‘And the Lord’s power was over all’

The Early Quakers, the Peace Testimony and Masculinity in England, 1660-1720

“…27 It should still be borne in mind, though, alongside Friends' rejection of violence: as Hilary Hinds notes of the early Quaker movement in particular, although it encouraged itinerant preaching, it was also 'strongly rooted in place, through household, meeting, community, and network.' 28 Indeed, the Quaker household was threatened most of all by those persecuting Friends; as Barry Reay outlines, in some regions 'evidence of a man's Quakerism was enough to have him turned… out of his home, to lose him his tenancy, even to have his vote disputed'; male Friends' role as householders was compromised by authorities who pursued them most commonly for their refusal to pay tithes. 29 Both companionate marriage and the rejection of spousal abuse were predated by Puritan appeals for men to maintain domestic rule, and by inference authority elsewhere, by godly example and not by 'big looks, & great words, & cruel behaviour'.…”

“…Like other male Friends, Fox inhabited 'certain social identities culturally associated with masculinity… resilient, purposeful [and] outspoken'. 133 Although these attributes were often less applicable to later, especially post-Toleration, Friends, their demonstrable masculinity, in terms of control of households and success in business, similarly worked to associate male Friends with some paradigms of early modern masculinity. However, Quaker men, Fox among them, demonstrably lacked the anxiety identified as a core of early modern masculine identity.…”

“…This indwelling Christ also endowed early Friends 'with immediate access to a source of divine authority'; a masculine ideal, Hinds suggests, which banished anxiety and installed confidence 'not by a self-sufficiency… but by a model of dependence on an omnipotent other whose beneficence in manifested in his co-extensiveness with the helpless subject.' 134 Bourdieu asserts, in relation to gender and symbolic violence, how bodily emotions, including anxiety, allow the dominated to unwittingly contribute to their domination. 135 Quaker men especially, then, might bypass the trials of anxious worldly manhood, all too aware of social and economic as well as gendered hierarchies, and the ongoing obligation to demonstrate specific forms of gendered authority, particularly those resting upon violence, through their union with the divine.…”