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Week 13 - 19Th Quaker Women

Week 13 - 19Th Quaker Women

Week 13 - 19th Quaker Women

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WOMEN, RELIGION AND HIGHER EDUCATION ALISON MACKINNON Women’s History Review, Vol. 7, No. 2, 1998 struggled with the relation between higher education and feminism. As Joyce Antler has concluded, the great virtue of many of the studies is the continuing joining of women’s educational experience to an analysis of women’s roles in larger society.[4] But one aspect remains strangely Educated Doubt: neglected; few have considered the way in which highly-educated women women, religion and the challenge integrated, ignored or resisted religion in the renegotiation of their subjectivities as highly educated women. of higher education, c. 1870-1920 [1] Higher education, with its emphasis on rationality and the secular, presented a major challenge to religious belief. Through several women’s responses to higher education we can reflect on the interplay between the ALISON MACKINNON secular, the activist and the mystical in their spiritual lives. Responses might University of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia take the form of rejection of traditional beliefs, of transformation of active witnessing into social action, and conversion of the spiritual or passionate into the aesthetic. Others might find in higher education a new field for the growth of the soul, new possibilities for moral transformation. While some ABSTRACT The advent of higher education for women, with its emphasis on drifted away from orthodox religion, others tended towards more embracing reason, on scientific thought and on critical approaches to knowledge, forms of the ethereal such as spiritualism, Christian Science [5] and constituted a potential threat to religious belief. The stories of male ‘doubters’ theosophy. Overall, we can detect a common thread – the search for a new are legion but what happened to thoughtful women, confronted with voice, a new sense of public authority. challenges to their belief systems? This article shows that educated doubt was not only a male affliction. Women responded to the challenge in a variety of Education and the Victorian Crisis of Faith ways. Some rejected belief, turning their religious impulses to aesthetic or social ends. Others brought scientific reasoning to bear on religious The neglect of highly-educated women’s religious experience is curious, phenomena, hoping to ‘prove’ the existence of spirituality. Some saw in science given the centrality of religion to most nineteenth-century women’s lives and and reason a further manifestation of the spiritual impulse; in education the moral authority it conferred upon them.[6] And, in significant ways, the further possibilities of the life of the spirit. A common thread unites the admission of women to the Universities of and Cambridge was a responses, the search for a voice, an authority which women sought in the new direct consequence of the turmoil experienced by many younger male dons secular institutions of higher learning. whose questioning of received orthodoxy in a range of areas included a challenge to the hold of religion.[7] Divisions within the Victorian Church, such as the conflict between Victorian humanitarianism and harsh Calvinist doctrines, as well as the publication of German Biblical criticism, prepared [The Society was] losing grasp of the highly educated and intelligent the way for the crisis of conscience which struck many thoughtful young young men and women belonging to our best old Quaker families who Victorians.[8] In the decades following the publication of John Stuart Mills’s were receiving first class curriculum at College and then drifting A System of Logic (1843), which challenged intuition and faith as legitimate theologically.[2] sources of information about the world and proposed a proper methodology How worldly! how shocking! how unchristian! [Anna Lloyd’s sisters’ for the social sciences, and Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1858) and The reaction to her intention to study at Cambridge c. 1869] [3] Descent of Man ( 1871), which more than any other texts challenged literal Christian beliefs, the attempt to reconcile the conflict between science and The history of women’s higher education has covered considerable ground. religion occupied many searching minds, both male and female.[9] For many Many historians have mapped the struggles of women to enter higher no reconciliation was possible: faith vanished entirely. By 1877 education, noting that their entry was achieved in the Western world in a W. H. Mallock could comment, “One may almost say that with us one can remarkably short stretch of time in spite of, in most countries, a fairly high hear faith decaying”.[10] It is the men, however, particularly those of the level of opposition. Others have charted women’s efforts to create their own intellectual élite, whose loss of faith we most frequently encounter. Such a institutions; have engaged with the multiple dimensions of the college loss for women might well be seen as even more catastrophic. experience; have traced the effects of college on postgraduate lives; and have

241 242 WOMEN, RELIGION AND HIGHER EDUCATION ALISON MACKINNON The stories of the male doubters are legion. , for output of writing and investigation while also performing the duties of example, was a brilliant young Cambridge Fellow who resigned his Trinity Principal of the newly-established Newnham College, Cambridge. At College Fellowship as he could not with clear conscience assent to the 39 Newnham young women were grudgingly accepted into University articles of Christian faith. Frederick Myers and Edmund Gurney, Sidgwick’s examinations and the life of the mind whilst being carefully excluded from Trinity colleagues and co-founders of the Society of Pyschical Research, also any of the privileges of the university.[17] found themselves unable to accept the comforting doctrines of the In her role as psychical researcher par excellence, coolly amassing vast omnipresence of God and the life after death – doctrines espoused in the numbers of facts from well-corroborated sources and sifting them minutely Evangelical homes in which they had been raised. Poet Arthur Clough, in search of emerging theoretical formulations, Eleanor Sidgwick embodied whose agonies of religious doubt were witnessed with alarm by his sister the faith in inductive empiricism of her intellectual milieu. She also provided Ann Jemima, founding Principal of Newnham College, Cambridge, elicited one of the few models available for the educated woman. Her response to many a sympathetic response to his Easter Day: the Victorian crisis of doubt, a crisis, incidentally which she did not appear Ah well-a-day, for we are souls bereaved! to share to the same extent as her husband Henry, not only offered women a Of all the creatures under heaven’s wide cope language of progressive social reform vested in the new science rather than We are most hopeless who had once most hope, moral imperatives, but sought to bolster women’s right to higher education And most beliefless who had once believed. in statistically-supported ways.