As The Twig is Bent: Quaker Ideas of Childhood

Abstract

When Woolman was born on October 19, 1720, he became the responsibility of two groups, his parents and the Burlington Monthly Meeting. His parents had the primary obligations of feeding, clothing, educating, and disciplining him. The authority of the parents was God-given: Honour your father and your mother, that your days may be long. The members of Burlington Monthly Meeting to which the Woolmans belonged thought of themselves as a second family, the people of God exercising a sacred responsibility to assist in rearing the child. Within a few days of his birth, Woolman was enrolled as a member of the meeting, a ceremony that was more legal than religious. For instance, in England, in the absence of baptism, the state required some test of legitimacy, and the laws of Pennsylvania demanded registers of the inhabitants. Meetings formulated lists of births, marriages, and deaths, and all religious bodies were eventually required by law to keep such records. Because frivolity was forbidden, the Friends were supposed to make no special preparations and have no feast at the naming of the child.1 Witnesses of the birth, weighty Friends, and the immediate family gathered. After a time of silence the father pronounced the name, which might be chosen for its religious connotations or because it was a family name, the witnesses signed a certificate of birth and John Woolman. Son of the said Samuel Woolman and Elizabeth his Wife . . . was born the 19th. 8 mo. 1720 was entered on the register of births and deaths.2 In his early years the meeting would serve chiefly as an insurance policy. If the immediate family became financially insolvent, the meeting might make loans, give money, seeds, tools or perhaps a cow to the Woolmans so that the family might survive. If there were too many brothers and sisters for the parents to support, the meeting could take the responsibility of placing some of the