Quaker Women

Personal Life, Memory and Radicalism in the Lives of Women Friends, 1780–1930

Sandra Stanley Holton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781135141172
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: History

One nineteenth-century commentator noted the 'public' character of Quaker women as signalling a new era in female history. This study examines such claims through the story of middle-class women Friends from among the kinship circle created by the marriage in 1839 of Elizabeth Priestman and the future radical Quaker statesman, John Bright.

The lives discussed here cover a period from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, and include several women Friends active in radical politics and the women's movement, in the service of which they were able to mobilise extensive national and international networks. They also created and preserved a substantial archive of private papers, comprising letters and diaries full of humour and darkness, the spiritual and the mundane, family confidences and public debate, the daily round and affairs of state.

The discovery of such a collection makes it possible to examine the relationship between the personal and public lives of these women Friends, explored through a number of topics including the nature of Quaker domestic and church cultures; the significance of kinship and church membership for the building of extensive Quaker networks; the relationship between Quaker religious values and women's participation in civil society and radical politics and the women's rights movement. There are also fresh perspectives on the political career of John Bright, provided by his fond but frank women kin.

This new study is a must read for all those interested in the history of women, religion and politics.

1
Introduction

‘Thou art most terribly dear, to leave thee is agony, but I know God can make hard things easy.’ So Elizabeth Bright wrote to her husband of less than two years, John Bright, as she lay dying from consumption in 1841. She was at their lodgings in Leamington Spa where they had gone to consult an eminent physician. John Bright was making one of his brief returns to their home in Rochdale, to complete the stocktaking in his family firm, and to participate in an election there. The doctor believed there had been some improvement in her condition but she continued, nonetheless, to prepare herself for death: ‘perhaps a brighter day may come, sometimes I believe it will but I try and wish to look the other way.’ John Bright returned to help nurse his wife as often as business and electioneering allowed, and her sister, Margaret Priestman, provided day-to-day care. Hopes for Elizabeth Bright’s recovery proved unfounded and increasingly she looked for some spiritual intimation that her soul was saved. Though she felt that even in a short and seemingly blameless life she had done much wrong, she also believed ‘there is mercy and I have prayed for it’.¹ For, the Priestman and Bright families were members of the Religious Society of Friends (often called ‘Quakers’), a church in which the influence of evangelical religion, especially its emphasis on personal salvation, had grown in previous decades.

As she lay dying, Elizabeth Bright asked that her bible and watch be kept for her infant daughter, Helen, and that her text book and a brooch containing some of her hair be given to her husband. As death approached she called her sister to her, and asked her to be kind to John Bright: ‘He has been a good husband.’ She requested all present to kiss her, saying her farewells ‘with the calm of one whose most cherished ties to earth had been gently loosened’. Those present watched anxiously for evidence of her salvation, and recorded her last words: ‘God has forgiven me’ and ‘Poor Mamma.’ They took comfort also in observing no fear or struggle in her passing: ‘her head drooped a little, a sweet smile lighted up the face of death and without a groan … her purified Spirit ascended to the God who gave it and to the Saviour who had redeemed it.’² Elizabeth Bright had made a good death, and she remained a symbol of feminine goodness and piety in family memory thereafter.³

The continued upbringing of her infant daughter by close kin was also among Elizabeth Bright’s last requests. During the previous months Helen Priestman Bright had been cared for at the home of her Priestman grandparents, Summerhill, in Newcastle. Subsequently, she returned to Rochdale and the care of her aunt, Priscilla Bright, who managed John Bright’s household, One Ash, until his second marriage some years later. Priscilla Bright kept in constant touch with the Priestman family through letters to her close friends among the remaining Priestman sisters, most especially Margaret Priestman. Margaret Wood, aunt and neighbour of Priscilla and John Bright, similarly recorded life at One Ash for an extended cousinage in the United States that she shared with the Bright family. Regular visits between Brights and Priestmans continued, too, and her Priestman aunts eventually took over the education of Helen Priestman Bright for some years. In this way, she became the hub of a Quaker circle that encompassed several generations of the Wood, Crosland, Bright and Priestman families in Britain, one that had extensive links with kin in the United States through the Wood and Bancroft families (Figure 1.1, and subsequent Figures for each family). The significance of what, for brevity, I will call the Priestman–Bright circle extended beyond the emotional life of its members: it also created, preserved and extended a ‘networked family’ that might variously serve the pursuit of business interests, humanitarian campaigns, the reform of the Society of Friends, and middle-class radical politics that latterly included the campaign for women’s rights.⁴

To a degree, the continuing strength and coherence of such connections rested on the creation and preservation of family memory. Letters, diaries and memoirs of the dead provided emotional, psychological and spiritual resources for the women and men of this circle, as they did in many other middle-class families. These papers served both as memorials for the dead, and as their gift to the living: readers might through them refresh their memory of the dead, find comfort for grief, confront their own mortality, celebrate goodness and piety, seek exemplars for spiritual growth and enlightenment, alleviate loneliness and sorrow, and preserve extensive bonds of kinship, despite physical separation and the passage of time.⁵ The gathering in of such material was undertaken originally only for an audience comprising near kin. It served to express and reaffirm shared religious, political and social values, not least in terms of the place of churches within civil society, and the space they provided for the enactment of forms of Christian citizenship for women as well as for men.⁶ It also served as a chronicle of family life and its connection with larger economic, social and political processes.

