From the archive: With hearts and minds prepared…
Janet Scott writes about a revision, a trial and moves towards equality
As Yearly Meeting 1918 approached, several subjects were on the minds of Friends. The propositions relating to ‘War and the Social Order’ (now eight rather than the previous seven) were due to return to the Meeting. A ‘Message to all Friends’ from the War and Social Order Committee appeared in the Friend on 22 February and stated:
…the doctrine of the Inward Light should teach us a new scale of human values. Class distinctions, and the man-made barriers which divide us from one another, will all be lost sight of in the realisation of the ties which bind us all as brothers. False standards, too, of wealth, material power and domination, will be swept away by the incoming tide of life… we cannot rest content with any system which allows men to be worn down by poverty, by bad conditions and by the relentless struggle for existence… We must seek for a way of life which shall liberate ourselves and others from this bondage… We must work out our spiritual beliefs in our material affairs.
Not quite so sanguine was Edith J Wilson, who in the 26 April edition of the Friend wrote:
It is an alluring thought that the Society of Friends might speak with a united voice in condemnation of the social bondage of the day, but it is difficult to see how this can be possible… in the popular mind Quakerism has come to be associated with wealth and comfort, and these are the things that raise barriers against brotherly comradeship, and that mean oppressive burdens upon labour… There is a deep and urgent call to members… to be honest and courageous in facing this question of a new way of life free from the bondage of material things.
Lucy F Morland was preparing that year’s Swarthmore Lecture on ‘The New Social Outlook’. This would be the second time since its foundation that the Lecture was given by a woman. On 31 May the Friend commented:
With [a] relentless finger she pointed out the way in which Friends, as a comfortable middle-class body in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, framed their polity from the standpoint of property holders alone; even some of the well-known and time-honoured phrases of Advices and Queries did not escape criticism.
Revision of the Book of Discipline
Other Friends were concerned about the proposal to revise Part 1 of the Book of Discipline that dealt with doctrine. In a letter published on 29 March Alice Mary Hodgkin and Rachel B Braithwaite wrote:
Apparently there is a desire to shift the ground of our union from doctrine to experience, which seems to us like putting the superstructure in place of the foundation. The foundation must be firmly laid in the truths of the Gospel if there is to be an enduring Christian experience… We invite Friends to come together for prayer upon this subject, that we may together definitively seek to know the mind of the Lord… that nothing contrary to His will may be done.
This led to further correspondence with one Friend in the 12 April edition pointing out that the Yearly Meeting of 1836 had:
…set forth that there can be “no appeal from the Scriptures to any other authority whatever” and that “they are the only divinely authorised record of the doctrines which we are bound as Christians to believe.”
This was then put into the Book of Discipline at the 1861 revision. Another Friend, in the 5 April edition of the Friend, wrote:
It is a unity of faith not a unity of doctrine for which we seek; it is a unity of devotion in the service of God as revealed to us in the life of Jesus.
Friends on trial
The adjourned April Meeting for Sufferings heard a report from Joan M Fry about the prosecution of two young women for distributing a pamphlet issued by the Friends’ Service Committee which had not been submitted to the censor. Harrison Barrow and Edith M Ellis went into the witness box. The Friend on 26 April described how:
Friends had tried to bring into the heated atmosphere of the Court something above legal quibble, and to make the real power of conscience understood… Edith Ellis said that… she had been given the opportunity to put our view of the relation between our duty to God and our duty to the State.
London Yearly Meeting: 250 years
On the opening day of Yearly Meeting a meeting was held in commemoration of the 250th session. The first in 1668 was at Christmas time and probably on the site later occupied by Devonshire House. W C Braithwaite spoke of the years up to 1725. The Friend on 31 May reported:
He was in his element in giving the historical account of the consolidation of the Society after George Fox’s release from prison in 1666. It was the need felt by the early “publishers of truth” for times of prayer and conference that led to the holding of the first gathering in London, and it was not till one hundred years later that the Meeting was set up on a representative basis. A Neave Brayshaw’s address treated of a time when the Society had fallen from its first love. In the hundred years 1725-1825 there were only twenty-four years in which the time of the Yearly Meeting was not taken up with hearing one or more “appeals”; the spirit of legalism having largely taken the place of the evangelistic fervour of earlier days.
The 31 May edition of the Friend also described how:
The Women’s Yearly Meeting was treated of by Mary Jane Godlee, who explained at the outset of her racy paper that the history of the slow development and growth of this meeting afforded rather painful reflection to those who had believed in the theory that Women Friends had always held an equal place with their brethren in the Church.
As the story was unfolded we saw how history repeated itself, those in possession of privilege declining to enlarge their borders. Friends who have worked for the political equality of women with men, and have noted the hesitation in past years of Members of Parliament to give practical effect by their votes to the professions made as candidates, are not altogether surprised to learn that even in the Quaker fold jealousy of women Friends assuming any equality of status with men prevented for more than one hundred years the establishment of the Women’s Yearly Meeting as a really representative institution.
The report continued:
Whilst quite early in the history of the Society “some Antient Women Friends” met together to consider their duty in providing material help for their fellow-members “imprisoned upon Truth’s Account”, it was not until 1784 that the Women’s Yearly Meeting was constituted on a representative basis and even then its powers were strictly limited and remained so until the forward movement towards the end of the last century was reflected in the desire of both women and men for a more complete comradeship in the service of the Society.
Joint conferences began to be held – the first being in 1880 for the consideration of the Opium Traffic between India and China, and so by gradual changes the complete fusion took place. Since 1907 all the sessions of the Yearly Meeting have been held jointly.
The Friend on 31 May commented that on the following day (when the clerks of the Yearly Meeting went to court to support Friends on trial under the Defence of the Realm Act):
It was a particularly interesting coincidence that on the morning following the reading of this paper, in the depleted state of the Clerk’s desk, M J Godlee was called to take the place of the Clerk and so quite naturally the Yearly Meeting, for the first time in its history, sat under the guidance of a woman Clerk. The events of this day were historic in more senses than one.
