Reviews of Books

Daughters of Light should be required reading for scholars and general readers interested in the history of women and religion in colonial America. It offers a highly detailed, often fascinating account of a large group of women preachers (1,300–1,500) who were active in the Quaker transatlantic community during the first two-thirds of the eighteenth century. These are women largely unknown to students of American history or the history of religion and whose achievements were of the greatest importance for the later history of abolition, women's suffrage, and gender relationships.	1
Larson's book is essentially a reconstruction of the lives and values of Quaker women preachers. "Who were the eighteenth-century women acknowledged as Quaker preachers? How did their ministerial role affect their families?" she asks. "How did these women cope with the dangers and difficulties of eighteenth-century travel? What ideas and practices did they transmit across the Quaker transatlantic community? What was the response to the Quaker women ministers in the larger society" (p. 12)? Women preachers came from a wide range of backgrounds, from the maidservant Jane Fenn to the minister May Drummond, member of an eminent Scottish gentry family. Their histories also included a wide range of activities: some entirely ordinary (feeding pigs, embroidering linens, raising children), others utterly extraordinary (traveling unaccompanied or with other women, addressing secular magistrates, delivering sermons). Elizabeth Webb (1663–1727) was a typical white colonial woman whose family emigrated from England to Pennsylvania: married to a prosperous farmer and mother of ten children, she engaged in the domestic tasks of dairying, curing meat, baking, brewing, and spinning. She was also a highly respected itinerant preacher who traveled in Virginia, New England, and Britain, published a commentary on the Book of Revelations, and corresponded on questions of theology with the chaplain to the prince of Denmark.	2
In arguing for the prestige of female ministers as a group, Larson emphasizes the upward mobility of even the most humble preachers. Jane Fenn, for instance, worked as a servant in a prosperous Quaker household, discussed religion at the dinner table with her employers, and was granted leave to travel when she felt the call to preach. Larson is also very interesting on the issue of motherhood. Neither pregnancy nor children slowed Quaker preachers down; their itinerancy was sustained by a commitment to "extensive" rather than "intensive" mothering and by a communitarian ideal of child-rearing that enabled women to leave young children in the hands of husbands and the local Quaker meeting while they traveled as "mothers in Israel" to the wider community. The spiritual authority of female preachers enhanced their authority in the family. Women ministers were often named executors in their husbands' wills; their opinions were sought by the Quaker meeting about the requests of male Friends to travel. Alongside these analyses of social background and female authority, Larson also tells a good story, recounting women's adventures in shipwrecks, preaching to African and Native Americans, and winning audiences with magistrates and state governors, even the queen of England.	3
In emphasizing the successes of Quaker women preachers, Larson tends to take her sources' statements entirely at face value. She also downplays the complexities of attitudes toward women, even in the Quaker community. Rachel Wilson and John Woolman, the Quaker abolitionist, were, in Larson's words, "equal religious authorities" (p. 5). But there was actually considerable variation in the way Quaker communities and individuals viewed female authority. In Philadelphia, women held an independent yearly meeting, but not so in England, where male Friends refused to allow an independent women's yearly meeting for almost the entire eighteenth century. The minister May Drummond, whom Larson cites repeatedly as an example of women's eminence, was perceived as a threat by eminent male Quakers; she was ultimately disgraced and ignored by British Friends.	. . .