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“By Her Needle Maintain Herself With Reputation:” Philadelphia Quaker Women And The Materiality Of Piety, 1758-1760, Laura Earls

Madison Historical Review

From the garments that they made to the ways that they spoke, Quakers grappled with the outward trappings of piety. Unofficial Quaker guidance enumerated some vague criteria for plain garments around the turn of the eighteenth century, but aside from this, pious members largely decided for themselves what was or was not plain. This paper utilizes a close study of the diaries and possessions of women including Elizabeth Sandwith Drinker, Grace Peel Dowell Parr, Hannah Callender Sansom, and their contemporaries to argue that, rather than represent lapses of faith, their material worlds represented individual interpretations of plainness within rigid social …