[18] Sidgwick was an excellent mathematician, serene in the “cool retreats of scientific speculation”, “a watcher of persons The response to this pervasive religious doubt took several forms. One was and things” [19], ideally suited to rational debate. She claimed the authority the attempt to prove the supernatural by scientific means.[11] Beatrice of the new faith in science to insert women’s voice into the public domain. Webb identified two other marked tendencies of British intellectual life in What was to replace the pre-eminence of religion in the the 1880s: a preoccupation with science and a transferral of the ideal of religion-saturated nineteenth century for the “numerous positivists, service from God to man.[12] In her biography of Roger Fry, agnostics and atheists” which commentators identify? Sidgwick provides one alluded to a variant of the latter. Fry, she explained, “tried to make art the example, but there were multiple pathways. In what follows, I look at several servant of society”.[13] Woolf attributed the ardour with which Roger Fry, a different approaches highly-educated Quaker women took to reconciling former Quaker, threw himself into a range of enterprises as due to his religion and science. I refer to science not in its modern, more specific, ‘Quaker blood’. Karl Pearson directed his energies after his loss of faith to sense but in the notion accepted by the Victorians of a more inclusive understanding scientifically the ‘laws’ underlying relations between the science, of the social sciences, of moral science even, and the notion of the sexes, the agenda of the Men and Women’s Club. Pearson was a rationalist, world made amenable to empirical observation and analysis. Quaker women who “turned to free thought for spiritual enlightenment”.[14] The provide a fascinating example, committed as they were to ‘the inner light’, to deliberations of the newly-formed Men and Women’s Club were to be a degree of equality between men and women and to a well-documented conducted “from the historical and scientific as distinguished from the association with social reform. How would they deal with the challenges of theological standpoint”. They were to include an “exact and impartial higher education to their beliefs? Some abandoned their religious faith analysis of facts”.[15] Other putative rationalists hoped to find evidence for completely, turning to aestheticism to meet their needs for the beauty and the existence of the disputed spiritual phenomena precisely through that passion their mothers had found in evangelical religion. Some turned from scientific method, using the sceptical spirit of inquiry. Reluctant to abandon the notion of service of God to service to man (sic), as Beatrice Webb so completely the spiritual values of their youth they established the Society for neatly put it, finding in a series of social causes an outlet for their Psychical Research as an essential part of an attempt to exist “Between missionary endeavour. In varied ways they sought to claim a new authority, Science and Religion”.[16] a voice, distinct from that of home or church. In some women, Judith The Society for Psychical Research, founded in 1882 along the lines of Walkowitz argues, the shift from moral values associated with social purity the Royal Society, is of considerable interest, not only for its longevity (it enabled them to embrace a more socially progressive ‘scientific’ approach to has an active membership today), or for the intrinsic interest of its attempts social change underpinning a more progressive feminism.[20] Was this a to analyse scientifically such diverse phenomena as haunted houses, necessary step for twentieth-century feminism? ‘phantasms of the living’ (and of the dead), and thought transference, but for the fact that the person deemed to be the ideal psychical researcher was a woman, Eleanor Mildred Sidgwick. ‘Nora’ Sidgwick (Balfour until her marriage to Cambridge Fellow Henry Sidgwick) created much of her vast

243 244 WOMEN, RELIGION AND HIGHER EDUCATION ALISON MACKINNON Prophetically, and in words which she later had cause to ponder, Mary Whitall Thomas proclaimed “now we women have our chance ... [W]hat The Quaker Response to the Higher Education of Women women want is power; not to support themselves, but power to do something”.[27] Could seizing that power co-exist with the maintenance of Neither reason nor Christianity invites women to the professor’s chair, the Orthodox beliefs that Thomas and Taylor shared? nor conducts her to the bar, nor makes her welcome to the pulpit, nor The Quaker example gives us cause to reflect on the relationship admits her to the place of ordinary magistracy.[21] between a particular form of higher education (secular) and the maintenance The demand for women’s higher education was, of course, far from or transformation of religious belief. Does a religious group risk annihilation universal: resistance more often than advocacy came from the churches. It in exposing its adherents to the possibility of questioning, challenging its was not without reason that some religious groups feared education for most deeply held tenets? How does the secular, the strong adherence to “the their female adherents. struggled with the desire to maintain a culture of critical discourse”, of sceptical inquiry, sit easily with a sense of strong sense of Quaker community and identity and, at the same time, to transcendence, of the ineffable? Can an education which privileges the provide a broader education which could, potentially, undermine both. rational subvert the impulse to the mystical? Irigaray writes that “the Quakers were well aware of the possible danger of educating women and in poorest in science and the most ignorant were the most eloquent, the richest earlier times had displayed a strong anti-intellectualism. Eighteenth-century in revelation”.