As they made the family central, George Fox and his inner circle also redefined it. Fox preached the need for morally self-sufficient households, established by husbands and wives who were bound by spiritual rather than carnal ties and sustained by both, for women’s spiritual authority and rational capacities were declared comparable to men’s. This authority and the accompanying self-discipline expected of Quaker mothers were to be mobilized toward the religious education of Quaker children. Children’s capacity to find and to develop their inner light, to hear the inner voice, depended on proper upbringing. No institution existed to sustain Quakerism if the family failed in its mission. Thus, Fox’s emphasis on the family as agent of and sanctuary for the faith produced a child-centered culture more intense than the mainstream culture, which emphasized the material well-being of sons and daughters. Not surprisingly, as one scholar has put it, “Quaker parenting was a frightening responsibility which required access to, yet control of, all emotions and all situations … and full insight.” When migration allowed the Quakers to flourish and to prosper in colonies of their own, this emphasis on the family as the spiritual and social center of Quakerism was not abandoned but reinforced.

  The oldest Quaker settlements in the middle colonies were the result of migration from other colonies, rather than immigration from Europe. The first settlements sprang up in the 1660s in East Jersey, populated by New England converts seeking relief from Puritan persecution. British Quakers began to settle in West Jersey, in the 1670s and early 1780s. But when William Penn launched his “holy experiment” in Pennsylvania, Quakers from northern England and Wales immigrated to the new colony. Before the century ended, almost 200 Cheshire and Welsh families had made their way to Pennsylvania, sometimes paying for their ocean voyage with contributions from their Highland communities. Penn’s offer of 5,000 acres of farmland for £100 was an abundance undreamed of and profoundly welcomed by Highlander families who had been forced in the past to apprentice younger sons and daughters to the non-Quaker world. These children, sent to learn trades in a hostile religious environment, had been either lost to the Quaker fold or fined and jailed for their persistence in Quaker belief and practice.

  By the end of the 1680s, the Quaker colonists had developed a thriving grain economy. Their prosperity brought material comforts, but these were secondary to the spiritual comforts it ensured. Their goal was to amass, and thus be able to distribute, enough land among their children to hold the family together physically and spiritually. Well into the eighteenth century, Quaker patterns of land acquisition and distribution to their heirs differed noticeably from their neighbors’. And in those patterns, the strategy was clear: to prevent the need or desire of Quaker children to enter the non-Quaker world.

  The difference between Quaker and non-Quaker inheritance strategies can be seen clearly in York County. Among neighboring German communities, conflicting desires to keep land holdings intact and to provide equally for all children led to two familiar compromise strategies. The first was for German fathers to exclude some children from the inheritance of real property in order to provide enough acreage for a working farm to others. The second was to sell off land in order to ensure an equal and adequate legacy for all sons and daughters. Either choice indirectly promoted the dispersal of the second generation. Within the Scot-Presbyterian community of the county, the preferred inheritance strategy encouraged second-generation mobility, both physical and social, by converting land into cash settlements for the heirs. The Quakers of York County rejected both alternatives. Like the Highlanders of the Welsh Tract or the Chester Friends, they tenaciously held on to their land, constantly adding acreage so that no son would be tempted to strike out on his own—to break free of parental power—or to fracture religious unity. When land scarcity, the disruption of war, and other factors made it impossible for Quaker families to continue to amass ample acreage, married couples chose to limit the size of their family, thus consciously ensuring the orthodoxy of the few rather than losing even a small number to the outside world.

  The Quaker parents’ ability to provide the material context and the spiritual guidance to ensure the commitment of the second generation remained the central goal of the Quaker community for years to come. Yet a second institution soon developed to help sustain them: the monthly meeting. Quaker leadership envisioned the meeting as complementary to the family. Yet because it represented the collective interests of the community, its power and influence proved greater than that of an individual couple. As Quaker husbands and wives discovered, the meeting set the standards by which the family would be judged.

  Within the meeting as within the family, women played active and independent roles. Quaker women and men organized themselves separately, each holding a monthly meeting that ran from a few hours to a full day. These monthly meetings were charged with basic oversight of the local community. Quarterly meetings brought together representatives from local monthly organizations, and they, in turn, sent representatives to the yearly meeting held in Philadelphia.

  Through the men’s meeting, Quakers negotiated their place within the larger English and colonial society. The men had the exclusive right to make policy on broad, and pressing, economic, political, or legal issues, such as slavery, taxes raised for military expeditions, the purchase of land from the Indians, and imperial trade regulations. In addition, they attended to internal matters, such as regulating the conduct of the male members of their community and attending to the needs of the poor.

  The women’s meetings had no authority to debate the larger, public issues, but they were far from ceremonial or social auxiliaries. Quaker founders had intended the women’s meeting to serve as a training ground for Quaker wives and mothers. Here, older women would instruct—and if necessary, discipline—younger ones. Within the meeting, emulation would be encouraged and dedication rewarded with status and respect.

