Quaker Hill / A Sociological Study

by Warren H. Wilson

In forms of beauty they know and feel little more. I do not refer to the lack of appreciation of the elevations and slopes of this Hill itself—a constant delight to the artistic eye. Farmers and laborers might fail to appreciate a scene known to them since childhood. But there is in the Quaker breeding, which gives on certain sides of character so true and fine a culture a conspicuous lack in this one particular.

As to music, even that of simplest melody, it has come to the Hill, but it "knows not Joseph." An elderly son of Quakerism said: "You will find no Quaker or son of the Quakers who can sing; if you do find one who can sing a little, it will be a limited talent, and you will unfailingly discover that he is partly descended from the world's people."

The effect of this aesthetic negation appears, it seems to the present writer, in a certain rudeness or more precisely a certain lack in the domain of manners, outside of the interests in which Quakerism has given so fine a culture. This appears to be keenly felt by the descendants of Friends. Not in business matters; for they are made directors of savings banks and corporations, and trustees, and referees, and executors of estates, in all which places they find themselves at home. Nor is it a lack of dignity and composure in the parlor or at the table. Nor is it a lack of sense of propriety in meetings of worship. But it is in matters ethical, civic and deliberate, and in the free and discursive meetings of men, in which new and intricate questions are to arise; in positions of trust, in which the highest considerations of social responsibility constitute the trust; in these, the men and women trained in Quakerism are lacking throughout whole areas of the mind, and lacking, too, in ethical standards, which can only appeal to those whose experience has fed on a rich diversity of sources and distinctions.

In this I speak only of the Quaker group and of those who have been under its full influence. It does not apply to the Irish Catholics, nor to the incomers from the city. The Quakers and their children lack precisely those elements of aesthetic breeding which would be legitimately derived from contemplation and enjoyment of beauty aside from ethical values. Ethical beauty, divorced from pure beauty, a stern, bare, grim beauty they have, and their children and employees have. But they have little sense of order in matters that do not proceed to the ends of money-making, housekeeping and worship. They do not seem to possess instinctive fertility of moral resource. It may be due to other sources as well, but it seems to the present writer that the moral density shown by some of these birthright Quakers, upon matters outside of their wonted and trodden ethical territories, is due to their long refusal to recognize aesthetic values, and to see discriminations in the field in which ethics and aesthetics are interwoven.

They made red and purple to be morally wrong, idealizing the plainness of their uncultured ancestry, and sweet sounds they excluded from their ears, declaring them to be evil noises, because they would set up the boorishness of simple folk of old time as something noble and exalted, "making believe" that such aesthetic lack was real self-denial and unworldliness. It is not surprising that in a riper age of the world, after lifetimes of this idealization of peasant states of mind, their children find themselves morally and mentally unprepared for the responsibilities of citizenship, of high ethical trust and of the varied ways of a moral world, whose existence their fathers made believe to ignore and deny.

Women have always occupied in Quakerism a place theoretically equal to that of the men, in business and religious affairs. George Fox and his successors declared men and women equal, inasmuch as the Divine Spirit is in every human soul.

After the influence of the early Friends ceased, the place of woman began to be circumscribed by new rules, and crystallized in a reaction under the influence of purely social forces; so that this most sensible people made women equal to men in meetings and in religious legislation through a form of sexual taboo.

Following the custom of many early English meeting houses, the men and women sat apart, the men on one side of the middle aisle, and the women on the other, so that men and women were not equals in the individualist sense, as they are for instance, in the practice and theory of Socialism, but were equals in separate group-life; to each sex, grouped apart from the other, equal functions were supposed to be delegated. Oblong Meeting House, on Quaker Hill, had seats for two hundred and fifty people on the ground floor, and in the gallery for one hundred and fifty more. The men's side was separated from the women's, of equal size and extent, by wooden curtains, which could be raised or lowered; so that the whole building could be one auditorium, with galleries; or the curtains could be so lowered that no man on the ground floor could see any woman unless she be a speaker on the "facing seats"; nor could any young person in the gallery see any one of the opposite sex; yet a speaker could be heard in all parts. The curtains could be so fixed, also, that two independent meetings could be held, each in a separate auditorium, even the speakers being separated from one another.

It was the custom for women to have delegated to them certain religious functions, at Monthly Meeting and Quarterly and Yearly Meetings, on which they deliberated, before submitting them to the whole meeting. This old Oblong Meeting House is a mute record and symbol of the century-old contest of the Puritan spirit among the old Quakers, striving for an inflexibly right relation between the sexes. They attained their ends through the creation of a community, but not until the community dissolved.

The position of woman among Friends is another eloquent tribute to the two-fold "dealing" of Quakerism with women. She is man's equal, but she is man's greatest source of danger. She must be on a par with him, but she must be apart from him. The relations of men and women are therefore very interesting. In doctrinal matters, in discussion, in preaching and "testifying," men and women are equal, and the respect that a man has for his wife or sister or neighbor woman, in these functions of a devout sort is like that he has for another man. Generally the men of the Quaker school of influence believe as a matter of course in the intellectual and juristic equality of women with men; and in the religious equality of the individual woman with the individual man. But in the practical arts and in business a woman is a woman and a man is a man. Here the women are restricted by convention to housekeeping, which on large farms is quite enough for them; and the men have the outdoor life, the "trading," and the gainful occupations—except the boarding of city people. There is no especial respect for the "managing woman" who "runs a farm"; the community expects such a woman to fail.