The Few Friends Who Were Out in Front on Social Change

“We tend to think historically that Friends have been out in front in all areas of social change, the abolition of slavery, rights for women, prison reform, and all the rest, but Margaret Bacon points out in an article that it was only a few Friends who were out in front. The John Woolmans and the Lucretia Motts were very lonely in their own meetings, in their own days, and the Elizabeth Frys also. They were eldered by their meetings and looked on as a little bit too far out for the general populace. 

I think this is also true today. Many Friends, perhaps the majority of Friends, accept the prevailing values of our time. And our civilization and our religious heritage, our Judeo-Christian heritage, are patriarchal, hierarchical, and homophobic. White, propertied, straight men, roughly between the ages of 25 and 65, who feel the need to prove their virility by violence, have determined what is normative for all of us. 

If we are people of color, if we are poor, if we are gay, if we are young, or elderly, or women, we do not fit the norm of wholeness. We are automatically lower down on the hierarchical ladder. […] We have all been brainwashed to accept hierarchy as the natural order of things.”

— Elizabeth Watson, 1985
Quaker feminist theologian