[28] Is this always the case? How did highly-educated women Quaker writer Sophia Hume, for example, asked: in the crucible of late nineteenth-century social change negotiate their What has our sex to do with mathematics ... what business have we with subjectivities to accommodate the secular and the sacred? the study of the globes, what have we to do with geometry; what with In quite another context, that of changing family formation, Vann & natural or experimental philosophy; what business have women with Eversley suggested that Quaker belief contained a Puritan/activist strand, physics and metaphysics; what business have we with language ... but to one which sought to dominate nature, and a more contemplative mystical gratify pride, and a vain mind.[22] side.[29] Although marriage and child-bearing were not seen “purely or even primarily as matters of economic calculation”, Vann & Eversley suggest that But in spite of fears of pride and vanity, both and the USA in the Quaker cultural life and religious beliefs worked towards a “rational’, even if nineteenth century had developed systems of ‘guarded’ elementary and unconsciously rational, demographic response.[30] Quaker marriages, secondary schools, designed specifically to promote ‘Quakerliness’ and the subjected to the scrutiny of the business meeting which attempted to reject avoidance of marrying out.[23] The move to provide higher education was unsuitable or impulsive marriages, placed emphasis on the ‘prudent’ slower as it was accepted that “in childhood the foundations of character are marriage. laid”.[24] The need to train teachers for secondary schools finally prompted Were the Puritan and the mystical, those “two cardinal elements Quakers, as other religious groups, to provide colleges, although the Quaker underlying Quaker theology” [31], inextricably linked or variously weighted move came considerably later than most. In the first half of the nineteenth in Quaker marriage choices? Historians of Quakerism point out that century several Friends’ schools in the USA, including Haverford devotion to the strongly mystical or to the more evangelical and ‘rational’ (established in 1834), became colleges: in the second half of the nineteenth varied greatly in Quaker practice over time and space. Phyllis Mack has century several new colleges were instituted including Swarthmore, drawn our attention to the creative tension between Quakers’ tenacity for a Pennsylvania, in 1864. Following Quaker belief, all, except for the Orthodox ‘pre-modern spirituality’ and the associated (and apparently contradictory) stronghold, Haverford, were co-educational and most were under the control tendency to accept enlightenment/rationalist concepts in areas such as of Yearly Meetings. banking, commerce and science.[32] In my own research on Quaker In 1884 Bryn Mawr College for women was established, intended by its courtships the two elements went hand in hand in marriage choices.[33] wealthy founder Joseph Taylor, doctor, businessman and Orthodox Quaker, Whilst there was a strong concern that the leadings of the inner light were as the women’s counterpart of Haverford. There, under the terms of Taylor’s observed in matrimonial decision-making, rational considerations such as will, the students were to be “cared for and guarded” and taught the economic prospects and sound family connections played an equal part. “doctrines of the New Testament as accepted by Friends”.[25] Delegates at Rational calculation and ‘falling in love’, that strangely modern combination, the 1880 Conference on Education offered several interpretations of the did seem to coexist. purpose Bryn Mawr was to serve in offering higher education to women. Similar questions arise in relation to higher education. Could the The predictable debate between educating women to be better wives and preservation of the spiritual withstand the scrutiny of rational inquiry? Or mothers or equipping them for an independent life ensued.[26]

245 246 WOMEN, RELIGION AND HIGHER EDUCATION ALISON MACKINNON would young Quaker men and women be cast adrift from their moorings? unravelled by scientific observation, and a firm faith in progress, Like Henry Sidgwick and Frederick Myers before him, Roger Fry found the underpinned Carey Thomas’s dedication to rigorous scholarship, to women’s atmosphere of Cambridge anathema to his religious faith: “his creed ... higher education and to women’s suffrage. While Mary Thomas hoped for dropped from him without any shock or pain”.[34] His passionate nature her daughter’s new heart, Carey Thomas desired proof, and proof was not was to find its home in art and the unQuakerly occupation of art critic. This forthcoming for her in the religion of her parents. In the work of Herbert ethical and religious dilemma, I argue, was not peculiarly male. Jane Spencer, however, a sense of scientific method, satisfying to the young Harrison, noted Newnhamite and Cambridge scholar of Greek religion, read aspirant after academic success, could be discerned. Truth was revealed in The Origin of the Species at the age of 20, and “Darwin as well as Aristotle, science, not in religion. encouraged her to abandon Christianity”.[35] Let us turn then to two In one sense Carey Thomas’s commitment to the pioneering cause of prominent Quaker scholars. women’s scholarship can be seen as a variant of her mother’s reform activity. While Mary Thomas evangelised for temperance, her daughter preached the gospel of women’s suitability for the highest levels of research “I declare thee really prefers an unsound book, to a sound one” and scholarship. But religion for Mary Thomas was not only witnessing for Mary Whitall Thomas, wife of physician James Carey Thomas, mother of God: it was a deeply felt, passionately experienced, often renewed ecstasy. eight living children, and Public Friend, expressed her Quaker faith through Where would her passionate daughter find an outlet for her deepest preaching and reform outside the home and at Quaker meetings. Fired by feelings? For Carey Thomas the void left by her loss of Quaker faith was the religious enthusiasm and the evangelising spirit of Gurneyite Quakers, filled by a Swinburnian aestheticism. Initially the works of Shelley and her ecstatic faith added a dimension to her life which transcended that of a Godwin, later of Rosetti, Swinburne and Gautier, drew her and a like-minded traditional Baltimore wife and mother in the last decades of the nineteenth group of passionate young women (‘nous autres’) [39] into a lifelong century. Nevertheless, the birth of her firstborn, daughter Martha Carey enthusiasm for poetry and the arts, represented by Europe, quintessentially Thomas, in 1857, brought her much joy and the hope of presenting to the by Italy. From Italy she wrote to Richard Cadbury: “Before the pictures, the world an active Christian such as herself. In this she was to be disappointed. constant springs of new intellectual and emotional life; and in the open air, a M. Carey Thomas, as she later came to be known, made her mark on the faun life, a background, a setting, a wherewithal to furbish forth one’s world as a leading educationist, responsible for establishing Bryn Mawr as a imaginations’.