In this refreshing and expansive study, Naomi Pullin considers the lives of ordinary Quaker women in the transatlantic world from 1650 to 1750. Her central argument is that female Quaker authority was consolidated, rather than diminished, by the institutional changes which transformed the movement in this period. These changes are exemplified by the formal institution of separate women's business meetings from 1671 onwards, and are often understood to have quietened female voices by entrusting the substantive issues of governance to men. Therefore, they are contrasted to the empowerment of women through the ecstatic Quaker ministry of the 1650s. However, Pullin focuses on those Quaker women who did not travel in ministry, and whose lives and witness were borne out locally. For such women, Pullin argues, Quakerism was not primarily experienced as an opportunity for ecstatic prophecy and international travel. Rather, the formalisation of procedure would have protected their existing administrative responsibilities at a local level, and enabled them to contribute to the formation of Quaker communities and identities across the transatlantic world. Moreover, by comparing the experiences of Quaker women to those in other Nonconformist groups, Pullin suggests that their opportunities for leadership were – and remained – significantly greater than in any other early modern community.

Pullin's study is organised around the relationships common to all Quaker women: with their families, their meetings, their friends and the wider world. Chapter i considers the position of female Friends in the household. Pullin notes that their refusal to submit blindly to their non-Quaker husbands was feared by hostile observers as a destabilising force in the home. However, marriage could also empower women within the Quaker community: it was accepted that they might need to leave their families for periods of travelling ministry (during which time their husbands would take on their household duties) and unity was emphasised above obedience as the primary marital virtue. Furthermore, domestic imagery was increasingly employed in the rhetorical construction of Quaker role models over this period. Respected women were cast as ‘mothers in Israel’, and the matriarchal responsibility to maintain and encourage a faithful household was recognised as crucial in the construction of a stable and sustainable Quaker faith. This only became more relevant as up to 90 per cent of Friends were children of Quakers by the end of the seventeenth century. In these ways, Pullin argues, spiritual and domestic work were ‘intrinsically linked’ in Quaker spirituality.

In chapter ii, Pullin turns to examine the changing role and authority of women within their Quaker meetings. She suggests that ‘the transition from sect to denomination within Quakerism was … singular in continuing to provide leadership roles for women from a range of backgrounds at all levels of the Society's hierarchy’. Women's meetings ensured female Friends’ formal input on matters of discipline, membership and marriage – and, significantly, often allowed them to assert this authority independently of male interference. For example, Pullin cites the notable example of women in Fairfax, who dealt with twenty separate requests for membership between 1745 and 1750, and processed them all without referral to the men's meeting. Furthermore, these roles were mostly situated in a local context, meaning that women who were unable or unwilling to travel could participate fully in the Quaker community.

In chapter iii Pullin considers the Quaker construction of friendship over time – both theologically, as a universal response to the presence of Christ in all people, and socially, as a level of intimacy reserved solely for one's co-religionists. As to the latter, female friendships were often constructed through correspondence, even across the transatlantic world, and were therefore based on a shared relationship to the truth rather than geographical proximity. In this sense, conversion to Quakerism radically altered how close relationships were formed and maintained.

Finally, chapter iv covers Quaker women's relationships with the non-Quaker world. This section underlines the extent to which perceptions of Quaker women were bound to wider cultural assumptions about gender and sexuality, and how their daily lives were practically intertwined with the economy and culture which surrounded them. Thus, Pullin not only explores the economic activities of Quaker women in detail, but also traces the intellectual process by which female Friends were viewed first as moral and sexual deviants, then as over-zealous wives who undermined their husbands’ authority through their own precocity, and finally as beacons of piety who were admirably concerned with their families’ spiritual welfare. This transformation echoes the broader ‘feminisation of religion’ in the eighteenth century, and indicates the extent to which the story of Quakerism reflected a ‘complex process of assimilation’ on a number of levels.

This is a well-paced, well-organised and readable study which offers a tantalising glimpse into the daily lives of early modern women from the intimate to the mundane. Pullin's claim that the institutionalisation of Quakerism empowered women is convincingly argued, and offers an important reminder that ‘to understand the experiences of women within seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Quakerism, we have to look beyond their roles as radical preachers’. Of course, the same holds for female spirituality across history, and this volume provides a welcome counter-balance to caricatured portraits of religious women as ecstatic and emotional. There are occasional tensions between Pullin's insistence that women held their leadership roles based on merit and independently of men, and her acceptance that their authority was often constructed out of a sense of familial and domestic respectability, or even on occasion through the husband's high status. Moreover, elements of Quaker theology are mischaracterised on occasion: for example, by describing the Quaker light within only as a ‘God-given inner light’ in the introduction to the work, Pullin sanitises the first Friends’ radical understanding of the literal presence of Christ dwelling within them. None the less, such quibbles do not undermine the historical strength of her argument. Along with the recent release of Michele Lise Tarter and Catie Gill's New critical studies on early Quaker women, this work points to a growing scholarly awareness of the female Quaker experience and provides a valuable reconsideration of the field. It will surely have a captive audience among students and scholars of early Quaker social history, gender history and the transatlantic religious world.