As The Twig is Bent: Quaker Ideas of Childhood

AS THE TWiG IS BENT: QUAKER ¡DEAS OF CHILDHOOD By Jerry W. Frost* When John Woolman was born on October 19, 1720, he became the responsibility of two groups, his parents and the Burlington Monthly Meeting. His parents had the primary obligations of feeding , clothing, educating, and disciplining him. The authority of the parents was God-given: "Honour your father and your mother, that your days may be long." The members of Burlington Monthly Meeting to which the Woolmans belonged thought of themselves as a second family, the people of God exercising a sacred responsibility to assist in rearing the child. Within a few days of his birth, John Woolman was enrolled as a member of the meeting, a ceremony that was more legal than religious . For instance, in England, in the absence of baptism, the state required some test of legitimacy, and the laws of Pennsylvania demanded registers of the inhabitants. Meetings formulated lists of births, marriages, and deaths, and all religious bodies were eventually required by law to keep such records. Because frivolity was forbidden , the Friends were supposed to make no special preparations and have no feast at the naming of the child.1 Witnesses of the birth, weighty Friends, and the immediate family gathered. After a time of silence the father pronounced the name, which might be chosen for its religious connotations or because it was a family name, the witnesses signed a certificate of birth and "John Woolman. Son of the said Samuel Woolman and Elizabeth his Wife . . . was born the 19th. 8 mo. 1720" was entered on the register of births and deaths.2 In his early years the meeting would serve John chiefly as an insurance policy. If the immediate family became financially insolvent , the meeting might make loans, give money, seeds, tools or perhaps a cow to the Woolmans so that the family might survive. If there were too many brothers and sisters for the parents to support, the meeting could take the responsibility of placing some of the *Assistant Professor of History, Vassar College. 1.John Willsford, A Brief Exhortation (Philadelphia, 1691), p. 5. 2.Burlington Monthly Meeting, Births and Deaths, 1682-1800; cf. William Penn, A Collection of the Works of William Penn (London, 1726), I, 870. 67 68QUAKER HISTORY children for rearing in good Quaker homes. If Friend Woolman died and John's mother wished to remarry, the meeting would demand that the boy's inheritance be preserved and that he be well taken care of. If both parents died, the meeting would serve as an emergency set of parents. John would be put out to Friends and later be apprenticed with his master guaranteeing clothing, education, and training in a profession. The meeting would pay the apprenticeship fee if necessary and supervise the indenture so that no undue obligation was placed upon the orphan. The religious status of the infant in Quakerism was far different from that of the child of Catholic, Lutheran, or Calvinist parents. Before the Reformation a father and mother took their baby as soon as possible to the church for baptism; the sacrament would save him from perdition by covering the taint of original sin. Lutherans and Anglicans continued this teaching. The status of a little child was more of a problem in the Reformed churches, for the harshness of the doctrine of predestination was apparent in teachings about children. AU children were believed to be flawed by original sin and in their natural condition were damned. If the infant were predestined to election, Christ would save it; but if he were not, infancy was no guarantee of salvation. The best hope for a damned child in Michael Wigglesworth's Day of Doom was that he would be placed in "the easiest room in Hell."3 With the exception of the General Baptists,4 in no part of Christendom before 1650 was a baby thought of as being innocent at birth, for Adam's sin was transmitted to all mankind. Since Augustine's time most western European Christians believed that sin was given to an infant through the lust in the act of conception. Since the Quakers had no sacraments, they could have no...