[40] major research university for women. As the towering figure in a superior The “religion of culture” [41] occupied the opposite pole to the Quaker institution she outwardly observed the forms of Quaker faith while plainness of Quaker life and led Carey Thomas far from the principles of her completely rejecting any belief in Quaker doctrine. In mid-life she wrote to youth. The ‘new heart’ her mother urgently sought for her recalcitrant her companion, Mary Garrett, after attending a : “It was a daughter was born elsewhere, given over to an enduring love of art and melancholy assembly to me of bygone days and things that are as obsolete literature. As a professor, the young student believed, “one [could] teach as the mastodon”.[36] one’s religion, highest beauty in literature and art from the lecture Mary and James Thomas belonged to the Orthodox body of Friends platform”. In Carey’s early years Mary Thomas had displayed a broad which split from the more liberal Hicksite Quakers in 1827. They believed in tolerance to her daughter’s voracious reading while regretting that she the literal truth of the Scriptures. Influenced by the powerful evangelical really preferred to read “an unsound book, to a sound one”.[42] And the preaching of Joseph John Gurney, they were part of the renewal movement ‘unsound’ books of Carey’s adolescence and young adulthood taught her, in “that brought Orthodox Quakers into the larger evangelical Christian world Horowitz’s words, “that passion lay at the core of her being”.[43] What of thought and practice”.[37] As Horowitz points out, renewal theology Carey sought from literature in adulthood was to be emotionally, placed an emphasis, new to Quakers, on the experience of conversion or the passionately moved: writing of one of her favourite authors that he had “the ‘new birth’. From her earliest years until her young adulthood in Leipzig, power of bringing tears to my eyes, of touching a heart string on every Carey Thomas (as she was known in later life) and her mother engaged in a page”.[44] It was feeling Carey Thomas sought, the feeling which eluded her bitter struggle – the struggle for her ‘new heart’. In spite of the best efforts in Quaker gatherings: in Gothic cathedrals she “felt what sent men on the of mother and daughter, the desired conversion never came. In 1879, at the Crusades ... to feel a thing is far beyond knowledge”.[45] Later in Thomas’s age of 22, M. Carey Thomas finally admitted to losing her Christian faith, academic career the Quaker trustees of Bryn Mawr were highly suspicious of replacing it with Spencerian positivist evolutionary science.[38] This belief in their dominating president’s unsound books. Her introduction of secular, natural law rather than divine revelation, a natural law which could be cosmopolitan literature and unQuakerly ritual into the College was

247 248 WOMEN, RELIGION AND HIGHER EDUCATION ALISON MACKINNON challenged by several trustees, who advocated the more guarded academic surrounding herself with material expressions of that splendour, a slightly curriculum of Haverford.[46] older contemporary and fellow toiler in the educational field found a more M. Carey Thomas was an extremely complex character, blurring the direct path to God through beauty. It was not the glory of Rosetti’s lines of gender, sensibility and religion in manifold ways. With vast energy paintings, nor of the breathtaking cathedrals of Europe that inspired and enthusiasm she attempted to rewrite the vocabulary of what was Elizabeth Powell Bond in the first instance but the beautiful colours of possible for women in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. nature. Bond, who came from a more liberal Hicksite background, sought to Transgressive in almost every way, in her teens in the late 1860s she decided reconcile Quaker ideals and the changing context of late nineteenth-century to tackle what was undoubtedly a man’s education, initially favouring society by finding God in every aspect of life. “I believe it possible”, she science or medicine. She enjoyed the passionate friendships with young claimed, “with truth and love in the soul, to so spiritualise this earthly life women so characteristic of the time. Attracted to intellectually curious and all its cares and interests, that they shall all minister immediately to the young men, one of whom clearly threatened to capture her heart and growth of the spirit”.[50] In a paper to the Young Friends Association in independence, she made a conscious decision to remain free and to live her 1896, for instance, she set out her views on the claims of beauty and life devoted to scholarship, art and a commitment to a life with women. Her simplicity.[51] tomboyish childhood pranks – climbing on roofs, walking on stilts and “Our experience of the spirituality, the noble clarity, the absolute generally creating mayhem – foreshadowed a fierce determination to genuine-ness, the incorruptible integrity, the lovely purity associated with challenge convention, to succeed in a new world for women, that of the severity of Friendly simplicity, makes it seem almost sacrilege”, she academic competition. She freely embraced ambition, that most unFriendly claimed, “certainly a risk, to depart from the straight line that fixed itself in ‘race with the rest’. In entering the academic world of the 1870s and early the lives of our fathers”. But, she believed the line had begun “to relax its 1880s Carey Thomas was exposed to all the ‘unsound’ currents which her fixedness”, the distinguishing outward signs of the profession of faith were mother feared. For a young woman who could not accept that there was one losing themselves, but doing so “as the leaven loses itself in leavening the religious truth, who believed that no religion, “if it did not shackle”, was loaf”. Our responsibility, she asserted, was in trying to prevent “a swing of wrong, that none had the truth, “they were only notes in a chorus”, religious the pendulum back again to excess”. For Bond the beauty of the Quaker doubt was as insistent as in the lives of many young men.[47] grey or drab dress was in its spiritual associations, the notion that dress, The fact that birthright membership of the Society of Friends was not indeed “all outward environment” had been subordinated to personality and enough for Mary and James Thomas and their circle, that they demanded character which could shine through the externals. How could one consider evidence of conversion, of the birth of a new heart, created extra tension for the beauties of nature’s colours, the white and purple of the crocus, the the ambitious young girl knocking at the doors of the male academic world. golds of the daffodils? Those colours could not be as beautiful as grey or Yet the world in which Carey grew up was far from narrow. As we have drab “unless their use [was] conformed to the law of simplicity; unless like seen, Mary Whitall Thomas supported women’s aspirations for higher grey and drab their chiefest beauty [was] derived from spiritual education, for “the power to do something”, as did Hannah Whitall Smith, associations”.