Quaker women resettling west of the eastern United States in the late 18th and early 19th centuries remade familial and community relationships by way of voluminous correspondence with female kin. Such correspondence in concert with the unique meaning that Quaker religiosity lent to notions of community and continuity in this period resulted in Quaker women being newly positioned within their families and communities in ways that scholars, assuming that all women experienced a decline in authority and autonomy as a consequence of their isolation in nuclear families on the frontier, have so far failed to appreciate.
My research discloses the vocabulary and cultural grammar that women used to explain the transformation of life the experiences – the reframing that their affections, their motivations and their relationships underwent in light of their changed circumstances as settlers. In communities where kinship networks, religion, and a highly structured church hierarchy reinforced each other, letters provide evidence of the Quaker principle of spiritual equality that expected women, as well as men, to participate fully in the development and reform of their faith communities. Late eighteenth and nineteenth-century Quaker women inherited an empowered and authorized position within hierarchical family structure that privileged men’s public and community status supplied a way to express their concerns and proclaim their solidarity as a group from Margaret Fell (1614-1702) and her daughters who had worked to systematize the early Quaker faith and formalize the roles that women would play as spiritual equals in the church. I argue that women lessened the strain of relocation by locating their families within a web of connections that strengthened the integrity and the social cohesion of their communities. Perhaps even more historically significant is the extent to which the Quaker tradition of epistolary tradition was crucial to the development of a widely dispersed network that held Quaker families and communities together across geographic boundaries. Quaker Women in this period understood their letter-writing as a crucial vehicle by which they could satisfy their spiritual mission as women. Their letters document their progress in the search for a stronger personal faith and comprise a form of discipline meant to instruct others and ensure the writer’s place in family memory. The effect of their voluminous and dedicated correspondence with one another goes beyond these intensions to include a changed Quaker frontier family and community culture within which women as corresponders wielded a new and different sort of influence than they had practiced in the locales of their birth.
This study is based on a collection of two hundred letters preserved by Charity Rotch, (1766-1824), a member of an elite New England Quaker family who migrated from Connecticut to the Midwest in 1811 where she and her husband, Thomas Rotch (1767-1823) lived until their deaths in 1823 and 1824. As the titular head of a farming family in Ohio, Thomas Rotch’s commercial activities linked him formally with the wider economy of the Atlantic world in ways easily recognizable to historians. However, less recognizable has been the ways in which Charity Rotch’s relocation to the frontier and repositioning within a nuclear family context also broadened her world. Evidence drawn from letters written by and to Charity Rotch chart her active roles in the gendered spaces of the public sphere where she exercised what she believed to be her right and responsibility as a spiritual equal and as a Quaker women – that of shaping and sustaining the faith community from one generation to the next. Her ability to do so was largely a consequence of what I have termed the “community of letters” that she helped to forge among Quaker women across significant distances. As a strong spiritual leader and role model for women Friends everywhere her letters went, she seized opportunities to remind women of the centrality of their faith in their lives, of the need for sacrifices to keep the faith, and of their responsibility for sustaining their faith in their communities.