Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations and note on the text
- INTRODUCTION
- PART I DRAMA AND POLITICS
- PART II AUTHORSHIP AND AUTHORITY
- PART III WOMEN AND WRITING
- PART IV EMPIRE AND AFTERMATHS
- 11 Seventeenth-century Quaker women: displacement, colonialism, and anti-slavery discourse
- 12 Republicanism, absolutism and universal monarchy: English popular sentiment during the third Dutch war
- 13 Reinterpreting the “Glorious Revolution”: Catharine Macaulay and radical response
- Index
11 - Seventeenth-century Quaker women: displacement, colonialism, and anti-slavery discourse
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 August 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations and note on the text
- INTRODUCTION
- PART I DRAMA AND POLITICS
- PART II AUTHORSHIP AND AUTHORITY
- PART III WOMEN AND WRITING
- PART IV EMPIRE AND AFTERMATHS
- 11 Seventeenth-century Quaker women: displacement, colonialism, and anti-slavery discourse
- 12 Republicanism, absolutism and universal monarchy: English popular sentiment during the third Dutch war
- 13 Reinterpreting the “Glorious Revolution”: Catharine Macaulay and radical response
- Index
Summary
SPIRITUAL EQUALITY, THE RETREAT FROM MILITARISM, AND THE POLITICS OF COMPENSATION
The polemic on freedom as a human right delivered by Aphra Behn's eponymous hero in Oroonoko; or, The History of the Royal Slave (1688), anticipated future anti-slavery demands and sounded a void in the first century of white British women's commentaries on slavery. By contrast, religious equality still surpassed emancipation as a more consistently discussed topic during these hundred years. Among its vital early proponents were women in the Society of Friends whose spiritual beliefs and refashioned political direction explain their unorthodoxy. Like Behn's writings, their commentaries derived from first-hand personal experience, but they largely confined themselves to discussions of spiritual access and compensation. Demands for full-scale emancipation within the Society, early by the standards of society in general, were a hundred years away.
Quaker women had militated vigorously during the Civil War but had quickly lost any power and influence they had garnered at the Restoration. By 1661–62 Quaker men and women experienced severe repercussions for opposing the status quo – so much so that, as Barry Reay compellingly argues, the Society of Friends at the point of its threatened dissolution began to conceal prior militarism to avoid persecutions:
Before [1661] it is impossible to talk, as it is later, of the Quakers as a predominantly pacifist group. Self-preservation after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, disillusionment with the effectiveness of political action, encouraged them to project their pacifism backwards. “Pacifism was not characteristic of the early Quakers: it was forced upon them by the hostility of the outside world.”
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Culture and Society in the Stuart RestorationLiterature, Drama, History, pp. 221 - 240Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995
- 1
- Cited by