[52] “May we not say then”, Bond concluded, “that the law of Carey’s aunt, and a feminist, writer and rebel. Doubtless the Quaker belief in beauty and the law of simplicity are at one with each other, and that the the spiritual equality of men and women underpinned their support, as did vital principle for the conduct of our lives is this – to make the outward their consciousness of the constraints of their own marriages [48] and circumstances of dress and household appointments, not the masters of the emerging currents of feminism. But the voice of the evangelist, the spiritual spiritual life but its ministers”. reformer, was not for Carey Thomas. Nor would it attract attention in the Elizabeth Powell Bond’s highly developed consciousness of the life of world of the research university. The voice of the rational philologist, the the spirit enabled her to distinguish a ministry in such taken-for-granted advocate of women’s education, however, was one to be reckoned with. She aspects of life as the natural environment and human friendships. As a kept her passionate addiction to the arts, the realm of feeling, securely young single woman of scarcely 30, Elizabeth Powell had been called in private. 1870 to lead the Free Congregational Society in Florence, Massachusetts, a role for which her Quaker upbringing and 4 years of teaching Dio Lewis gymnastics in Boston and Vassar apparently prepared her. Not a licensed “From beauty on and up to God” [49] minister to the group, Powell held a position akin to that of a teacher: the While Carey Thomas drifted inexorably away from the faith of her parents, spiritual and moral development of her congregation were her finding instead a passionate attachment to beautiful works of art and responsibility.[53] In her paper ‘The Ministry of Nature’ she spoke of the

249 250 WOMEN, RELIGION AND HIGHER EDUCATION ALISON MACKINNON beauty of nature, pleasure in flowers, enjoyment in the study of botany, “Kindergarten? Hardly!”, she exclaimed, anticipating the sceptical response geology and astronomy, as manifestations of the spirit. Nature is “a of readers, then went on to argue that the purpose of the College was “that perpetual message from God that the central motive of all creation is of the kindergarten writ large”. Influenced by the educational reformers love”.[54] The sky over our heads suggests infinity, the earth under our feet Froebel and Pestalozzi, Bond believed that each child or older student must brought assuring firmness and the unfailing promise of harvests, mountains be allowed to unfold in an atmosphere of love. Each was to be regarded as and rivers “move us with their noble symbolism”, Bond affirmed. Later, in ‘A holy. The metaphors of growth, common to this school of thought, were Spring Parable Read to [Swarthmore] Students’, she again elaborated: the second nature to Bond: the child’s petals were to unfold at the appointed ministry of flowers taught that crocuses “were living out the law of their time, the delicate tendrils not to be forced.[61] being” [55], and “every tree awaking from its wintry sleep seems alive with God”.[56] The seasons of nature taught patience and acceptance, joy and the As “the leaven loses itself in leavening the loaf” constant presence of an unseen Hand. Developments in science, which Elizabeth Powell Bond, trained as a M. Carey Thomas and Elizabeth Powell Bond, both prominent Quaker teacher, followed with interest, were further proof of God. “We are favoured educators, used vastly different vocabularies to express their response to the to live in a time”, she affirmed, “when we have new realisation of the power challenge of higher education to their religious belief, yet in both the of the unseen ... As we come nearer to these unseen forces we come nearer Quaker faith had “leavened the loaf”. There were many forms in which a to God”.[57] Science could illustrate by analogy the presence of the soul: “It Quaker heritage could lead to affirming a life of the spirit. In Bond the is this intangible part that like heat and light and electricity eludes our “distinguishing outward signs” of the profession of faith were no longer as grasp, that is the center of man’s power”.[58] At Swarthmore College, where obviously worn in bodily form – the outward profession gave way to the Bond was Dean for 20 years, her ability to link spirituality and the everyday inner acceptance of the spiritual nature of all of life. To her students and life of the undergraduates by using the language of their work, sporting colleagues Bond personified serenity and acceptance, the “everyday activities and friendships, endeared her to countless students and illustrated heroism” about which she had lectured to young Friends. Bond found and her supreme talents for ministry. Anna Gillingham, a student in the 1890s, preached God in every aspect of her life and work, in nature as in students’ reported to her parents that Mrs Bond “gave us a beautiful talk yesterday friendships and athletic activities. She was both teacher and minister, the about our sabbath”. The whole room of “laughing, merry boys and girls sat latter more overtly at two points in her life, in her early thirties and in hushed and quiet”.[59] Perhaps they heard Dean Bond speak on The retirement. During her long association with Swarthmore her role as Dean Ministry of Friendship. “Our friend ... is he [sic] who ... sets us free from was clearly a form of ministry and her influence reached out into several ourselves and is a connecting link between us and the world” she claimed, generations of Swarthmore students. In her life and words there is no “a mission field is close at hand, – to be a true friend to ‘the friend of thy difficulty in identifying the spiritual, and her authority as a spiritual leader. soul’”. A friend was, in Bond’s terms, one more revelation of God.