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Chapter 5 Quaker Women in Kenya and Human Rights Issues
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111 Quaker Women in Kenya and Human Rights Issues Quakers traditionally have proclaimed a strong testimony of gender equality. From the time of their origins in seventeenth-century England, women of the Religious Society of Friends (also known as Quakers) have enjoyed full equality in ministry with Quaker men, something quite unusual three and a half centuries ago. More recently Quaker women in England and North America have been disproportionately active in the woman’s suffrage and other women’s rights movements. Quaker missionaries who came to Kenya emphasized this teaching. As Jeremiah Mogufu recalled, “In all matters, Friends taught equality. They were among the first to allow women in the pulpit because they believed that God speaks through everybody. Age, sex, or education has no distinction in their souls before God.”1 Elisha Wakube remarked, “The Kenyan Quakers have [a] testimon[y] which favour[s]. . . equality of all human beings,” and in living up to this testimony, Kenyan Quakers have taken such stands as “promot[ing] girls’ education [and] facilitat [ing] the participation of women in public life.” 2 The purpose of this essay is to examine how this Quaker testimony of equality, which often has resulted in active advocacy of women’s rights, has manifested itself in the quite different cultural context of twentieth- and twenty-first century Kenya. Stephen W. Angell Chapter 5 112 Quaker Women in Kenya The Quaker testimony of equality has deep and evolving roots, dating back to the period of Quaker origins in mid-seventeenth century England. “Christ has come to teach his people himself” through an inward light in each person, declared Quaker founder George Fox; this location of the divine inside every individual led early Quakers to what their contemporaries often regarded as dangerously radical stands toward a universalizing affirmation of humanity. For example, they insisted on addressing any person with “thee” or “thou,” rather than the more polite “you”; and they refused to take off their hats in the presence of nobility. From their beginnings in the 1650s, women were regarded as having an equal right to preach the message of Christ, should they perceive Christ calling them to do so. Numerous tracts, most famously Margaret Fell’s 1666 tract Women’s Speaking Justified, Proved and allowed by Scriptures, all such as speak by the Spirit and Power of the Lord Jesus, presented the Quakers’ case for gender equality in ministry. One notable fact about this tract is its authorship by a powerful widow, arguably the most influential woman in the Quaker movement, who three years later married Fox.3 A ferocious revolt within the Quaker movement was touched off in the 1670s, in large part by Fox’s and Fell’s establishment of separate women’s meetings for business. Their opponents were unhappy that these two influential leaders had sought fit to enhance women’s powers by involving them in the denomination’s decision-making processes, but Fox’s and Fell’s position in support of women’s empowerment stood.4 In regard to differences of race and ethnicity, the Quaker testimony of equality was not initially as strong. In his visit to the West Indies and North America in the 1670s, Fox had been willing to countenance the slavery of Africans by Quaker owners, provided that the latter were diligent in providing religious instruction to the slaves in their households.5 This position remained largely unchanged until the mid-eighteenth century, when a mildmannered tailor and itinerant minister from New Jersey, John Woolman, gently but persistently persuaded the members of his own Philadelphia Yearly Meeting and of other Quaker bodies in North America to free their slaves. In 1758, for example, the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting reached a consensus that its members should no longer buy and sell slaves and that committees should circulate to the homes of Quaker slaveholders to urge them to free their slaves.6 A more final step came one year after Woolman’s death, in 1773, when the same Yearly Meeting decided that any member who still refused to emancipate their slaves should be removed from membership. Within a decade, every Quaker Yearly Meeting had followed Philadelphia’s lead and the Quakers had become the first Christian denomination in North America to free itself of slavery.7 Still, this step did not portend an absolute stance by Quakers on behalf of racial equality. By primarily informal means, African Americans were excluded from membership and segregated in attendance at many Quaker...