  As George Fox had hoped and envisioned, respected matrons of the community did lead the colonial Quaker women’s meetings. Chester County’s Martha Thomas was perhaps typical of this “female spiritual aristocracy,” in her energetic and self-confident use of her considerable authority. For thirty-three years she could be seen riding sidesaddle on the best of the county’s horses, traveling the Pennsylvania countryside to investigate, expose, condemn, and punish “carnal talk” among female Friends. Most of Thomas’s peers within the meetings shared her social profile if not her energy. They were married to Friends of good standing, usually officers in the men’s meeting, and they began their active role within the women’s meetings in their thirties, after proving themselves successful mothers and household supervisors. And once they achieved leadership within the meetings, most remained in positions of authority for twenty years or more.

  That Martha Thomas rode the countryside on the finest horse in the county offers a clue to the leadership’s wealth as well as to their devotion. Within the Philadelphia meeting, the tendency for wealth and leadership to go hand in hand was more pronounced than in the countryside, yet everywhere, wealth provided a woman with the time to visit sinners or interview brides-to-be. Sixty percent of the leadership of the colonial Philadelphia women’s meeting had slaves, and over 50 percent of the Chester County leaders had servants or slaves for household duties.

  The women’s meeting concerned itself exclusively with intra-community affairs, but in handling such matters, they were an autonomous and self-governing body. They policed their own sex with regard to dress, deportment, and speech, exhorting the young to “labour to keep out of pryd and superfluities.” Dangerous behavior for Quaker women included parting their hair, pinching their caps too tightly around their faces, wearing elaborate clothing, or making suggestive gestures. At the meetings, Quaker women also focused on care of the poor of both sexes and demonstrated particular concern for widows and daughters from needy families.

  The power of the women’s meeting could be gauged by its authority in two critical areas. First, the meeting controlled the preparation of certificates for women planning to move or transfer to another monthly meeting. The right to judge and evaluate was explicit in the granting or denial of this religious passport. Second, women regulated the reproduction of the community itself by investigating those who wished to marry and determining if the couple conformed to Quaker standards of matrimony. The importance of this activity can be measured, in part, by the amount of time allotted to it. The Chester County monthly meeting devoted 54 percent of its business time to marriage; only 19 percent was devoted to charity.

  Quaker couples acknowledged the authority of the women’s meeting to determine their fate in both serious and humorous ways. In the Welsh tract, young women announcing their intentions to marry lobbied for approval by filling the meetinghouse with supportive peers. This “love politicking” confirmed Quaker women’s control over the formation of new households.

  Although “love politicking” was sometimes helpful, the Quaker standards that women upheld allowed for little compromise and little argument. Sometimes the records show us acts of resistance against the intrusiveness of the meetings’ authority. In 1691 Susanna Robinson, a Chesterfield widow, announced her desire to marry again. The request was not greeted warmly, for the women’s meeting had received reports that the widow Robinson had a tendency toward “disorderly cariages.” Robinson did not meekly accept the judgment of her spiritual superiors. Instead, she dismissed the reports as lies and declared that “she was dame enough to goe and doe whether and what she pleased.” She even threatened to appear at the next monthly meeting and challenge its members directly.

  More disturbing and more damaging challenges came from younger Quakers who chose to marry outside the faith. Despite the material incentives offered to children to remain close to home, despite the exhortations and urgings of loving but perhaps overly admonishing mothers, many Quakers of the second and third generation did marry outside the fold. When the outmar-rying reached crisis proportions in the 1740s and 1750s, Quakers responded with severity, choosing to preserve their ideals rather than accommodate their children. Between 1750 and 1790, Pennsylvania’s Quaker community disowned almost 50 percent of the rising generation for marrying “irregularly.”

  For women whose life choices were in harmony with Quaker prescriptives, the opportunity for leadership and public recognition far exceeded those in the non-Quaker world. Opportunities did not lie in the economic sphere, however, for unlike the Dutch of New York, the Quakers were inclined to insulate women from economic authority. Quaker women rarely handled or managed the money their products brought to the family, even though colonial Pennsylvania had an extensive trade in home manufactures. As widows, Quaker women were also less likely to enjoy the authority that Dutch or other English Protestant women could expect. Male co-executors restricted Quaker widows’ actions, and husbands relied on male overseers and trustees to guide their widow’s administration of the estate. A widow’s guardianship of her own minor children was also closely monitored. She was expected to submit a complete account, with vouchers, for every shilling spent on basic necessities as well as education. Unlike Dutch widows of the seventeenth century, who had great latitude in managing their children’s legacies, Chester County Quaker women could not sell any land unless they persuaded a court that all other existing resources—their husband’s personal estate or the rent earned on lands—were inadequate to pay debts or maintain the family.

  How do we explain the constraints placed on Quaker wives and mothers in a culture that acknowledged women’s rationality as equal to men’s? The answer probably lies with two overriding concerns of Quakerism: that parents, particularly mothers, devote their lives to the spiritual education of their children and that sufficient material wealth, especially in the form of land, be amassed and distributed to retain those children within the circle of the faith. The logic of the former discouraged women’s involvement in economic affairs; the logic of the latter produced an anxious and protective attitude toward inheritance and its management among those responsible for economic affairs.