[60] While such a leader had a very definite place in a Quaker college, her Noting two athletes returning from a run during a winter’s storm, Bond authority would carry less weight in the new secular institutions. For Bond, used the occasion to press home a point. What was the mainspring, the less highly educated than Thomas, there was no difficulty in reconciling motive power of all their disciplined activity? A spiritual force, “the purpose religion, science and higher education. For Thomas, however, the new world to win when strength should be pitted against strength” .... “it is this of the research university was one where reason reigned. invisible, spiritual force that is securing to them not only exercise and health In the early twentieth-century professions, spiritual life was often and glorious recreation ... but also a mental supremacy”. It is scarcely relegated to the realm of the private. It is not difficult to detect the surprising that Bond secured the devotion of generations of Swarthmore conscious witnessing of believers through their life’s work, although they students, whose interests and concerns she took so much to heart, whose rarely voiced openly their sense of the spiritual. Edith Pye said of her life language she spoke. companion, Hilda Clark, English medical doctor, wartime relief worker and Bond was attuned to the “problem for the college student of peace activist, that “she talked little about her beliefs, but she lived her maintaining the principles of the home in the face of doubters”. Her Quaker faith”.[62] Clark explained her understanding of religious practice: “I solution, argued in a long manuscript paper, was to support a home think it may be said that wherever Friends have administered relief in atmosphere rather than the “Bohemianism of College towns”. In her various countries, interest was aroused in the spirit that made them work in argument two strands are interwoven, that of the traditional ‘guarded’ a way that impressed people as being disinterested and sincere. This led Quaker education and contemporary views of the kindergarten. people into enquiry into Friends’ principles”.[63] In common with Elizabeth

251 252 WOMEN, RELIGION AND HIGHER EDUCATION ALISON MACKINNON Powell Bond, Clark believed in the spiritual nature of all of life. Running a confided to her mother the difficulty of striking a balance between her love maternity hospital behind the lines during World War I, Clark reflected on of William Morris’s work and the required Friends’ simplicity. the dilemmas of pacifism: “I do not mean the practical difficulties but the What can we make of the aesthetic passion of M. Carey Thomas, who spiritual ones ... the essential spiritual difficulties – the standing up for went quite beyond any sense of Quakerly ‘balance’? Was this a manifestation peace in the midst of the machinery of war, while owing our lives and our of the spirit, replacing religious enthusiasm, sublimating it into other scope for work to those who are fighting ...”.[64] Her post-war relief work in channels? Clearly religion did not stand the test of scientific rigour in Europe was part of an active spiritual life, one that she pragmatically linked Thomas’s view. But could the need for spiritual passion be sublimated with the mechanics of organisation. Pleading for more top personnel to be elsewhere? How do we define spirituality in these contexts? Was the secular, sent from the English Friends’ Committee to post-war Vienna, for instance, the rational, enough for the highly educated women of the late nineteenth Clark argued that “here the spiritual help will be hampered if it isn’t backed century? “One of the things I wanted very much to discover by going to by brains”.[65] In Clark a separation between “service to God” and “service Newnham”, wrote one new student in 1885, “was whether ‘knowledge’ per to man” (sic) is untenable. While an observer may well have seen Clark as se was really all-sufficient for some of the women of this age, or whether engaged in the latter, to intimates her ‘witnessing’ was clear. they were only trying to drown their hearts in it, as I half suspected both of The question of spirituality becomes more complex when we turn to them and of myself.”[71] The vast numbers of college women who were the lives of those for whom education had not been reconciled with religious attracted to theosophy, a belief system which attempted an overarching belief. M. Carey Thomas maintained the outward forms of Quaker belief for framework which would include science and religion, seems to suggest very good reasons – she needed the support of the Bryn Mawr trustees – otherwise.[72] Highly-educated women (and men) were attracted to while at a deeper level her faith had fled, although she never formally associations which attempted a reconciliation, which accommodated both resigned from the Society of Friends.[66] At the age of 24 she wrote of her knowledge and heart. preoccupation with heroes, “hero worship, or rather genius worship is one This exploratory article has raised more questions than it can answer. manifestation of the religious insti[n]ct in whi[ch] one can pour heart & Perhaps it can best be seen as opening a conversation on the way in which soul”.[67] Another manifestation was the gift of enthusiasm. The ardour late nineteenth-century higher education presented new challenges for expressed through her mother’s religion found different channels in Carey women from religious backgrounds, new ways of defining spiritual life and Thomas’s passion for art and literature, her advocacy of higher education for many possibilities for remaining securely anchored or ‘drifting theologically’. women. Can the commitment to service which characterised the life and Phyllis Mack has asked that we “keep our ideas fixed on that point where work of so many highly-educated Quaker women be ascribed as the working religion, rationality and public action meet”.[73] Around that point complex of that spirit, of the “religious instinct”, even where conscious belief had currents flow: historical contingency shapes new possibilities. ‘Educated gone? Philosopher Carol Ochs defines spirituality as “the process of coming doubt’ cannot be seen as a male affliction alone. It provided a conduit into relationship with reality”: “this idea of reality, as something through which many women had to pass before they too could claim a new progressively revealed to us throughout our experiences and ultimately authority, a social rather than a religious voice, one which could be heard in inexhaustible, is what I mean by God”.[68] Could that reality, in an the new secular institutions of the twentieth century. increasingly secular world, always contain one fixed idea of God? Sarah Bancroft, student president at Swarthmore in 1897, was much Notes influenced by Dean Elizabeth Powell Bond and carried that influence with her to Newnham College, Cambridge as the scholarship [1] This article is a part of a larger project, Quaker Families and the Construction holder. Fellow student Anna Gillingham was impressed with Sarah’s of Social Difference, funded by the Australian Research Council. I am grateful demeanour at her final Swarthmore College meeting: “It has been a great for ongoing discussions with my colleagues Sandra Stanley Holton and day for her to stand there presiding and call for the report of the Margaret Allen, and Kerri Allen, post-doctoral fellow for the project. Earlier [scholarship] committee which would make known her distinction, but her versions were presented to the seminar on Varieties of Religious Experience, at quiet modesty and dignity were beautiful”.