Abstract
Although the existence of Quakers in Virginia is well known, the best recent surveys of Virginia history devote only passing attention to them, mostly in the context of expanding religious freedoms during the revolutionary era. Few discuss the Quakers themselves or the nature of Quaker settlements although notably, Warren Hofstra, Larry Gragg, and others have studied aspects of the Backcountry Quaker experience. Recent Quaker historiography has reinterpreted the origins of the Quaker faith and the role of key individuals in the movement, including the roles of Quaker women. Numerous studies address Quaker women collectively. Few, however, examine individual families or women of different generations within a single family, and Robynne Rogers Healey has argued for “more biographies of less well-known Quaker women”. This essay uses a four-generation genealogical case study of the Quaker Bowater-Wright family to analyze the development of the Quaker faith in the Virginia backcountry and the lower South and its spread into the Old Northwest. In the backcountry environment, with its geographically isolated settlements and widely dispersed population, early Quaker migrants found fertile ground for both their economic and religious activities. The way of life that developed there differed significantly from the hierarchical Anglican structure of the Tidewater region and the more vocal evangelical groups with their independent congregational structure in the southern backcountry. This article argues that Quaker women played a critical role in shaping Quaker migration and institutional growth in eighteenth and nineteenth century America. It also suggests that the Quaker institutional structure reinforced family connections by creating a close bond that united southern Quakers across a great geographical area.
Highlights
Historians debate the extent to which colonial America may or may not have provided opportunities to women that they lacked in the nineteenth-century, which is when the “Cult of Domesticity” largely shut them off from public activities and confined them to a separate sphere of private domestic activity
This meeting, called Fredericksburg Monthly Meeting—which members of the Wright family joined as early as 1762—lasted until 1782, but it too began to decline as Quakers from Virginia and North Carolina began organizing in the western portion of the colony during the 1760s
Between 1650 and 1820, four generations of the family of John Bowater and his daughter Mary Wright worked to spread of the Quaker faith from England into Maryland, Pennsylvania, the Carolinas, Ohio, and Indiana; Mary’s granddaughter Charity Cook would take the migration full circle, traveling twice from South Carolina to England and Ireland on missionary trips before permanently setting in Ohio in her old age
Summary
Historians debate the extent to which colonial America may or may not have provided opportunities to women that they lacked in the nineteenth-century, which is when the “Cult of Domesticity” largely shut them off from public activities and confined them to a separate sphere of private domestic activity. During the Great Awakening of the middle-eighteenth century and in the evangelical congregations spawned by that event, women worshipped alongside men and often assumed leadership positions within congregations While this change represented an important point of departure from mainstream practices within the Church of England (and earlier, the Catholic Church) in the colonies, the radical sects emerging a century earlier from the English Civil War had proclaimed the equality of persons and had given women an enlarged share of religious authority. This paper examines one family who made the transition from the Church of England to the Society of Friends during the seventeenth-century and follows four generations of its descendants It argues that the radical Quaker beliefs about gender equality led to sustained change concerning the domestic and public roles of women, as evidenced by three generations of these Quaker women. The Wrights were part of a social and religious network that linked Quaker families in England, Pennsylvania, the Virginia and Carolina backcountry, and, the midwestern United States; as such, they, especially several key female members of the group, played an important role in expanding the Quaker movement and, in the process, settling the lower south and “old northwest.”
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