlantic Age, p. 2.
81 Sarah M. Pearsall, Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 2008), esp. pp. 12–13.
Introduction 29
formation’.82 It is therefore crucial that the lives and experiences of Quaker
women are viewed in the context of the social and political developments occurring within wider Atlantic culture.
A transatlantic perspective, moreover, has specific value for a study of early Quaker women, for the mass migration of British Quaker converts to the American colonies from the 1680s, and the constant exchange of ministers and writing, provided an alternative space for Quaker women’s experiences to be defined. Visiting Pennsylvania in 1754, the German traveller Gottleib Mittelberger described the conditions that he found as ‘a paradise for women’.83
It is striking, however, that women’s position within colonial Quakerism remains a largely neglected subject. In part this can be attributed to the general lack of interest that scholars have had in second- and third-generation Friends more generally. The absence of colonial women from the current secondary literature is nevertheless surprising, since the decline of Quakerism in England was paralleled by its dramatic growth in the American colonies from the 1680s. Following William Penn’s royal charter in 1681, Pennsylvania became a haven for Friends facing persecution and suffering for their beliefs. The aim of settlement in the colonies was not for the improvement of individual fortunes, or simply as a means of escaping persecution, but to pursue a godly lifestyle, in a society where religious values firmly penetrated the colony’s government. This became known as the ‘Holy Experiment’ and replicated many of the ways of life and worship patterns practised by English Friends. More than three thousand Quakers are estimated by Thomas D. Hamm to have settled in
82 Kate Chedgzoy, Women’s Writing in the British Atlantic World: Memory, Place and History, 1550–1700 (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 7–8.
83 Gottlieb Mittelberger, Gottlieb Mittelberger’s Journey to Pennsylvania in the Year 1750 and Return to Germany in the Year 1754, transl. Carl Theo. Eben(Philadelphia, 1898), pp. 122–23.
Pennsylvania between 1681 and 1683, and by 1775 it is estimated that there were one hundred thousand Quaker inhabitants residing in North America—a figure which far outstripped the declining population of Friends in the British Isles.84
Penn’s ‘Holy Experiment’ has long been regarded as providing a model of social organisation where domesticity was placed at the very centre. Even contemporary observers came to admire the distinctive familial ideology propounded by the Quaker inhabitants of Pennsylvania, repeatedly praised for their orderly domestic habits and their rejection of wider cultural customs.85 It
is worth noting here that the peculiar brand of domesticity that characterised eighteenth-century Pennsylvania made the colony the most studied and certainly the most appreciated of all the British North American colonies during the early Enlightenment.86 Of particular value was the fact that the settlers were
able to live in harmony under the principle of mutual toleration without any ecclesiastical hierarchy or institutionalised authority imposed from above. In such a pluralistic society, the household was to occupy a central place in the reproduction of religious values and beliefs. Indeed, Levy suggests that it was in placing the domestic sphere at the heart of their faith that Friends were able to continue to maintain strong communities while tolerating the influx of a wide array of settlers into the colony.87 This unique blend of domesticity and
84 Thomas D. Hamm, The Quakers in America (New York, 2003), p. 33.
85 Chapter Four explores in greater detail the various ways in which non-Quaker writers and thinkers responded to the challenges posed by Quakers.
86 Enlightenment theoristsincluding Locke, Voltaire, Crevecoeur, Brissot, and Rousseau viewed the ‘Holy Experiment’ in Pennsylvania as compatible with Enlightenment values and devoted some attention to the arrangement of family life and religious practices in their writings. See Chapter Four for a more thorough investigation of their views. See also Levy, Quakers and the American Family,pp. 3–22 and James Emmett Ryan, Imaginary Friends: Representing Quakers in American Culture, 1650–1950 (London, 2009), pp. 63–91.
Introduction 31
religious authority, Levy argues, provided ‘the animus’ for Quaker dominance over Pennsylvanian government during this period.88 The thesis continues this
line of argument, by showing how Quaker views about the family permeated their attitudes about life within the metaphorical ‘household of faith’.
For a survey focused on Quaker women’s everyday lives and experiences, the strong domestic orientation of colonial Quakerism makes it a natural object of study. However, in order to manage a comparative transatlantic study of this scale, some limits have had to be imposed. Whilst the thesis makes some reference to female Friends living in Ireland and Scotland, the majority of individuals explored on the British side of the Atlantic will be English Friends. Further research is required into the changing nature of Scottish and Irish Quakerism and the impact that such developments had on women’s roles, but this is beyond the scope of this survey. Similarly, the American context of Quakerism will be observed mainly through a study of the writings and exchanges of Pennsylvanian Friends. Although it will not form the sole focus of analysis, this geographical focus provides a useful framework for comparison with English Quakerism through the networks of trade, correspondence, missionaries, and migrants linking the two communities throughout the period. Pennsylvania was without doubt the Quaker stronghold of North America, and where the majority of English settlers came to reside. It also acted as the centre for the American Quaker mission, with Philadelphia serving as a point of transit to the outlying provinces.89
88Ibid.,p. 5.
89 For a good demographic study of eighteenth-century Philadelphia see: Susan E. Klepp, Philadelphia in Transition: A Demographic History of the City and its Occupational Groups, 1720– 1830 (London, 1989).