Quakers and the American Family (review)

40Quaker History (White) Coffin, for example, died in 1881, not 1910; Nereus Mendenhall contemplated moving to Minnesota, not Indiana; Clarence Pickett grew up in Kansas , not Iowa. One can also quibble about the criteria for selecting subjectsare Emily Howland and William Hobson really more imporant than Alice Paul and Charles Osborne, for example? Overall, however, the selection is remarkably inclusive, doing justice especially to Evangelical Friends such as Esther Butler, Everett Cattell, and Walter and Emma Malone who have often been left out of other compilations. Probably the greatest strength of the work is its bibliographic base. Between them, Barbour and Frost appear to have read virtually every work of scholarship on Friends, published or unpublished, not to mention nearly all of the important primary sources. The critical bibliography is an invaluable guide to the state of Quaker historical scholarship. The weaknesses of this work are two. First of all, perhaps because it is a collaboration, or perhaps because of the relatively short chapters (an average of fifteen pages), the work often seems choppy, lacking an overall unifying theme or themes or interpretative structure. The work almost seems like more a series of essays at times. This may also be the result of attempting to crowd over three hundred years of Quaker history into less than three hundred pages of text. This reader, for one, would have preferred to forego the biographical section in order to allow greater development and elaboration of certain topics. The other problem is an excess of typographical errors, annoying in a work whose publisher is charging $65 a volume. At that price, both readers and authors deserved better of Greenwood Press. Still, these stylistic problems do not undermine the substantive merit of the work. For those who can afford it, The Quakers will be a welcome addition to any library of Friends works. Earlham CollegeThomas D. Hamm Quakers and the American Family. By Barry Levy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. 340 pp. $24.95. Levy's original insights are marred by misreading of evidence, faulty documentation , and generalizations based upon insufficient knowledge. On first reading I thought that this was either a major contribution to the literature or a disservice to Quaker history. Having reread the book and checked a few footnotes, my conclusion is that it is both. Unfortunately, unless one is a specialist in the literature and inclined to do extensive research, it is virtually impossible to separate sense from nonsense. My advice is that when Levy discusses religion and uses literary sources, beware. When he extracts quantitative data, his insights are valuable. Levy maintains that Fox and seventeenth-century Welsh Quakers created a pattern of domesticity virtually identical to norms prevailing in America after the 1830s. The cult of true motherhood, the innocent child, the child-centered family, affection with the family, gentleness, a spiritualized romantic love as the basis for marriage—these were a Quaker creation. Such Quaker domesticity , Levy argues, required material comfort, but Wales was poor. So in order to preserve their unique form of domesticity, Welsh Quakers migrated to Pennsylvania , where they exercised enormous influence. Quaker success in creating religious toleration, material prosperity, antislavery, and control of the colony rested upon their unique family style. Early Quaker settlers created large Book Reviews41 farms so they could provide for their children. As eastern Pennsylvania filled up, fathers had difficulty in amassing sufficient land, and those who were poor experienced the cost of domesticity as their sons and daughters left the meeting. There is much good in this book: Levy's linkage of family life and social structure, demonstrations of Welsh poverty and economic success in Pennsylvania , biographical sketches of four Quaker women ministers, analysis of the orphans' court. He has used diverse materials—wills, tax lists, meeting records—and done family reconstitutions to elucidate Quaker life. The book is at its best in the sections on Pennsylvania social structure and meeting life. The thesis in Section I that Quakers created in seventeenth-century England a family order "almost identical" to nineteenth-century domesticity is simply wrong. Levy does not show that the family became mother-child centered, that the father was a remote figure with less moral authority...