Reviews of Books

"The focus on Quakers as exemplars of mid-Atlantic women" tends to "marginalize [other] Pennsylvania women" in early American women's history, since Quakers were a minority of Pennsylvania's population by 1720, according to Jean Soderlund (in "Women in Eighteenth-Century Pennsylvania: Toward a Model of Diversity," Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 115 [1991], 168). While Karin Wulf's Not All Wives does lean heavily on Quaker subjects, it neither overstates their importance nor consigns them to the margins in telling a larger story. On one level, Not All Wives is a collective biography of single women in Philadelphia, through which Wulf "explores how ideas about gender, rooted in assumptions about women's position as wives, came to apply to all women regardless of their marital status" (pp. 1–2). On another, it connects the decline of Quaker political influence to changes in women's status in Philadelphia and thereby to broader developments in Revolutionary America. The Quaker and Moravian groups of the early city, Wulf shows, promoted an expanded vision of single womanhood that could not be accommodated by the ascendant masculine and martial culture of the Revolutionary period.	1
Long neglected by both contemporaries and historians who assumed that the experiences of married women constituted the experience of all women, the single women of colonial Philadelphia are worth studying for several reasons. Unmarried women formed a significant proportion of the population in urban areas of the early modern world; up to 20 percent of Philadelphia's heads of households were women; even married women "experienced extended periods of singleness, sometimes as long as or longer than periods of marriage" (pp. 13–14). More important, unmarried women "were a nexus for cultural tensions and thus provide a prism through which vital connections among politics, economics, and gender are refracted" (p. 9).	2
In the early city's Quaker culture, discussion of gender roles in local magazines and almanacs accepted and even celebrated spinsterhood. Elite and non-elite Quaker women wrote poetry and essays for each other praising the virtues of single life, and teachers such as Rebecca Jones and Hannah Catherall assigned these writings to their students. Quaker theology supplied a rationale for unmarried Quaker women, who "found the obligation to their own spiritual development an exclusive one" (p. 67), and it also contributed to a cultural legitimation of singleness beyond Quaker boundaries. Wulf supplies ample evidence of unmarried women, within and without the Society of Friends, heading households, enjoying a political voice by means of membership in the Philadelphia corporation, establishing businesses, and developing economic networks within their religious affiliations and neighborhoods.	. . .