Quaker Women: Personal Life, Memory and Radicalism in the Lives of Women Friends, 1780-1930

One nineteenth-century commentator noted the ‘public’ character of Quaker women as signalling a new era in female history. This study examines such claims through the story of middle-class women Friends from among the kinship circle created by the marriage in 1839 of Elizabeth Priestman and the future radical Quaker statesman, John Bright.

The lives discussed here cover a period from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, and include several women Friends active in radical po...