Women's Authority in Pennsylvania and New Jersey Quaker Meetings, 1680-1760

Abstract

S CHOLARS seeking the source of the women's rights movement in North America discover that the trail leads to the Society of Friends. The Quakers, who in Sydney E. Ahlstrom's words had by I700 become probably the most potent religious movement in the colonies outside Puritan New England,' dwindled to a small sect after the Revolution. Nevertheless, a large percentage of nineteenth-century feminists were Quakers. These women had sharpened oratorical and organizational talents as ministers and as leaders of their separate women's meetings for discipline, and they had applied these skills to acquiring the same recognition and authority in the larger society that they possessed within their church. Lucretia Mott and her fellow Quaker activists had behind them almost two centuries of female participation in the leadership of their faith when in i848 they helped to draw up the Declaration of Sentiments for the convention at Seneca Falls. , In examining the history of eighteenth-century Friends in order to investigate the origins of American feminism, historians have employed a conceptual framework that makes autonomous female power the standard by which women's experiences should be judged.2 This model makes

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