The creation and preservation of this family archive was a task largely undertaken by the women of the Quaker families concerned. Male kin might also from time to time keep diaries and write family letters and memoirs of the dead. But it appears to have been the women of this circle who ensured the continuing life of family memory by beginning the systematic creation, collection and passing on of such an archive, largely now contained within the Millfield Papers and the Sarah Bancroft Clark papers, both comprising

Figure 1.1 The kinship networks of Helen Priestman Bright Clark (with location where known, and religious affiliation where this is known not to be the Society of Friends)

women’s private papers for the greater part.⁷ These sources provide a perspective on history through the written reflections of a group of related Quaker women from the modest but comfortably placed ranks of nineteenth-century shopkeepers and manufacturers. They include accounts of the spiritual life, domestic relationships, sewing groups, philanthropic societies, and close emotional relationships that formed female worlds among more well-to-do women at this time. But the women of this family circle also lived alongside men, of course, and the interests, activities and values of both sexes clearly overlapped, where they did not merge, at many points. Therefore, such sources provide not only ‘insider’ views of women’s worlds,⁸ but also accounts of how women’s prescribed roles within the family related to other worlds – of church government, of theological disputation, of voluntary organisation, of business, of politics, of class relations, of cultural pursuits, of various modes of intimacy between the sexes, of what it might mean among these circles to be Quakerly and womanly at this time. Such an archive offers, then, a fresh viewpoint from the more conventional materials of history: government papers, parliamentary debates, newspapers and so on, sources that overwhelmingly reflect how the world looked from the perspective of men, and of men in public life, belonging to various elites among their own sex. It also holds representations of a past world as understood through a particular religious mentality. This encompassed a considerable variety, as we shall see, but reflected, nonetheless, a distinctive meaning with which such women might invest their own lives, not least in a shared understanding of the relation between the past of their families and their own present.

Quaker women as a generality were better known at this time for the nicety of their domestic arrangements, for their good works, for their thorough if practical education and for notions of female modesty that led them in general to shun the public eye. The Anglican anti-slavery campaigner, Thomas Clarkson, promoted such a stereotype in his account of Friends, for example.⁹ But women Friends also appeared distinctive among their sex, and Clarkson concluded that such difference arose from their ‘public character’, noting, for example, how they might hold most of the offices in their church and take part in their own business meetings. Such participation, he believed, encouraged among women Friends the ‘thought, and foresight, and judgment’ that gave them this ‘new cast’ of character. He associated such an advance with a fuller realisation of Christian values among Quakers than among other congregations, where ‘Women are still weighed in a different scale from men.’ On the basis of such observations, he declared: ‘This is a new era in female history.’¹⁰ His account contained a degree of overstatement, as we shall see, and more recent accounts of the position of women Friends in this period continue to veer between celebration and a more muted assessment.¹¹ Nonetheless, the significance of the roles of Quaker women as ministers, elders and overseers of the church, as probably among the first women to begin to limit their fertility in the nineteenth century,¹² and as philanthropists, humanitarians and reformers all suggest a picture that moves beyond the stereotype of the domestic, retiring and modest woman Friend. So it may not seem so surprising that the presence of Quaker women has begun to be charted among the leadership of the radical wing of the women’s movement from the mid-1860s.¹³

The presence of Unitarian and Quaker women has long been routinely noted in general histories of the women’s movement. Now a more complex understanding is emerging: women Friends were not to the fore in the intellectual and ideological foundations of the women’s movement in the 1840s and 1850s, for example,¹⁴ a role largely undertaken by a number of ‘radical Unitarian’ women whose ideas about women’s position have recently received more extensive recognition.¹⁵ The Priestman–Bright circle joined the women’s rights movement at a later stage, and they were also unusual among women Friends in such participation, as well as in their involvement in radical politics more broadly, and in their efforts to reform the government of the Society of Friends. Clearly, Quaker women differed among themselves as to how to enact the ‘public’ character identified in them by Clarkson, and those differences suggest changing understandings of women’s nature and their proper place, of the meaning of ‘public’,¹⁶ and of the proper relationship between church and polity.¹⁷ The preservation of so many of their letters and diaries allows the historian to explore subjective understandings of such issues and of how these women engaged with the discourses of gender, class, race, religion and politics that surrounded them. Family relations were central to the roles women were able to play in civil society and in public life, and sources such as these also allow us to reconstruct particular domestic cultures, to examine them for distinctive characteristics and to explore further the role of gender relations in the creation of the middle class. They make it possible, that is to say, to view public life from the perspective of the domestic arena. In this case, the active creation, collection and preservation of personal papers among this circle of women suggest the importance of family history and memory in their understanding of the relationship of the present to the past. Such material also suggests the possible sources of union between personal and public selves, not least in responses they contain to the contemporaneous debate on ‘the woman question’.

