Presents the diary of the sixteen-year-old daughter of a prominent Quaker family who moved with her family from British-occupied Philadelphia for the safety of the countryside during the Revolutionary War. Includes activities and a timeline related to this era.
More than a thousand Quaker female ministers were active in the Anglo-American world before the Revolutionary War, when the Society of Friends constituted the colonies' third-largest religious group. Some of these women circulated throughout British North
New Critical Studies on Early Quaker Women, 1650—1800 takes a fresh look at archival and printed sources from England and America, elucidating why women were instrumental to the Quaker movement from its inception to its establishment as a transatlantic religious body. This authoritative volume, the first collection to focus entirely on the contributions of women, is a landmark study of their distinctive religious and gendered identities. The chapters connect three richly woven threads of Quaker women's lives—Revolutions, Disruptions and Networks—by tying gendered experience to ruptures in religion across this radical, volatile period of history.
Hannah Callender Sansom (1737-1801) witnessed the effects of the tumultuous eighteenth century: political struggles, war and peace, and economic development. She experienced the pull of traditional emphases on duty, subjection, and hierarchy and the emergence of radical new ideas promoting free choice, liberty, and independence. Regarding these changes from her position as a well-educated member of the colonial Quaker elite and as a resident of Philadelphia, the principal city in North America, this assertive, outspoken woman described her life and her society in a diary kept intermittently from the time she was twenty-one years old in 1758 through the birth of her first grandchild in 1788. As a young woman, she enjoyed sociable rounds of visits and conviviality. She also had considerable freedom to travel and to develop her interests in the arts, literature, and religion. In 1762, under pressure from her father, she married fellow Quaker Samuel Sansom. While this arranged marriage made financial and social sense, her father's plans failed to consider the emerging goals of sensibility, including free choice and emotional fulfillment in marriage. Hannah Callender Sansom's struggle to become reconciled to an unhappy marriage is related in frank terms both through daily entries and in certain silences in the record. Ultimately she did create a life of meaning centered on children, religion, and domesticity. When her beloved daughter Sarah was of marriageable age, Hannah Callender Sansom made certain that, despite risking her standing among Quakers, Sarah was able to marry for love. Long held in private hands, the complete text of Hannah Callender Sanson's extraordinary diary is published here for the first time. In-depth interpretive essays, as well as explanatory footnotes, provide context for students and other readers. The diary is one of the earliest, fullest documents written by an American woman, and it provides fresh insights into women's experience in early America, the urban milieu of the emerging middle classes, and the culture that shaped both.
New York Public Library Teen Book List In colonial America, hard work proved a constant for most women—some ensured their family's survival through their skills, while others sold their labor or lived in bondage as indentured servants or slaves. Yet even in a world defined entirely by men, a world where few thought it important to record a female's thoughts, women found ways to step forth. Elizabeth Ashbridge survived an abusive indenture to become a Quaker preacher. Anne Bradstreet penned her poems while raising eight children in the wilderness. Anne Hutchinson went toe-to-toe with Puritan authorities. Margaret Hardenbroeck Philipse built a trade empire in New Amsterdam. And Eve, a Virginia slave, twice ran away to freedom. Using a host of primary sources, author Brandon Marie Miller recounts the roles, hardships, and daily lives of Native American, European, and African women in the 17th and 18th centuries. With strength, courage, resilience, and resourcefulness, these women and many others played a vital role in the mosaic of life in the North American colonies.
"This book features: the integration of English history with Penn's personal struggles and accomplishments (and shows how specific events affected Penn and the Quakers); thorough coverage of the Quaker faith provides insight into Penn's motivations and actions; chapter-ending summaries provide a synopsis of important events in Penn's life and chart Penn's evolution from peaceful Quaker to profit-making colonizer; and study and discussion questions at the end of the book help students check their reading and comprehension. These questions may also be used to facilitate discussions in the classroom or student study groups."--BOOK JACKET.
Indian, European, and African women of seventeenth and eighteenth-century America were defenders of their native land, pioneers on the frontier, willing immigrants, and courageous slaves. They were also - as traditional scholarship tends to omit - as important as men in shaping American culture and history. This remarkable work is a gripping portrait that gives early-American women their proper place in history.
This brilliant study shows the pivotal role the Quakers played in the origins and development of America's family ideology. Levy argues that the Quakers brought a new vision of family and social life to America--one that contrasted sharply with the harsh, formal world of the New England Puritans. The Quakers stressed affection, friendship and hospitality, the importance of women in the home, and the value of self-disciplined, non-coercive childrearing. This book explains how and why the Quakers have had such a profound cultural impact on America and what the Quakers' experience with their own radical family system tells us about American families.
A seminal work exploring the daily life and status of southern women in colonial America, describes the domestic occupation, social life, education, and role in government of women of varied classes.