Women's Speaking Justified and Other Pamphlets by Margaret Fell, and: New Critical Studies on Early Quaker Women ed. by Michele Lise Tarter

Reviewed by: Women's Speaking Justified and Other Pamphlets by Margaret Fell, and: New Critical Studies on Early Quaker Women ed. by Michele Lise Tarter Robynne Rogers Healey Women's Speaking Justified and Other Pamphlets. By Margaret Fell. Ed. by Jane Donawerth and Rebecca M. Lush. Toronto: Iter Press; and Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2018. 243 pp. Illustrations, Notes, bibliography, and index. Paper, $39.95. New Critical Studies on Early Quaker Women. Ed. by Michele Lise Tarter and Catie Gill. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. xv + 284 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. These two recently published collections expand our understanding of Quaker women and their instrumental place in shaping Quakerism from its origins to its establishment as a transatlantic religious body. Each volume does this differently. Tarter and Gill offer a collection of scholarly essays; Donawerth and Lush present a collection of Margaret Fell's writings with a substantive scholarly introduction. Together this scholarship deepens our knowledge of women's contributions to and experiences of religious nonconformity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. New Critical Studies on Early Quaker Women, 1650–1800 includes twelve essays from varied perspectives in literary studies, religious studies, and history. Together the anthology covers the first 150 years of Quakerism, a period of significant change and upheaval in politics and society throughout the Atlantic world as well as within the Religious Society of Friends. One wonders if it is correct to classify such an extended period as "early"? Even so, this extended period and the ways that the essays, organized as they are, move back and forth from the early modern period through the eighteenth century offers important insights into the world of Quaker women and the worlds those women created and shaped. This long view of "early" Quaker women questions traditional periodization, especially important in innovative scholarship in gender studies. One of the collection's greatest strengths is its disciplinary scope. The volume facilitates meaningful and exciting disciplinary conversations between history, literature, and religious studies. As a model of interdisciplinary dialogue and collaboration, Tarter, Gill, and the collection's authors have undoubtedly moved the analysis forward, as Christine Trevett remarks in her afterword (241). A number of essays uncover the lives of everyday, non-elite Quaker women who did not leave textual sources in their own hand. Naomi Pullin's work situates female martyrdom and suffering within the lay culture of Atlantic world Quakerism. Pullin teases out the ways that the everyday sufferings and activism of 'ordinary' women [End Page 42] Friends, seldom captured in Besse's Great Book of Sufferings, sustained Quakerism and were critical to its survival and expansion (117-121). Women as sustainers of the faith also appear in Elizabeth Bouldin's case studies of women educators and socializers of children in the eighteenth century, efforts that both preserved a distinct Society and taught young Friends "how to move between the meetinghouse and the outside world" (203). Interrogating Quaker women's efforts to define and redefine the boundaries of their own communities demonstrates the complex methods of negotiating non-conformity and conformity. Both Stephen Angell's and Jean Soderlund's essays reveal ways that women as colonizers navigated Quaker testimonies across lines of status or class, race, ethnicity, and religion to define their communities. On a more personal scale, Desiree Henderson considers Elizabeth Drinker's diary "as a work of literature" (146), and shows how Drinker purposefully identified and constructed her social network, literally "writing her community into being" (163). We see similar agency in Kristianna Polder's reimagining of Margaret Fell, which contends that Fell crafted her identity as a "radical 'Spiritual Mother'" (190) by challenging social and patriarchal expectations and reconceiving motherhood as complex and empowering (201). Not all Quaker women claimed this rhetorical empowerment, as Sarah Crabtree demonstrates in her examination of itinerant minister Patience Brayton. Despite being spiritual leaders of fortitude and authority, Crabtree argues that public women Friends "rhetorically adhered to the gendered limits of autonomy in late eighteenth-century America" (144). Erin Bell gives readers an innovative analysis of outsiders' views of Quaker women, disclosing the ways that Quakers themselves became texts in the Atlantic world. As stock characters, they were...

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