[69] Later, married to Roger the Centre for Historical Analysis, Rutgers University, New Jersey, April 1997 Clark, Hilda’s sister, Sarah Bancroft Clark combined the duties of a modern and to the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia workshop, Standing against mother of six with active involvement in Quaker meetings, in Seventh Day the stream: women, religion and political action, held in Adelaide, 10-11 July 1997. Thanks are due to seminar participants for many helpful suggestions. Schools, in suffrage activity and the intellectual currents which characterised the Quaker ‘renaissance’.[70] Decorating her house in Street, Somerset, she

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[2] Henry Stanley Newman cited in Thomas C. Kennedy (1996) What hath [17] See Gillian Sutherland (1996) Emily Davies, the Sidgwicks and the education of Manchester wrought? Change in the Religious Society of Friends, 1895-1920, women in Cambridge, in Richard Mason (Ed.) Cambridge Minds (Cambridge: Journal of Friends’ Historical Society, 57, p. 279. Cambridge University Press); also Helen Fowler (1996) Eleanor Mildred [3] M. C. Bradbrook (1969) ‘That Infidel Place’: a short history of Girton College, Sidgwick, 1845-1936, in Edward Shils & Carmen Blacker (Eds) Cambridge 1869-1969 (: Chatto & Windus). Women: twelve portraits (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). [4] Joyce Antler (1987) Review of three books on women’s higher education, Signs: [18] In response to a journalist’s jibe that intellectual success for women could only Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 12, pp. 386-390. be undertaken at the cost of physical deterioration, Sidgwick undertook a major study (with over 500 questionnaires) of Newnham women’s health compared to [5] See Sandra Stanley Holton (forthcoming 1998) Feminism, history and that of their sisters. Fowler, ‘Eleanor Mildred Sidgwick’, pp. 19-20. movements of the soul: Christian Science in the life of Alice Clark, 1874-1934, Australian Feminist Studies. [19] Ethel Sidgwick (1938) Mrs Henry Sidgwick: a memoir, pp. 30, 36 (London: Sidgwick & Jackson). [6] Perhaps it is best explained by our own late twentieth-century secular preoccupation with class and gender. The same cannot be said for Early Modern [20] See, for instance, Walkowitz’s discussion of Maria Sharpe’s painful history where religion is a central focus of women’s history, See, for instance, transformation in City of Dreadful Delight, ch. 5. Patricia Crawford (1993) Women and Religion in England, 1500-1720 [21] John Angell James (1785-1859) (1854) Female piety: or The Young Woman’s (London: Routledge) and Phyllis Mack (1992) Visionary Women: ecstatic Friend and Guide through Life to Immortality (New ) p. 90, cited in Lynda prophesy in seventeenth-century England (Berkeley: University of California Coon et al That Gentle Strength, p. 1. Press). A notable modern exception is Catherine A. Faver (1993) Feminist [22] Sophia Hume (1766) A Caution to such as observe days and Times: to which is spirituality and social reform: examples from the early twentieth century, added, An Address to Magistrates, Parents, Masters of Families etc, 5th edn Women’s Studies Quarterly, 1 & 2, pp. 90-105. (London) by J. Ridley, G. Kearsly & L. Urquhart, p. 12, cited in Phyllis Mack [7] Sheldon Rothblatt (1968) The Revolution of the Dons: Cambridge and society (1997) In a female voice: selfhood, sex and politics in eighteenth-century in Victorian England (London: Faber & Faber). Quakerism, unpublished paper presented to Centre for Historical Analysis, [8] Josef L. Altholz (1995, reprint edition) The warfare of conscience with theology, Rutgers University. in Gerald Parsons (Ed.) Religion in Victorian Britain, Volume IV: [23] See, for instance, Kerri Allen & Alison Mackinnon, ‘Allowed and expected to be Interpretations (Manchester: Manchester University Press, first published 1988). educated and intelligent’: the education of Quaker girls in nineteenth-century England, History of Education (forthcoming, 1998) and Kerri Allen, Quaker [9] See, for instance, Alan Gould (1968) The Founders of Psychical Research, ch. 2 education in comparative perspective: England and the United States in the (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul); John Peregrine Williams (1984) The nineteenth century, unpublished paper, Quaker families project. making of Victorian psychical research: an intellectual élites’ approach to the [24] Alpheus MacTaggart (1880) A Friend’s University, Proceedings of a Conference spiritual world, PhD thesis, . on Education in the Society of Friends, p. 119 (Philadelphia: J. H. Culbertson). [10] Cited in Gould (1968) The Founders, pp. 63-64. [25] Cornelia Meigs (1956) What Makes a College? A History of Bryn Mawr, [11] Mary Walker (1990) Between faith and madness: the relationship of women to pp. 23-26 (New York: Macmillan). Meigs points out that Taylor had stipulated the supernatural in late Victorian Britain, in Lynda L. Coon, Katherine J. that Trustees should always be Orthodox Quakers. Haldane & Elizabeth W. Sommer (Eds) That Gentle Strength: historical [26] Proceedings of a Conference on Education, p. 25. perspectives on women in Christianity, p. 230 (Charlottesville: University Press [27] Ibid., p. 27. of Virginia). [28] Luce Irigaray (1985) La Mysterique, Speculum of the Other Woman, p. 192 [12] Cited in Judith R. Walkowitz (1992) City of Dreadful Delight: narratives of (Ithaca: Cornell University Press) (tr. Gillian C. Gill). sexual danger in late-Victorian London, p. 137 (London: Virago). [29] Richard Vann & David Eversley (1992) Friends in Life and Death: the British [13] Virginia Woolf (1940) Roger Fry, a Biography, p. 64 (London: Hogarth Press). and Irish Quakers in the demographic transition, 1650-1900, p. 244 [14] Ibid., p. 137. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). [15] Cited in Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, p. 146. [30] Ibid., p. 128. [16] Frank Miller Turner (1974) Between Science and Religion: the reaction to [31] Jacques Tual (1988) Sexual equality and conjugal harmony: the way to celestial scientific naturalism in late Victorian England (New Haven: Yale University bliss, Journal of the Friends’ Historical Society, 55, p. 168. Press).

