With over 350 years of history, Quakers have some aspects that are laudable by contemporary standards, and others that are morally questionable. The three areas where Quakers are probably most praised are anti-slavery work, women’s rights, and their commitment to peace. In each they had real successes, but also moments where Quaker attitudes now seem quite regressive. Part of the issue here is that Quakerism is by no means a unified movement but had different branches that often took a variety of approaches to these topics.

Slavery and Race

Quakers were not initially opposed to slavery; there were Quaker slaveowners in both the United States and the British-controlled Caribbean. By the mid-eighteenth century, Quaker meetings generally had moved to encourage their members to free their slaves and prohibited the buying and selling of slaves. It took until the 1770s for some Quaker yearly meetings, the main ecclesiastical organizations of Quakerism, to make slave-owning an offense punishable by disownment (the Quaker version of excommunication).

Yet even though they were opposed to slavery, some Quakers were hostile to the broader abolitionist movement. These Quakers feared being politically connected with non-Quakers and did not want to be associated with people from other religious traditions which had paid clergy. A number of schisms occurred within Quakerism over abolitionism. The Orthodox Quaker Indiana Yearly Meeting, for example, briefly split in 1842, with the side favoring more involvement with the abolitionist movement labeling themselves “Anti-Slavery Friends.”

There were prominent Quaker abolitionists. The Orthodox Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier was critical to organizing the Liberty Party, an anti-slavery predecessor of the Republicans. Hicksite Quaker leader Lucretia Mott was heavily connected with Garrisonian abolitionism. These figures faced intense criticism from other Quakers; Mott in particular regularly had to defend herself in Quaker circles.

After abolition Quakers were less exemplary. Quaker schools were sometimes segregated, in some cases until after Brown v. Board. In the Midwest, some evangelical Quakers were associated with the Ku Klux Klan; Quaker involvement in the Klan in that area was just as common as other groups' membership. The American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker-created service organization, started working in favor of civil rights from the 1920s onward, and was strongly supported by theologically liberal Quakers in the northeast, but it faced opposition from the more theologically and politically conservative parts of the denomination.

Women’s Rights

Quakers did recognize women’s religious equality from the group’s beginnings in the mid-seventeenth century. They had women as prominent leaders and thought women could be inspired by God to give ministry just as men could. To my knowledge, Quakers were the first Christian group to include women in ministry. In the United States and England, other groups only started allowing women into the ministry in the late nineteenth or twentieth century (some religious groups obviously still forbid women from the ministry).

Quaker polity­– how the denomination was governed­­– vested power in men’s and women’s meetings for business, gender-separated governing bodies comprised of all members. In theory there was supposed to be a division of labor in what men’s and women’s meetings did; men dealt with practical business, while women dealt with marriages, families, and the poor. Both were supposed to work together to make decisions, and the gender separation supposed to prevent men from stifling women’s leadership. In practice, men’s meetings were often in charge, and women’s meetings subordinate. This began to change in the late nineteenth century as many Quaker meetings dropped gender-separated meetings.

Quakers were deeply connected to the women’s rights movement. Most of the attenders of the United States's first women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls were coming from a Quaker Yearly Meeting. Susan B. Anthony had a Quaker background, while suffragist Alice Paul was a Quaker.

Peace

Quakers maintained a “testimony against war” and practiced what we now might call pacifism, citing the Biblical injunction to love their enemies. This could be extremely controversial depending on the circumstances. Quakers were often accused of disloyalty for their views.

In the French and Indian War, Quakers dominated Pennsylvania’s legislature and refused to fund or mobilize the militia to fight. As you might imagine, this did not go over well in a colony that feared being attacked. The Quakers mostly resigned from governmental posts rather than support the war.

In the American Revolution, Quakers were often seen as pro-British due to their opposition to the conflict. Because Quakers also had a transatlantic religious organization, they also wanted to keep strong ties with London. A small number of Quakers schismed away from the rest, dubbing themselves the “Free Quakers” and fighting for the patriots.

Quaker advocacy of peace could cause them to urge groups under threat to accept coercion rather than resist. Quakers were part of the Grant Administration’s Indian Peace Policy in the 1870s, working as Indian agents for the government to convince Native American tribes to convert to Christianity, give up their customs, and assimilate rather than fight the federal government. In the 1930s, one Quaker leader urged Jews to practice love and cooperation with the Nazis, which he suggested might cause the Nazis to treat them better.

Some Quakers also tended to see the conflicts they fought in as exceptions to the “rule” of the testimony against war. Richard Nixon, for example, was a birthright Quaker from the evangelical part of the denomination and served in the Navy in World War II. In Vietnam, he argued that U.S. military action served the greater goal of peace, so was ultimately consistent with his Quakerism.

Other Issues

Quakers occasionally had religious views opposed to modern innovations, which seem strange to contemporary people. Abolitionist John Woolman protested against smallpox vaccination before dying of smallpox in 1772. Quaker leader Elias Hicks hated higher education and denounced the Erie Canal as a Satanic development. Quaker meetings were critical of fiction, dance, and music until the late nineteenth century.

Quakers also were endogamous until the late nineteenth century, marrying only other Quakers. This meant they often disowned people for “marrying out of meeting.” Quakers could seem fairly insular and disconnected from the wider society. I’ve written about this elsewhere.

Conclusion

Quakers are hardly morally perfect. In hindsight, Quaker inaction on the segregation of Quaker schools and their treatment of Native Americans are quite lamentable. They were also not always consistent in their commitment to women’s equality. That said, Quakers moved to forbid slavery before other religious groups and had women in ministry over two hundred years before that became common.

By modern standards, Quakers often turned a blind eye to inequality, racism, and injustice. Measured by the standards of their contemporaries, over their history, Quakers have been among the most socially progressive religious organizations.

Recommended Readings:

Carey, Brycchan, and Geoffrey Plank, eds. Quakers and Abolition. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2014.

Dandelion, Ben Pink, and Stephen W. Angell, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Quaker Studies. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Graber, Jennifer. “‘If a War It May Be Called’: The Peace Policy with American Indians.” Religion and American Culture 24, no. 1 (ed 2014): 36–69.

Hamm, Thomas D. The Quakers in America. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.

May, Isaac. “Opening the Shutters: Gurneyite Quakerism and the Struggle for Women’s Equality in the Meeting for Business, 1859 to 1930.” Quaker Studies 18, no. 2 (March 2014): 170–90.