‘Choose Life!’ Quaker Metaphor and Modernity

Abstract

In 2003, Grace Jantzen presented the George Richardson Lecture, the annual international lecture in Quaker studies, entitled ‘Choose Life! Early Quaker Women and Violence in Modernity’, which was published in Quaker Studies. It was part of her ongoing work on the preoccupation of modernity with death and violence. In the lecture she argued that Margaret Fell and most other early Quaker women encouraged a choice of life over a preoccupation with death, while most male Friends (as Quakers are also called) maintained the violent imagery of the Lamb’s War, the spiritual warfare that would usher in the kingdom. While both men and women developed what became the Quaker ‘peace testimony’ (the witness against war and outward violence), the language used by male and female Friends differed in its description of the inward spiritual life and its consequences and mission. Thus, Grace Jantzen argued that these women Friends were choosing a language counter to modernity, while the male apocalyptic was indeed counter-c...