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

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Indeed, Quaker women had an important role in their communities that allowed them to see themselves as equal, which explains their active involvement in a number of reformist groups in the nineteenth century and, most notably, in the abolitionist cause. By 1840, several renowned American Quaker women like Lucretia Mott, her sister Martha Coffin, Abigail Kelley, and Susan B. Anthony, among others, realized the need to work not only in favor of the abolition of slavery, but also to attain the suffrage for women. Their contribution to female suffrage became paramount, until in 1920, and thanks to the invaluable role played by Alice Paul, another Quaker (Hamm 2003: 188), American women were granted the right to vote.

Given their history, it is no wonder that the allure of Quakerism for writers and readers alike is great and has been so for decades. Anna Breiner Caulfield’s Quakers in Fiction: An Annotated Bibliography (1993) offers a thorough compilation of works that depict Quakers in fiction. James Emmett Ryan’s Imaginary Friends: Representing Quakers in American Culture, 1650-1950 (2009) is, like Caufield’s book, out of date by a few decades, but Ryan’s volume has the merit of showing the appeal of Quakerism not only in literary works, but in American popular culture at large. Jennifer M. Connerley’s Ph.D. thesis, Friendly Americans: Representing Quakers in the United States, 1850-1920 (2006a) also examines popular representations of Quakers. More recently published is Farah Mendleson’s Creating Memory: Historical Fiction and the English Civil Wars (2020), where there is a section dedicated to the analysis of literary works which feature Quaker characters in the years of the English Civil Wars. Other scholars have more narrowly focused on the representation of specific Quaker distinctive signs in both literature and popular culture, like Jennifer Connerley, who has turned to the significance of the Quaker bonnet in two papers: “Fighting Quakers: A Jet Black Whiteness” (2006c) and “Quaker Bonnets and the Erotic Feminine in American Popular Culture” (2006b). The latter traces widespread popular representations of Quaker women’s bonnets from the 1850s through the 1930s in fiction, image, film, and music.