No More Quaker Heroes - or Villains

  A Book of Quaker Saints by Lucy V. Hodgkin

 

 illustrated by F. Cayley-Robinson

A Yearly Meeting preparation session on 'Uncomfortable Quaker Histories' which I attended on Zoom yesterday allowed me to revisit work I have done myself on challenging Quaker myths and legends and got me thinking about how to take this forward.

We were presented with stories of Quakers in Lancaster and in America (including William Penn) who had been profitably engaged in the Atlantic slave trade and who had not always been challenged effectively by their contemporaries. We were also reminded of the ambivalent attitude of some Friends in the past to the poor - only to be helped if they were suitably grateful and knew 'their place' and never wholly accepted as equals. In this context we were asked if a testimony to equality had ever existed.

Back in the 1980s I gave a series of talks on Quaker Myths and Legends, questioning assumptions that were taken for granted at the time such as equality between men and women and how the peace testimony came about. In 1986 I was part of the group who wrote and presented the Quaker Womens Group Swarthmore lecture 'Bringing the Invisible into the Light'. As well as questioning whether equality had always been an integral part of the Society of Friends, the lecture included examples of painful personal experience such as domestic violence among Friends. The lecture was welcomed by many but also provoked very strong negative reactions - disbelief that Quakers could act in this way and denial that Friends were not always perfect in their relations with others. A lot of the discomfort stemmed from our audacity in challenging some Friends' established world view.

We are now looking at our past again through the lens of sexism, racism and classism and what we are finding is uncomfortable. I would say that this is what an honest study of the past should be. There never were Quaker Saints. Quakers have always been humans with human imperfections, shaped by the wider society they found themselves in but also by changes in the practices and attitudes of the Society of Friends through the centuries. I think it is better and more helpful to identify with past Quakers who were not perfect than to put heroes and heroines on a pedestal from which they may come crashing down. We may feel shame at the actions of Friends in the past and seek in some way to make amends but I believe that we should also try to reach for understanding, to learn where we are going wrong now and how we may change and improve.

We may remove the name of William Penn from a room in Friends House but I hope we can continue to give him his due and not reject him totally as a Quaker villain. We should not reject his writings because of some aspects of his life because his words are still valuable. When my meeting was reading through Quaker Faith and Practice several years ago as part of the revision process I was surprised to find that the extracts Friends found most helpful were not the most modern writings but those by William Penn and Isaac Penington. 

We need meticulous research, such as we were presented with in the preparation session, looking in detail at Quaker links to slavery, attitudes to the poor and other marginalised groups. The more we learn the more we can understand rather than only condemn. Local studies are a good start but these themes also need to be seen in a wider context - for example the way in which womens' meetings evolved, their purpose and their influence.

I have tried in my biographical posts on this blog to include a broad range of past Quakers, including women of course but also lower class Quakers without much money. There are also 'difficult' Friends and those with mental health problems. Just a few examples are Ruth Follows, Thomas Shillitoe, Benjamin Lay and his wife Sarah, Josiah Langdale and Rebecca Jones. James Jenkins was trying to write honest rather than idealised testimonies to Friends he had known in the 18th century, There is much more work to be done to bring invisible poor Quakers, Quaker servants and Quaker people of colour into the light, but a start has been made.

If there is one lesson we can learn from the past it is that there should be no more Quaker Saints. We must do away with Quaker heroes but I hope we will not go to the other extreme and cast Friends as villains. Idealising the past makes us unable to face reality but so does seeing it only in black and white rather than in Quaker gray.
.

Quaker Alphabet Blog Week 21 - K for Knitting

 I have just returned from Britain Yearly Meeting where I observed several people knitting during sessions, although usually only during introductions and reports. I sat next to one woman and asked her why she was doing it. She replied that having something to do with her hands stilled her mind and stopped her becoming distracted. That seemed reasonable to me but unfortunately others found her hands' constant movement distracting and asked her to stop.

Illustration to QWG Swarthmore lecture

I have never knitted in meetings, partly because I am not proficient enough to knit without giving it most of my attention, but I do have some history with Friends and knitting. I was part of the Quaker Womens Group who were asked in 1983 to give the Swarthmore lecture. Over the next three years we read, researched and wrote. We met together to talk, edit and make decisions. During that process some of us also knitted and in the end we joked that we had produced not only a lecture and a book but several sweaters. We even used two of them to punningly illustrate part of a quotation from Mary Elson about the London women's meetings ' blessed be the name of the Lord who hath quickened and made alive unto himself and hath knit and tyed and bundled up and hath united us together in one spirit.'

