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6. Strengthening the Bonds of Fellowship: The Domestic and Public Lives of Quaker Women
- University Press of Florida
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6 Strengthening the Bonds of Fellowship The Domestic and Public Lives of Quaker Women One Sunday in July 1857, Rebecca K. Williams, the clerk of the Fairfax women ’s meeting, attended a particularly “favored” meeting. Minister Miriam Gover and her traveling companion, Williams’s aunt, Susan Walker, had returned to Fairfax after a two-month religious journey to the Genesee and New York Yearly Meetings. “It felt pleasant,” Williams reported, “to have our dear Friends Miriam and Aunt Susan to meet with us again.” Gover had followed her husband Jesse Gover into the ministry in 1834, and when he died eight years later, she became Fairfax’s foremost minister. Thereafter, Gover ministered regularly to a receptive meeting. “Her concerns were weighed so long and so well,” Friends remembered, and she spoke “with a clearness and precision that left no doubt on the minds of her friends as to the source from whence the call emanated.” When Gover traveled abroad, as she did twenty-eight times in her ministerial career, Fairfax Friends often sat in silence in their meetings, deeply missing her “practical . . . communications.” When Gover died in April 1863, the meeting’s heartfelt memorial praised “her labors for the cause of truth and righteousness.” Williams, Gover’s friend and companion, emphasized the key role she played in the meeting. “She indeed was as a mother to us all,” recalled Williams, “and greatly shall we miss her words of council and the influence of her watchful waiting.”1 The 1828 Hicksite separation and outmigration to the West eroded the cohesion of northern Virginia’s Quaker community. Many “weighty” Friends departed, creating a leadership vacuum and eroding personal and economic networks that helped maintain the community’s “partial isolation from the world.” Friends worked hard to retain their values and meetings , but they worried how to maintain their distinctiveness in a region dominated by slavery and slaveholders. As Seth Smith, living in the town of Union in Loudoun County, noted in 1838, “the old stock of friends in The Domestic and Public Lives of Quaker Women · 171 this neighborhood are all gone,” and in the early 1850s, Smith would leave too. By 1860, the population of the four surviving Hicksite Quaker monthly meetings in northern Virginia—Goose Creek, Alexandria, Fairfax, and Hopewell—had fallen to under one thousand people from the approximately two thousand Friends of the 1780s. In the Quaker villages of Goose Creek, Lincoln, and Waterford, Friends faced a crisis as the community structures, economic ties, and personal and religious networks that enabled them to live as a people apart from their slaveholding neighbors declined.2 In these circumstances, the roles of women, though always important, expanded and helped sustain the community. Women like Miriam Gover and Rebecca Williams assumed leadership positions within the Society, and by the late 1860s female Friends insisted on full equality within the meetings . Women Friends’ attendance at the region’s Quaker schools reflected their enhanced status. At these institutions, female Friends obtained education and employment, enabling them to participate in northern Virginia’s antebellum middle class culture. Women Friends also forged a variety of informal ties that helped sustain the Quaker religious community. As male Friends’ economic dependence on the broader white community grew, female networks of support became essential for preserving Friends’ sense of separateness. Women’s socializing, nurturing, and association building, in short, superseded men’s economic networks as a source of group cohesion.3 Friends’ doctrine and history gave women a distinctive role and status within their community, but they still could not escape the influence of southern values and practices. Quaker women, like their male counterparts , eschewed slavery and provided steady employment for northern Virginia’s free black population. A few women joined efforts to aid African Americans, primarily by teaching in black schools. Unlike northern Quaker women, however, few of northern Virginia’s female Friends played active roles—at least before the Civil War—in promoting progressive social causes. External social pressures and women’s tacit acquiescence in southern racial values and embrace of middle class conventions constrained them. As a result, the region’s Quaker women rarely crossed the divide that separated black and white, and they often treated the African American women who worked for them as inferiors. Social and theological turmoil among antebellum Quakers thus had complex consequences, both weakening northern Virginia Friends’ distinctiveness while expanding leadership opportunities for women like Miriam Gover. Female Friends trod an uncertain path as they tried to sustain their weakened...