As the Way Opens: the Story of Quaker Women in America (review)

Book Reviews57 tween self or ego and God, and hence also between die present and future in history. The early Quakers saw "the Lamb's War" as God's Spirit overcoming evil to master the physical world. If we ask Keith and his opponents not about philosophical reality, but about the religious meaning of their own lifetimes, we find the Philadelphians moving out of dualistic ethics into "realized eschatology," while Keith was both more static and more transcendent in his preoccupation with the past and future acts of Christ. Yet Keith won young radicals as his followers: a lonely man. The tracts Frost includes show that when formulating Quaker beliefs against Lodowick, Keith could be an excellent summarizer of Quaker thought in that decade; when defensive about his ideas of transmigration, as a neat intellectual answer to the problem of how non-Christians can be saved, he could begin to suggest two levels of belief. The documents of change and counter-change within Philadelphia Monthly and Yearly Meetings are all here, including the summations against Keith of Samuel Jennings and Caleb Pusey, but Keith's reply is not included, nor that of the Keithian Daniel Leeds, nor Keith's rejection by London Yearly Meeting, nor the tracts he afterwards poured out against Friends after becoming a missionary for die Church of England. Nevertheless, Frost still gives us plenty to work with. Earlham CollegeHugh Barbour As the Way Opens: the Story of Quaker Women in America. By Margaret Hope Bacon. Richmond, Ind., Friends United Press, 1980. 132 pp. $8.95. Drawing upon lectures given at Pendle Hill during the summers of 1974 and 1975, Margaret Bacon has expanded her notes into this preliminary study of the contributions made by Quaker women to both the Society of Friends and to American reform movements. Her list of achievers is based upon the Friends included in Notable American Women, a three-volume reference work published by the Harvard University Press in 1971, and is augmented by material received in response to published solicitations. Acknowledging the limitations and possible biases of lists, the author's stated intention is to write an outline of Quaker feminist history which will point the way to further, more detailed researches. The main thesis is simply that since Friends encouraged equality of the sexes from the founding of the Society, and long before such a concept was generally accepted, Quaker women had both the nurture and the training to become pioneers in the fields to which dieir individual concerns and abilities led them. Their participation in vocal ministry, as well as practice in business management and group organizational skills provided through the conduct of women's yearly, quarterly, and monthly meetings, and a wellrounded education resulted in the fact that a preponderance of early women leaders were Quakers. As the Way Opens chronicles the subsequent reaching out into the secular world by Quaker women as the resultant impact of their spiritual beliefs on their perceptions of social needs and imperfections . One of the strengths of this small book is its succinct explanations of the logical flow of each generation's activities from religious tenet to social 58Quaker History action. Written as a stimulus for the study of the historical role of Quaker women, the text is also comprehensible to the non-Friend. Incisive descriptions of Quaker principles and history of organizations and geographical developments are lucid without being simplistic. Nor does Bacon dodge the less praiseworthy aspects of Quaker history. The misguided and embarrassing excesses of zeal, the unpopularity of some of die most gifted leaders, the negative side of Quietism, the ambivalent treatment of blacks within the Society and other similar failings are carefully included to provide a balanced view. Being a survey, this volume omits material that the reader may wish were included. The topics covered—education, abolition, temperance, peace, contributions to the ministry, voting rights, and a spectrum of social ills— are all viewed according to their relationship to the women's rights movement . This approach gives a unifying theme but consequently imposes limits on the scope of subject matter. Little is said regarding such traditional Quaker concerns as treatment of the Indians, assistance to the underprivileged...