An Ackworth School pin-ball with ribbon

Historically Quaker women and girls have sewn and knitted useful things, such as stockings. Pupils at Ackworth School sewed distinctive 'plain' samplers with geometric designs and subdued colours. They also made round knitted pin-balls (pincushions) in two halves, sometimes with a strip between to make them fatter and with a ribbon attached as a handle. Their designs often included mottos and initials and there are examples made to promote the anti-slavery cause.

Anti-slavery pin-ball front

Anti-slavery pin-ball back

Shetland knitting sheaths

The pin-balls were knitted in silk on very thin needles or 'makkin [making] wires'. To protect the knitter from the sharp ends of the needles and to make them easier to handle knitting sheaths were sometimes used. The narrow end of the knitting sheath was tucked into the right side of the knitter's skirt or apron, and the knitting needle was inserted into the open end among the quills.

Modern finger loom

When Rebecca Jones visited England from1784-8 she kept a memorandum book with a note of her expenses among other things. In Birmingham in 1787 she bought 3 pairs of ivory knitting pins for 2 shillings and 3 ivory finger looms (another way of knitting) for the same price. Rebecca also notes the 'Tokens of Love' which she was given by the Friends she travelled among. These include 'silk for knitting' from Elizabeth Hoyland, a 'Tin Case for knitting' from Esther Tuke and a 'Knitting Sheath' from S. Baker. Rebecca was an accomplished needlewoman so perhaps on her travels she was knitting pin-balls to give as tokens of love to others. She visited Ackworth School too and shared her experience of running a school so there may have been some cross-pollenation of ideas going on there!

Knitting then and now has both practical and spiritual aspects, as the introduction to the Woodbrooke course to be held in October this year called Knitting your Peace reminds us. 'Knitters know that the knitting process is a short cut to the bubble of inner peace. Whilst hands carry out the steady, rhythmic, repetitive movement of making each stitch with needles and yarn, hearts and minds are released to reflect on the here and now within ourselves, within our day, within our lives.' 

Quaker Alphabet Week 10 - E for Equality

Equality as a Quaker testimony derives from the conviction, as George Fox put it, that there is 'that of God in every one'. As with the other testimonies, to peace, truth and simplicity, equality is a work in progress which we do not always live up to either individually or corporately.

When I think of equality in a Quaker context what first comes to my mind is equality between women and men. It is often said that there has always been equality between men and women in the Society of Friends, but this is only a partial truth. While in general there has been spiritual equality, Quakers have often retained the temporal attitudes to the roles of the sexes that have been part of the world in which they lived and live. There are examples of this scattered through the biographies that I am writing as part of the Quaker Alphabet.

Back in the 1980s I was a member of the Quaker Womens Group and helped to write and present the QWG Swarthmore lecture Bringing the Invisible into the Light at Yearly Meeting in Exeter in 1986. The fact that Quakers had sometimes fallen short in their testimony to equality was one of our themes and we encountered a very hostile reaction from some quarters for daring to question an accepted truth.

There are other areas in which Quakers have not always managed, consciously or unconsciously, to be true to their testimony to equality. Friends in Britain have exhibited some racist attitudes as Lilamani Woolrych found when she was a Joseph Rowntree Quaker Fellow in 1993 and published in her report Communicating across cultures.

More recently Vanessa Julye and Donna McDaniel have looked  at the record of American Quakers in this area in their 2011 book Fit for Freedom, not for Friendship and found it less than perfect. Although Quakers worked to right the wrongs of African Americans they were uncomfortable about living with them as equals or accepting them as full members of the Society of Friends. Black Friends were expected to take their place on the 'back benches' and had to fight for full acceptance as members.

In the same way lack of equality related to social class or educational differences was and perhaps still is an issue among Friends. When the Adult School movement was at its height among Quakers in the 19th and 20th centuries some of the working-class pupils wanted to be

An application form for Quaker Associate Membership

come Friends but it was felt that they were not ready for full membership and a new category, associate membership was created for them. No doubt the Friends concerned thought they were being kind but
they were not accepting these people as equals.

I feel that it is important for Friends to recognise that we have failed to live up to our testimony to equality in the past and may be failing always to live up to this and other testimonies today. If we do not recognise this we run the risk of falling into the trap of self-righteousness. It is salutary to remember that Quakers are no more perfect than the rest of humanity and never have been.