Quakers and Shakers

The Quakers have never accepted this name, calling themselves The Society of Friends. The name shows, like many others given to religious sects, the strength of stereotypes of irrationality, hysteria, and diabolical possession, often with the innuendo of sexual perversion of various kinds. Two other key terms showing this complex are bugger , which has its own entry, and enthusiasm , an extremely negative term in the seventeen century, rooted in the sense “inspired by God.” Quaker (ca. 1647) and Shaker (ca. 1648) first carried many of these notions, being derived, according to one observer, “from the Trembling and Quaking, caused in them by Vapours in their Ecstatick Fits” (Edward Chamberlayne, The Present State of England 1694, III i 378). ( Vapours was the old term for hysteria, while in its origins ecstatick meant “standing outside oneself,” in modern parlance “beside oneself.”) One of the first references to the sect comes in a letter written in London in 1647:

I heare of a Sect of woemen … come from beyond the Sea, called Quakers, and these swell, shiver and shake, and when they come to themselves (for in all this fitt Mahomett’s holy-ghost hath bin conversing with them) they begin to preache what hath bin delivered to them by the Spirit.

(Clarendon mss, no. 2624)

The underlying stereotypical idea is that of demoniality, or indecent intercourse, with an incubus or succubus, alluded to in the pointed reference to “Mahomett’s holy-ghost hath bin conversing with them.” The original sense of converse was “to have sexual intercourse,” of which the first recorded instance (in 1536) refers, fascinatingly, to demoniality in a nunnery: “This Albyne, with her fiftie sisters…. Conversit with devilis in forme of men, and concsavit [conceived] childrin” (John Bellenden, Chronicle of Scotland I, xix).

However, George Fox, the founder of the Quakers, said that the name was given to himself and his followers by Justice Bennet at Derby in 1650 “because I bid them Tremble at the name of the Lord” (Hodgkin 1896, 54). The noted diarist John Evelyn recorded visiting some Quakers in prison in Ipswich on July 9, 1656, referring to them as “a new fanatic sect, of dangerous principles, who shew no respect to any man, magistrate or other.” Evelyn was obviously alluding to their refusal on principle to take any oath, nor to remove their large wide-brimmed hats, and to their quaint use of the forms thou and thee .

Fox and his followers took Christ’s injunction in the Sermon of the Mount, “Do not swear at all” (St. Matthew 5:31), literally and seriously, regarding judicial and profane swearing as forbidden. This led to their imprisonment for contempt of court. Keeping their hats on was an acknowledgment of the higher authority of God, while the use of the familiar forms thou and thee was intended to put everyone on the same basis of brotherhood and friendship. It was unfortunately often taken as an insult. As Fox observed in his Journal in 1660: "We were often beaten and abused for using those words to some proud men, who would say, “What you ill-bred clown, do you thou me?” (Mencken 1936, 450). The entry for thou records some insulting uses. Ironic comments such as “He … Quaker-like, thou’d and thee’d Oliver” are recorded through the seventeenth century, during which various derisive formations had sprung up, including Quakerism, Quakerish, Quakeristical , and Quakerly .

A quite different and more tolerant view comes from the French philosopher Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) who spent the years 1726–1729 in forced exile in England, recording his experiences in his Lettres Anglaises (1734), of which the first four are on the Quakers. Voltaire presents them as a sober, decent, spiritual brotherhood that would have been “respected in Europe if men could respect virtue beneath ridiculous appearances” (1980, 32). Furthermore, commenting on the agreement that William Penn subsequently reached with the local Indians in Pennsylvania, he noted pointedly: “It is the only treaty between these people and Christians which has never been sworn to and never broken” (1980, 34).

The Shakers were subject to similar hostile stereotyping in England, prior to the founding of the American sect in 1774, even though it was based on different ideals, of mixed communities of men and women living in celibacy.