Читать книгу American Quaker Romances. Building the Myth of the White Christian Nation онлайн

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Their concern with the so-called Testimonies, nowadays often referred to as SPICES (Simplicity, Peace, Integrity, Community, Equality, and Stewardship), made Quaker deviations from cultural norms even more conspicuous. ssss1 Their Testimony of Simplicity led them to renounce outward markers of wealth or high status. Consequently, they chose to dress in a simple manner, and to wear clothes that had no embellishments and were made in fabrics of dull colors, often brown or gray. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, many Quakers, most notably John Woolman (1720-1772), also refused to wear dyes and fabrics that came from slave labor (Dandelion 2008: 25). Quakers decided that their speech, too, would remain plain. In the seventeenth century the English began to use the grammatical form “you” in all cases, singular or plural, a feature that characterizes Modern English. Quakers chose to retain the forms of Middle English pronouns for the singular (thou, thee, thy, thine, thyself), which in practice had been kept primarily only when referring to a person of lower social standing, such as a servant (Hamm 2003: 21-22).