What sorts of sex scandals did Quakers have? | AskHistorians Archive Observer

I’m not aware of any notable sex scandals involving members of the Religious Society of Friends (known popularly as Quakers) in the United States or United Kingdom. There are some controversies that might have been connected with sexuality, but I’m not sure any of them would be classified as sex scandals per se.

Nudity as a Religious Practice

There was some scandal over early Quakers' use of nudity as a religious practice. At issue was the Quaker custom of “going naked as a sign” in the seventeenth century. In the 1650s in Westmorland and Yorkshire, there are reports of Quakers stripping naked and giving sermons. It’s not entirely clear what the theological justification for this was, though sometimes it may have been a demonstration that they had returned to the state of innocence that Adam and Eve held before the fall. On other occasions, the nudity seems to have been tied to Quaker warnings about the forthcoming apocalypse. Both men and women engaged in this practice, which contemporaries regarded as scandalous.

In 1653, for example, there was a report of a Quaker running naked through Kendall calling on people to repent. George Fox, the founder of Quakerism, praised another naked Quaker, William Simpson, for going “Naked and in Sackcloth” as a “sign” to parliament and “to the [Anglican] priests shewing how God would strip them of their power, and they should be as naked as he was.” The (non-Quaker) diarist Samuel Pepys recorded an incident of a naked Quaker running through Westminster Hall calling on people to repent, though he noted this naked Friend was not completely nude as he was “very civilly tied about the privities to avoid scandal.” Quakers stopped going naked as a sign by the late seventeenth century.

The Legitimacy of Quaker Marriages

Quakers refused to use Anglican priests to officiate their marriages, believing that Quaker meetings gathered together had the power to witness marriages. Couples would speak their vows and the meeting members present would sign a marriage certificate. Because England had an established church, this was typically not initially seen as a form of legal marriage.

The fact that Quakers followed their own marriage practices opened them up to the charge from Anglican critics that Quaker couples that saw themselves as married were really in illicit sexual relationships. Their children were also legally illegitimate. Starting in 1661, English law began to offer some protection for Quaker marriages, but the choice of Quakers to marry outside of the established church prior to this could be regarded as a sexual scandal.

Women in Ministry

Quakers having women ministers was often seen as a violation of social norms, religious doctrine, and gender roles. The sect acknowledged the validity of women in ministry from its beginnings in the mid-seventeenth century, one of the first Christian groups to do so. In texts like Margaret Fell’s 1666 “Women’s Speaking Justified,” Quakers made a case that women were just as able as men to connect with God and be ministers.

Women’s ministry was a major division between Quakers and other Christians for centuries. For example, the Grimké sisters, two nineteenth-century American abolitionist Quaker ministers, were often seen as being transgressive because they lectured before “promiscuous assemblies,” which meant they spoke before audiences comprised of both men and women. In the twentieth century, many Protestant groups began accepting women’s ministry, which made Quakers' acceptance of the practice seem far less radical.

Gay and Lesbian Relationships

Starting in the 1960s, some American and British Quakers began to urge that same-sex relationships should be tolerated. The 1963 publication “Towards a Quaker view of Sex” by British Quakers argued that homosexuality should be decriminalized, and that it could even be seen in a positive light. By the 1980s, some Quaker meetings in the U.S. and U.K. began preforming same-sex commitment ceremonies or weddings. I would be reluctant to classify this as a sexual scandal, but conservative religious groups often regarded it as such, and condemned Quaker support for LGBTQ rights.

Sexual Abuse in Quaker Schools

Quakers operate a number of private schools. As with many educational institutions, there have been cases of sexual abuse of students by faculty. Carolina Friends School had a number of cases of sexual abuse involving a teacher and an assistant principal in the 1960s and 1970s. Moses Brown School in Providence had cases in the 1950s involving five teachers. Some of these allegations did not come to light until the present.

There have been more contemporary cases of sexual abuse and rape in Quaker schools and colleges, though many allegations would probably be too recent to be allowed on AskHistorians. It’s worth observing that the percentage of Quaker students and faculty at Quaker schools has been fairly low throughout much of the twentieth century, so it’s not really clear how much Quakerism is directly connected to connected to these occurrences. The scope of sexual abuse allegations in Quaker institutions seems comparable to other private schools.

Conclusion

I’m not particularly well versed in African and Latin American Quakerism, so I don’t know much about scandals involving those Friends. Many of the things that would once have been regarded as scandalous among Anglo-American Quakers, such as the manner in which they get married, or allowing same-sex relationships, have now achieved a considerable degree of acceptance in the United States and western Europe.