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[32] Phyllis Mack, working paper presented to Quaker historians workshop, was first delivered in Florence, MA, on 28 November 1871 and was repeated at Haverford, June 1996. Brooklyn in 1872, in Florence in 1883. [33] Alison Mackinnon (1997) ‘My dearest friend’, courtship and conjugality in some [51] Elizabeth Powell Bond (1896) The claims of beauty and simplicity, manuscript mid and late nineteenth-century Quaker families, Journal of the Friends’ paper for Young Friends Association, EPB papers, Box 4. Historical Society, 58, pp. 44-58. [52] Ibid. [34] Virginia Woolf (1940) Roger Fry, a Biography, p. 13 (London: Hogarth Press). I [53] Emily Cooper Johnson (nd, c. 1930) Dean Bond of Swarthmore: a Quaker am grateful to Kerri Allen for access to her unpublished paper, Negotiating humanist (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company). Quaker identities. [54] Ibid., p. 103. [35] Hugh Lloyd-Jones (1996) Jane Harrison, 1850-1928, in Edward Shils & Carmen [55] Elizabeth Powell Bond (1896) A spring parable read to students of Swarthmore Blacker (Eds) Cambridge Women, p. 30. College, April 19, 1896. Bond papers, Box 4, manuscript paper, SC. [36] Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz (1994) The Passion and the Power of M. Carey [56] EPB, Notes of talks to Friends’ Meetings, 1908-11, Box 4, Bond papers, FHL, Thomas, p. 347 (New York: Knopf). I draw substantially on Horowitz’s biography SC. in the discussion that follows. [57] Ibid., 25 April. [37] Ibid., p. 6. [58] E. Powell Bond, ‘Spiritual growth’. [38] Ibid., p. 114. [59] Gillingham papers, Folder 2, Letters of Anna Gillingham to her parents, Friends [39] Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz (1992) ‘Nous Autres’: reading, passion and the Historical Library, Swarthmore College, 19 September 1896. creation of M. Carey Thomas, Journal of American History, 79, pp. 68-95; Barbara Sicherman (1993) Reading and ambition: M. Carey Thomas and female [60] The Ministry of Friendship, Bond papers, manuscript paper, 14 April 1895. heroism, American Quarterly, 45, pp. 73-103. Sicherman claims that for the [61] There was a considerable overlap here with some of the ideas of Maria young idealist “books were a touchstone for fantasy”, p. 84. For Thomas the Montessori. See Marjan Schwegman, Healing the gap between science and love. works of Swinburne, Shelley and Gautier represented what Linda Dowling has The religious experience of Maria Montessori, working paper presented to the called “The fatal Book”, the “texts ...[which] seem to preside over or indeed Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis, 25 March 1997. See also Elizabeth produce a climacteric of mental and physical change in their readers”. Linda Powell Bond, Reverence, a paper read before The Home Influence Association of Dowling (1986) Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siècle, Philadelphia, 1897, published by the Philanthropic Committee, Philadelphia p. 164 (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Quarterly Meeting, 1897. [40] Horowitz (1994) The Passion and the Power, p. 25. [62] Edith Pye, War and its Aftermath: Letters from Hilda Clark, M B, B S, from [41] Ibid., p. 213. France, Austria and the Near East, 1914-1924, Wells and London, Clare, n.d. p. 125. [42] Ibid., p. 42. [63] Hilda Clark, Notes on relief work, Hilda Clark MSS (Temp MSS 301/1/1), [43] Horowitz, ‘Nous Autres’, p. 71. Library of the Religious Society of Friends, London. [44] Ibid., p. 213. [64] Letter from Hilda Clark, April 1915, Hilda Clark MSS. See also Faver, ‘Feminist [45] Ibid., p. 121. spirituality and social reform’ for Emily Greene Bach’s reconciliation of the [46] Ibid., p. 260. spiritual life and social action. [47] Ibid., p. 96. [65] Report from Hilda Clark to Friends Emergency & War Victims Relief Committee, [48] Horowitz’s biography includes sympathetic accounts of both Whitall sisters, Austria and Hungary subcommittees, London, 2 September 1921, Clark papers. Mary Whitall Thomas and Hannah Whitall Smith, whose strong ideas were to [66] Another prominent educator, Margery Fry, head of Somerville College, Oxford, take unexpected shape in their often unconventional offspring. See also Kerri and sister of the art critic, Roger Fry, did resign from the Society although she Allen’s paper on Hannah Whitall Smith, in this volume. had maintained her faith throughout her own university days. Her biographer [49] Note in diary of Elizabeth Powell Bond, Bond papers, Friends Historical Library, does not record Fry’s struggles with doubt, merely reporting that Margery Swarthmore College. “could not bear Quakerism” and that “one of the leading Quaker families gave her a sense of negative exhilaration, like extra-non-alcoholic drinks. They are [50] Elizabeth Powell Bond, Spiritual growth, manuscript paper, EPB papers, Box 4, good souls, but they make you so anxious not to be a good soul yourself that Diaries and talks, Friends Historical Collection, Swarthmore College. This paper the anxiety is almost a pain”. These flippant words disguise Fry’s dedication to the essential core of Friends’ belief – that of service, and during her long life she

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worked indefatigably for a range of causes, most notably for prison reform but without the faith of Hilda Clark. Enid Huws Jones (1966) Margery Fry: the essential amateur (London: Oxford University Press). [67] Sicherman (1993) ‘Reading and ambition’, p. 84. [68] Carol Ochs (1983) Women and Spirituality (Totowa: Rowman & Allanhead) quoted in Faver, ‘Feminist spirituality and social reform’. [69] Anna Gillingham to her parents, 10 April 1897, Gillingham papers. [70] See Thomas Kennedy (1983-84) History and Quaker Renaissance: the vision of John Rowntree, Journal of the Friends’ Historical Society, 55. [71] Victoria Glendinning (1969) A Suppressed Cry: life and death of a Quaker daughter, p. 95 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul). [72] The link between college-educated women and theosophy has not yet been documented but emerges strongly from literary and biographical sources. I am grateful to Joy Dixon for thoughts on this subject. See her paper to the Rutgers Centre for Historical Analysis, 4 March 1997, Domesticating the occult: theosophy in Britain. [73] Phyllis Mack, ‘In a female voice’, p. 31.

ALISON MACKINNON is Professor of History and Gender Studies and Director of the Institute for Social Research at the University of South Australia, St Bernard’s Road, Adelaide, South Australia 5072, Australia ([email protected]). She has a long-standing interest in the history of women’s higher education and in changing patterns of gender relations and family formation. She has published extensively in these areas. Her most recent book, Love and Freedom: professional women and the reshaping of personal life (Cambridge University Press, 1997), was awarded the prize for literary and cultural criticism in the New South Wales Premier’s Literary awards. With Sandra Stanley Holton and Margaret Allen she is participating in an Australian Research Council funded project entitled Quaker Families and the Construction of Social Difference.

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