Living in the Light: Some Quaker Pioneers of the Twentieth Century. Vol. I: In the U.S.A. (review)

Book Reviews55 concluding epilogue Sterling provides vignettes of four black women at the turn of the century based on extensive quotation from their private journals. We Are Your Sisters is indeed a remarkable achievement, but it is, as Sterling herself says, "not a definitive history ... but a sourcebook, a sampler. " Sterling 's principal purpose is to gather and present these precious but little used materials. Yet if her collection is to stand as a source book, the individual entries should have been more clearly identified; imprecise citations and unconventional footnoting will make the work of future historians more difficult. Moreover, Sterling 's organizational framework and assumptions about the nature of abolitionism and feminism tend to obscure the totality and complexity of the black female experience. She presents this experience through a prism, vignettes of particular women at particular times, rather than painting a total picture. The fascinating careers of outstanding women, such as Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, and Charlotte Forten, are fragmented under separate headings, diluting the sweep and scope of their heroic accomplishments. Finally, the observations that Sterling presents in her introduction and reinforces in her prefactory comments seem to belie the sources themselves. She maintains, for example, that "the difference between the experiences of most black and white women is striking. " Yet in case after case, the documents she herself has chosen show black women joining the struggle for the rights of all women, as well as white women concerned and active in the cause of their black sisters. Again, she comments particularly on the racial prejudice of some Quakers, but she does not comment on the documented instances of kindness and support shown to black women by individual Friends and by the Society as a whole. Yet even these serious reservations cannot diminish the value of the materials presented in We Are Your Sisters. No amount of criticism of editorial policy can dull the voices or cloud the experiences of black women in the 19th century America. Kentucky Humanities CouncilJudi Jennings Living in the Light: Some Quaker Pioneers ofthe Twentieth Century. Vol. I: In the U.S.A. Edited by Leonard S. Kenworthy. Kennett Square, Pa.: Friends General Conference and Quaker Publications, 1984. 283 pp. $9.00. One of the most venerable of Quaker institutions is collective biography. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it took the form of series like Piety Promoted in a Collection of the Dying Sayings of the People Called Quakers or endless volumes of memorials and "testimonies concerning deceased Friends." Leonard S. Kenworthy has given new life to this tradition in Living in the Light. Happily, Kenworthy has taken the impulse to preserve and to eulogize in a different direction. The theme that he has chosen to unify his collection of biographies is pioneering: breaking new ground and pointing new directions not just for the Society of Friends but for the larger society as well. Included in this volume are eighteen essays on Emily Greene Balch, Kenneth and Elise Boulding, Howard and Anna Brinton, Henry J. Cadbury, Mary Steichen Calderone, Everett L. Cattell , Rachel Davis DuBois, Rufiis Jones, Thomas Jones, Thomas Kelly, Frederick J. Libby, Clarence Pickett, Bayard Rustin, Alice C. Shaffer, Douglas and Dorothy Steere, Elton Trueblood, Elizabeth Gray Vining, and Raymond Wilson. It is difficult to make general comments about such a collection. In his introduction the editor comments that the sketches should explode any notion that there is a Quaker "type. " Nevertheless these Friends share a striking number of characteristics . Nearly all have spent their lives on the East coast. Of the eighteen, none are Conservative Friends and only Cattell comes out of the Evangelical Friends Alliance . The overwhelming majority were or are identified with the Friends General 56Quaker History Conference. Over half of the group are college faculty or administrators. The group is evenly divided between those who pioneered in areas of social reform and those who pioneered in religious thought, although many of the latter also were social activists. One has to sympathize with Kenworthy's difficult task in narrowing the subjects to these eighteen, but one must also regret that there was no room to tell the story of Elbert Russell's lonely crusade to introduce...