The response of members of this circle to evangelical religion will receive particular attention. A number of studies of the middle class in this period have established the importance of evangelicalism as a cultural force in shaping ideologies of gender difference, in the formation of class-consciousness and in the creation of civil society.¹⁸ Similarly, histories of the Society of Friends have emphasised the profound impact of evangelical beliefs on nineteenth-and twentieth-century Friends, especially as a major factor in the revival of Quakerism.¹⁹ The influence of evangelical religion also led to serious tensions and eventual schisms with the Society of Friends, in both Britain and the United States in this period. Its impact was various and complex among the Priestman–Bright circle, shaping the religious outlook of its members in differing ways, not least in their relation to public life. Money, too, shaped the values and opportunities available to these six women. Middle-class women’s relationship to property in this period was also complex, especially after marriage. It reflected a mix of legal restrictions and the decline of dower rights, along-side the growing use of marriage settlements and trusts, as well as informal understandings and domestic cultures that might challenge conventional expectations on such matters. Though the evidence is patchy, the sources examined here suggest the significance of what will be termed ‘women’s money’, how it was constituted and controlled, how it informed gender relations within the family and the roles women might play both within middle-class enterprise, and outside the family, in this period.

The nature and content of this family archive allows an examination of what Amanda Vickery has termed the ‘unpredictable variety of private experience’.²⁰ Its method is that of a ‘microhistory’ that explores the lives of particular persons, their relationship to each other, their mentalities and subculture, and their understanding of larger processes and structures.²¹ Its form is that of collective biography and the subjects selected here are examined in terms of their particularity, not for their typicality, or as exemplars.²² The discussion will focus on the lives of six women, selected from among three successive generations of this kinship circle to allow the narrative to move across time. Marriage among this circle of women seems often to have been less constraining than the conventions of the day might lead us to expect. Equally, the period covered saw new opportunities arising for single women among the middle class. So, of each generation one of those selected was married and one was single, allowing also a further point of comparison as marriage and spinsterhood placed women in a different relation both to their families and to their society. My choice was directed also to some extent by the power of individual voices, some of which emerge more strongly than others from the archive because of the forcefulness of a particular personality, individual powers of expression, a reflective turn of mind, contingencies in the survival of documents or a mixture of such elements. They share, that is to say, a particular ability to communicate between the living and the dead, to represent the self with some force in what was written and still may be read.

The creation and maintenance of family memory among this circle was encouraged through oral storytelling and its written recording, through the passing on of houses, furniture, books and, most of all, of old diaries and letters. Hence, some of the idiosyncratic declarations and expressions of my first subject, Margaret Wood (1783–1859) remain current in family memory even today. Almost two hundred years after her birth, subsequent generations of her kin might sit in her rocking chair, ‘very handsome, but high and severe’, enjoy the sampler on ‘Industry’ that she sewed as a pupil at Ackworth School, read her family chronicle, journal and letters, share recorded memories of her from those who had known her in life, and so learn from her cultural legacy.²³

A very different sensibility from Margaret Wood’s emerges from the letters, memoranda and memoir of Rachel Priestman (1791–1854), a Quaker minister and mother of Elizabeth Bright, whose story is considered next. Later chapters move on to discuss the lives of two members of the next generation, Margaret Priestman (1817–1905), subsequently, Wheeler and then Tanner), eldest surviving daughter of Rachel Priestman, together with that of a younger daughter, Anna Maria Priestman (1828–1914) who remained single; and, for the next generation, their niece, Helen Priestman Bright (1840–1927, subsequently, Clark), who was also Rachel Priestman’s granddaughter, and Margaret Wood’s great-niece. Prior to her marriage, Helen Priestman Bright sometimes joined Margaret Wood, her servant-companion, Eliza Oldham, and a second cou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Margaret Wood (1783–1859): Quaker spinster and shopkeeper
• 3 Kinship, money and worldliness
• 4 Rachel Priestman (1791–1854): a ‘public Friend’
• 5 Marriages, births and deaths: the formation of the Priestman–Bright circle
• 6 Religion, family and public life
• 7 Sisters, marriage and friendship
• 8 The single life: Anna Maria Priestman (1828–1914) and Margaret Wheeler (1817–1905)
• 9 Family, friendship and politics: Helen Priestman Bright (1840–1927)
• 10 Marriage, money and the networked family
• 11 Helen Clark, family life and politics
• 12 The changing order: family, friendship and politics in the late nineteenth century
• 13 Suffragism and democracy
• 14 The Priestman–Bright circle and women’s history
• Abbreviations in notes
• Notes
• Select bibliography
• Index