The Invention of Professional Quakerism: Academia, Gender, and Social Class in the Shaping of Quaker Leadership in the Twentieth-Century United States

Abstract

This article describes the emergence of ‘professional Quakers’, or Friends who emerged as leaders of Quaker institutions based on secular credentials. In the early twentieth century, many American Quaker institutions, especially Quaker colleges, large yearly meetings, and Quaker organisations like the American Friends Service Committee, began hiring full-time staff and assembling boards that resembled the structures of corporations and other secular institutions. Furthermore, the leaders of these bodies became de facto leaders within the Religious Society of Friends, a process accelerated by the comparative decentralisation of the Quaker denominational infrastructure relative to other Protestant groups. Over time, the Quaker leadership apparatus came to reflect the values and prejudices of the larger American society in which it operated, privileging those to whom secular credentials were widely available, namely wealthy male Friends, and excluding those also excluded from most secular institutions of learning, especially women.This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0.