Category Archives: Divergent Friends

For Women’s History Month: Lucretia Mott’s Secret Recipe for “Good-Trouble” & Hell-Raising

Nantucket is a fascinating pilgrimage spot for Quakers; it’s best to visit off-season, when it’s easier to look past the opulence, and see how thick the small town is with stirring Quaker history. Among its numerous distinctive features, the one we want to home in on here was the fact that while the harbor was populated with Quaker ships, the town was populated by many Quaker women. And these women, even the most prosperous ones, were kept plenty busy; not just with children, but also with business.

I mean both Meeting business, and business business. Many Quaker men were away from the island for years on end (Lucretia’s father was gone for three years), sailing halfway around the world (or farther) on trips that were always dangerous, and not rarely fatal — and during which communication with home was rare or nonexistent.

Meantime, Quaker women, while still heavily encased in what we would now think of as stereotyped women’s roles, were more educated than many other females of their day; they also had official status in the Meetings; and they — well, let’s hear how Lucretia describes it:

A Progressive Quaker Message from Lucretia Mott

Lucretia Mott, considered at the time of her death in 1880 to be the “greatest American woman of the nineteenth century” by many of her contemporaries, was a Quaker abolitionist, women’s rights activist and social reformer. She was a key figure in an insurgent movement of Progressive Friends. Her messages and actions are very pertinent today – and laid much of the foundation for the current women’s movement.
Wednesday First Month (January) 3, 2018, will mark Lucretia’s 225th birthday.
What message would she have for us if she were here today?
HINT: She’d likely tell us we’re in deep trouble and should get up and get busy. (She’d say it nicely, but urgently).
In fact, her message might sound like this . . .

My Quaker 50th Anniversary (Already?)

This month, December 2015, marks the 50th anniversary of my coming among Friends. And much of that whole ongoing adventure can, for this purpose, be boiled down to four things:

A knock on the door;
Getting “The Letter”;
Riding the bus; and
Getting on with it.

The knock on my door came (as best I can recall) in early December, 1965, on Lapsley Street in Selma, Alabama.
Alabama in general, and Selma in particular, were extremely unlikely places for this to happen, among the least likely in the U.S. But it did, reflecting the recurrent tendency for Quakers to turn up where they are least expected.
My wife Tish, answered the knock, and then recoiled in fright. A young white woman stood there — and looked as scared as Tish did.
We were living in the black part of Selma, had been working with Dr. King’s staff in the voting rights movement for almost a year. There had been some violence, plus ominous, heavy-breathing phone calls to the house, that sort of thing. So we were cautious.
But as soon as the young woman spoke, her accent showed she was not a local, and Tish relaxed. In fact, she was a student with a group from a new Quaker educational experiment, Friends World Institute (later College).

At the school they studied problems (like racism) rather than conventional courses; and did this with a lot of “study travel,” trekking off in VW Microbuses to places far away from the school’s initial base on Long Island, New York. Places like Selma, where Dr. King’s office staff sent them out to canvass in black neighborhoods to find people of color who still needed to register. Which brought her to our door.

Two Unforgettable Profiles In Courage: 1969

David McReynolds on why he wrote the “Coming Out” article in 1969: “those of us who were homosexual hid this fact when we spoke of the Gandhian principle of absolute truth. Yes, truth and honesty about everything … except our own lives, which were in violation of the laws, and about which we had to keep silent in order to speak the truth about war and peace, racism, capitalism. Truth about everything… except the one thing that could destroy us.
My article was an effort to be honest at last.”