Abstract

The active role of women within the Society of Friends, from its origins in the 1650s, was one of its most strikingly unusual features. The Society overturned many aspects of gendered expectations, in large part by allowing women to
preach and supporting those who wished to travel within the British Isles and overseas in order to do so. Unsurprisingly, then, there were a number of non-Quaker responses to Friends, both positive and, more commonly, negative, which sought to stereotype members of the denomination. Analysis of British and North American published representations of Quaker women allows reflection on the motivations of (usually male) non-Quakers who circulated
such accounts and often profited, literally, from them. Such representations, both written and visual, reveal stereotyping of female Friends, not only preachers, which served a number of different ends: it sought to titillate non-
Quaker men with depictions, written and visual, of young Quaker women, and to reinforce their self-appointed role as moral guardians and their assumption of religious, moral, and gendered superiority to Quaker women. Such representations were likely motivated in part by anxious hegemonic masculinity, as identified by scholars such as Mark Breitenberg (1996) and applied to early Quakerism by Hilary Hinds (2011, 56–9). That by the early eighteenth century
Quaker women appeared frequently as stock and relatively undifferentiated characters in literature, in contrast to some individual Quaker men such as James Nayler, suggests the extent to which non-Quaker manhood was driven
to anxiety by Quaker women.