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This chapter examines the special spiritual partnerships shared between itinerant Quaker women. Female Quaker preachers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries undertook extensive, dangerous travels, making recurrent sea voyages across the Atlantic, over the Irish Sea, and between the West Indian islands. These women also traveled overland on foot and horseback across England, Scotland, and Wales and through every mainland British American colony. The wide-ranging travels undertaken by Quaker women were almost always accomplished in the company of a female companion, a spiritual partner who was intended to provide affection, solace, and aid. Female members of the Society of Friends attempted to mitigate hardships through the spiritually and emotionally meaningful relationships they formed with these partners, whom they called their yokemates.

This chapter examines the central role of Quaker women during the years 1675–1710 in developing the first colony founded by members of the Society of Friends in North America. As individuals, women Friends helped to fashion a multicultural society consistent with Quaker beliefs in religious liberty and pacifism by maintaining amicable relations with the Lenape Indians and non-Quaker European settlers. At the same time, however, Friends failed to acknowledge the inconsistency of exploiting enslaved African Americans with Quaker ideals. As leaders of the Salem, Burlington, Chesterfield, and Newton (later Haddonfield) monthly meetings, Quaker women also helped to shape West New Jersey society by strengthening rules of discipline to prevent their children and other Friends from marrying non-Quakers and adopting ‘outward vanities’.

This chapter presents an analysis of Amy Kirby Post, an antislavery Quaker who quit her meeting in the mid-1840s to pursue “worldly” efforts to end slavery. It seeks to explore what led an individual whose Quaker coworshippers already accepted the wrongs of slavery to seek nonetheless a different path, one that she felt offered her a deeper bond between faith and action. What is clearest in examining the life of Post is that she was committed to finding a spiritual home that not only allowed her to pursue social justice on this earth, but also required her to do so. For her, faith had to demand, not simply permit, efforts to build a better world on earth as well as beyond it. During the first four decades of her life, witnessing against social ills in Quaker meetings seemed to satisfy her need to improve the world. But beginning in the 1840s, she embraced a more active sense of religious and political agency, which drew her into the Progressive Friends, spiritualism, and Unitarianism, as well as into an astonishing range of movements for social change.

This chapter demonstrates the ways in which dress can be used as a powerful interpretative tool in understanding how the Quaker family, and especially women, engaged with antislavery activism in the 1850s. It discusses how dressing in free-labor cotton clothes embedded antislavery consumption practice into everyday life, as an embodiment of individual political belief. It presents new research on the involvement of one Victorian Quaker family—the famous Clark family of Somerset—in the antislavery cause. It discusses the British free produce movement and its campaign against slave-grown cotton; it examines Quaker attitudes to dress; and it compares dress in the photographs to surviving examples.

The origin of the Colored Orphan Asylum (COA) has several versions, influenced by the passage of time, boastful pride, and marketing objectives. An original version noted that in 1834 two Quaker women, Anna H. Shotwell and her niece, Mary Murray, chanced upon two dirty and unkempt children at play under the watchful eye of a black woman. Upon learning that they had been abandoned by fugitive slave parents, the two gave the woman a few dollars to care for the children. Several days later, they found that the kind woman had four additional children under her care, having received enough funds to tend to their needs. This led the two Quakers to consider opening a home for homeless children of color. The COA was formed on November 26, 1836, in the home of William Shotwell. The founders decided upon the name “colored” in deference to the community's sensibilities.