Carolina Fernández Rodríguez - American Quaker Romances

Their Peace Testimony made them abhor war, which brought them reprisals, as seventeenth-century England did not recognize the concept of conscientious objection. However, the concern with Integrity would bring them economic rewards in the long run, especially after the passing of the Act of Toleration in 1689 which granted freedom of worship to nonconformists in Britain. In fact, as time went by, Quakers became very prominent as businessmen and bankers (Dandelion 2008: 24) because people trusted them in business transactions and as money lenders. They also invented the fixed price for merchandise at a time when haggling was the standard in business. Quakers believed that it was immoral to charge one person more than another for the same thing. This revolutionized commerce and drew in customers.

With the expansion of the British Empire, the Religious Society of Friends saw its transportation to America. The first Quakers who came to the American colonies, in the 1650s, were missionaries who faced stiff resistance, particularly in Puritan Boston, where four were hanged (Dandelion 2008: 89-90). However, in the colonies of Rhode Island and North Carolina, where freedom of religion had been established, they quickly found a foothold. The need for a refuge for the Quakers being persecuted in Britain weighed heavily on William Penn, an English Quaker. His deceased father had made a large loan to the government, and the debt was now owed to the son. Penn requested payment in the form of a grant of land; consequently, the Religious Society of Friends saw its first-scale transportation to America. In 1681 the colony of Pennsylvania, the so-called “Holy Experiment” (Dandelion 2008: 15; Hamm 2003: 27), was founded by William Penn as a refuge for Quakers. Penn’s belief in Equality, Peace, and Integrity led him to negotiate a series of purchases of land from Native Americans (the Delaware or Lenni Lenape), despite having the land grant from the King. Penn also negotiated several treaties to maintain peace, so there would be no wars with the original inhabitants as had been the case in other colonies (Hamm 2003: 28). The Holy Experiment, however, was not free from contradictions, as Penn himself was the owner of several slaves. Notwithstanding these and other incongruities, and despite the persecution they endured in the New England colonies, American Quakers kept growing in number, their communities establishing strongholds during the Colonial period not only in Pennsylvania, but also in places like Nantucket Island or, as said, North Carolina. The capital of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, known as the “City of Brotherly Love,” was, by the time of the American Revolution, one of the largest and most prosperous cities in what would become the United States. Quaker strongholds like Nantucket and New Bedford, to cite another example of the prosperity brought about by Quakers, became the centers of the whale industry in the eighteenth century. At the time of the American Revolution, whale oil was the most valuable commodity exported to England from Massachusetts and Quakers supplied the whale oil to light London’s streets at night.

New opportunities opened up after the Revolutionary War and the passing of the Northwest Ordinance (1787) by the Confederation Congress. The Northwest Ordinance provided a method for admitting new states to the Union from the Northwest Territory. Many Quakers began to move to the newly created Territory and, later on, to the states that sprang from it. They were particularly attracted by the fact that the Northwest Ordinance had banned slavery in those states (Hamm 2003: 39). Indeed, by the end of the eighteenth century many American Quakers were already convinced that slavery could not be accepted by members of the Religious Society of Friends (Hamm 2003: 34-35). Their loathing of slavery led them to move away from slave states, most notably North Carolina, but also to actively engage in the anti-slavery movement and in the Underground Railroad (Dandelion 2008: 29-30).

The Testimony of Equality also made them believe that women and men should have the same rights within a Quaker Meeting; when prompted by the Inner Light, both could equally speak up and minister to others (Hamm 2003: 184). Women became itinerant ministers, and left to visit other meetings, leaving the childcare and household duties behind, sometimes for months at a time. Thus, Quaker women got used to travelling far and wide, even across the Atlantic, speaking in public, and seeing their contributions respected. In early Quakerism, Meetings for Business were segregated: men held theirs, and women handled their own (Dandelion 2008: 22). Though the issues dealt with by women were usually less important, that women had authority over any businesses was radical in the seventeenth century; besides, being in charge of their own business meetings gave women experience in running organizations. For decades there were partitions in Quaker Meeting houses so that men and women could conduct their Meetings for Business separately. Those spaces became a cradle for women’s rights associations, and Quaker women rose as “mothers of feminism” (Hamm 2003: 184).

Indeed, Quaker women had an important role in their communities that allowed them to see themselves as equal, which explains their active involvement in a number of reformist groups in the nineteenth century and, most notably, in the abolitionist cause. By 1840, several renowned American Quaker women like Lucretia Mott, her sister Martha Coffin, Abigail Kelley, and Susan B. Anthony, among others, realized the need to work not only in favor of the abolition of slavery, but also to attain the suffrage for women. Their contribution to female suffrage became paramount, until in 1920, and thanks to the invaluable role played by Alice Paul, another Quaker (Hamm 2003: 188), American women were granted the right to vote.

Given their history, it is no wonder that the allure of Quakerism for writers and readers alike is great and has been so for decades. Anna Breiner Caulfield’s Quakers in Fiction: An Annotated Bibliography (1993) offers a thorough compilation of works that depict Quakers in fiction. James Emmett Ryan’s Imaginary Friends: Representing Quakers in American Culture, 1650-1950 (2009) is, like Caufield’s book, out of date by a few decades, but Ryan’s volume has the merit of showing the appeal of Quakerism not only in literary works, but in American popular culture at large. Jennifer M. Connerley’s Ph.D. thesis, Friendly Americans: Representing Quakers in the United States, 1850-1920 (2006a) also examines popular representations of Quakers. More recently published is Farah Mendleson’s Creating Memory: Historical Fiction and the English Civil Wars (2020), where there is a section dedicated to the analysis of literary works which feature Quaker characters in the years of the English Civil Wars. Other scholars have more narrowly focused on the representation of specific Quaker distinctive signs in both literature and popular culture, like Jennifer Connerley, who has turned to the significance of the Quaker bonnet in two papers: “Fighting Quakers: A Jet Black Whiteness” (2006c) and “Quaker Bonnets and the Erotic Feminine in American Popular Culture” (2006b). The latter traces widespread popular representations of Quaker women’s bonnets from the 1850s through the 1930s in fiction, image, film, and music.

When Americans in this century think of Quakers, many will recall the image of a Quaker man wearing a broad-brimmed hat on a box of oatmeal. For over a century, images of Quakers have been used to sell many different products, often with absolutely no connection with anyone in the Society of Friends, but simply because Quakers acquired a reputation as honest people. Quakers have not only been preyed upon by a consumerist society for their peculiar image or the waves of positive associations that emanate from their bonnets and broad-brimmed hats. Their spiritual values and their social commitments have set them apart as special people. As is often noted, “Quakers had an influence beyond their numbers” (Dandelion 2008: 1). Certainly, their influence on many historical processes and social movements has been profound, and so has been their presence in American popular culture, where they are frequently presented as pioneers of the most noble causes and beacons of moral integrity at times when the nation has discussed issues of paramount importance like the abolition of slavery, gender equality, pacifism and even ecology.