  No such constraints operated within the religious sphere, however. Women became elders within the Quaker meeting and ministers as well. In such roles, they were celebrated by women and admired by men. Indeed, female spiritual leadership was often a path to social mobility, for a woman’s poverty was no deterrent to an elite marriage if she was a “talented vessel of truth.” The wealthiest of Quaker men were know to seek out these women to be the mother of their children.

  Susanna Hudson was such a woman. She was born into poverty in northern Ireland in 1728 and spent most of her youth as a domestic servant. At the age of twenty-one she married a poor linen weaver named Joseph Hatton. When her husband’s shop went bankrupt, friends found the growing Hatton family a farm to lease. Here, in the Irish countryside, her husband kept two looms going while Susanna milked the cows and nursed her own children. Over the years the couple managed to save some money, which they planned to use for their passage to Pennsylvania But the Quaker community they lived in did not want to lose Susanna Hudson Hatton, for she was no ordinary farmer’s wife but a Quaker minister who had been called to give testimony at the age of seventeen. Over the years her reputation had grown, so to keep Susanna in Ireland, friends subsidized the Hattons, paying apprenticeship fees for all their sons.

  In 1759 Joseph Hatton died. Susanna took a small inheritance, left to her in appreciation for her ministry by another Irish Quaker, and visited William Penn’s “holy experiment.” There, she met Thomas Lightfoot, the second-wealthiest farmer in Chester County. Lightfoot was so impressed by this Irish widow’s testimony that he followed her to Ireland, courted, and eventually married her.

  Susanna Hudson Lightfoot lived the rest of her life in comfort. Did material ease soften her commitment to simplicity and truth or diminish her capacity to listen to and give testimony to the Inner Voice? She denied such change in herself. Before her death, she wrote to old Irish friends, intent upon assuring them that she had remained true to her calling.

  I would have my Friends to know in the land of my nativity, as some there (though very few) said I should grow proud, if ever I grew rich; therefore, I would have them to know (not for my sake but for the precious testimony’s sake) that the southern breezes have not yet soothed so as to make me forget myself; it is true, this has been a pleasant spot to live in, with an agreeable companion, and I believe it was nothing short of the good hand which so provided for me, but my heart has not been in it.

  Whether Susannah Hudson Lightfoot spoke with conviction or in uneasy defense we cannot know. But her life confirms the respect Quakers of both sexes willingly accorded women who were exemplars of the faith.

  Born to poverty or comfort, religiously prominent women were depicted as satisfied individuals. They were energetic, happy, and faithful women who integrated their spiritual and material lives, reading the Bible in the course of their daily chores. When a moment of respite came, one matron was remembered as retreating to her room “with a Bible or some religious book; where a portion of her time was spent lone; from which retirement she often returned with evident tokens that her eyes had been bathed in tears.” On their deathbed, many pious Quaker women enacted a final lesson in life for friends and family; with husband, children, and friends gathered around their bedside, they gave their last testimony on the peace that came from a Quaker life. “I can freely give up husband and children and all this world,” Eleanor Smith said on her deathbed, “to be with the Lord, whose presence I feel flowing as a river into my soul.”

  What comes across to us from these reminiscences may not be the message that these Quaker matrons intended. The historian cannot fail to notice the independent space these women were able to create for themselves; the time for reflection and thoughtfulness they had; and the calm with which they accepted and integrated authority and respect into their character and daily life. Even if, by the mid-eighteenth century, the “holy experiment” had unraveled and Quaker hegemony in Pennsylvania politics had been broken, women such as Susanna Hudson, Eleanor Smith, and Martha Thomas had been significant figures in the creation and shaping of their religious culture.

  Religion or ethnicity defined the context of many middle-colony women’s lives. Yet social class was no less important in determining their circumstances. In the commercial, urban centers of Philadelphia and New York and in the Pennsylvania agricultural economy which some historians laud as the “best poor man’s country,” a woman’s position within the social hierarchy delimited her choices and her opportunities and established the possible within her own history.

  The fertile valleys and rich farmland of Pennsylvania quickly yielded a grain economy. Quakers and non-Quakers alike participated in a commercial agriculture that made the middle colonies the breadbasket of the British Empire during the eighteenth century. This grain economy required an expanded labor force, not only in the production of wheat and rye, but also in the performance of other farm chores and household activities. Home manufacture was an increasingly important part of this commercial agricultural economy. And by the 1760s, for example, counties like Chester were shipping butter to colonial cities and to the West Indies. In the cities, flour milling and textile manufacture expanded urban employment. New York and Philadelphia were becoming major colonial ports, generating growth in intracity commerce and trade between the rural and urban areas of each colony. These cities were magnets for the poor as well as the rich, and those who made their fortunes here exploited the labor of those who did not. Each of these broad economic developments would have consequences for women’s productive activities.