As Jean Soderlund remarked over thirty years ago, Quaker women in early America did not separate their domestic roles as wives and mothers from their religious ones as ministers and eldresses. The modern demarcation between public and private, which did not match their lived experience, persisted into the nineteenth century despite the onset of separate spheres ideology. The porosity of personal identity is evident in this volume of essays on Quaker women during the nineteenth century. As part of the Pennsylvania State University Press's series on The New History of Quakerism, this book seeks to interrogate the “constructions of gender” for women in this period, as well as to highlight female Friends who have often been “overshadowed by the patriarchal histories of Quaker men” (1 and 11). It sets out to understand the gendered experience of women in the wake of schism and division that led to varied forms of Quakerism on both sides of the Atlantic. This anthology includes four sections; each section has three articles of about fifteen pages each. A foreword by Janet Scott and an afterword by Emma Lapsansky-Werner bookend the collection. The editors’ brief introduction provides historical context to complicate the traditional narrative of Quaker women, who have often been viewed as absolute equals with men and as unfailing advocates for black people's inclusion in Quaker communities. As the editors assert, Friends, “whether Hicksite, Orthodox or Gurneyite, only gradually accepted new roles for women” (11). Despite its radical reputation, the Religious Society of Friends both challenged and affirmed the societal inequities of the nineteenth century.

The first section, “Engaging Conflict and Separations,” opens with an article by Thomas D. Hamm on Hicksite women from the schism of the 1820s, through their involvement in the U.S. Civil War, philanthropy and the suffrage movement. Next is Robynne Rogers Healey's essay's on Elizabeth Robson, which brings necessary attention to a neglected figure in the Hicksite Schism. An English minister, Robson traveled to the United States in the 1820s and became a prominent actor in the evolving separation among American Friends. Julie Holcomb ends this section by examining the lives of four women all related to George Taylor, a prominent free produce activist in the antebellum United States. The study of these women's lives (Elizabeth Magee Richards, Elizabeth Richards Taylor, Elizabeth Taylor Whitson, and Elizabeth Sykes Taylor) establishes the “permeable boundary between the public and private spheres and broadens our understanding of the relationship between Quaker women . . . and the reform movements of the nineteenth century” (58).

“Engaging Diversity” is the focus of the second section with papers on four different women; the first, by Stephen Angell, explores the religious identity and racial challenges of Sarah Mapps Douglass and Sojourner Truth in Antebellum America. This is followed by Anna Vaughan Kett's study of Eleanor Clark, whose antislavery work extended throughout Britain as well as the United States. Her familial, local, and transatlantic contacts demonstrate the power of female networking in the nineteenth-century Quaker world. Lastly, Jennifer Buck examines the role of Ruth Esther Smith in the Quaker missions of Central America in the early twentieth century. Like other female missionaries who lived abroad, Smith gained gender privilege she would never have attained in the United States.

The third section, titled “Engaging Sacred and Secular Literature,” starts with Isabelle Cosgrave's analysis of four Quaker fiction writers: Amelia Opie, Helen Hunt Jackson, Mary Howitt, and Mary Hallock Foote. The publishing careers of these women, two American and two English, reveal changing attitudes toward fiction during the nineteenth century, which Cosgrave ascribes in part to the Hicksite Schism. Nancy Jiwon Cho considers Lucy Barton, an Anglican writer whose literary experience exhibits the expansion of Quaker identity as well as a transition in Quaker culture in the nineteenth century. The last chapter in this section, by Carole Dale Spencer, describes the Holiness leader Hannah Whitall Smith. As a biblical interpreter, Smith combined Quaker doctrines. An evangelical who believed in biblical primacy, she maintained a mystical approach to spirituality showing continuity between traditional beliefs and the evangelicalism that Orthodox Friends endorsed during the nineteenth century.

The fourth and concluding section, “Engaging the Wider Social and Cultural World,” begins with Joan Allen and Richard Allen recounting the contributions of less well-known British women in different forms of activism from peace, slavery, and poverty, to temperance, suffrage, and Chartism. Next is Hannah Rumball's discussion of the decline of plain dress among English women during the nineteenth century. The final article by Linda Palfreeman outlines the medical and humanitarian leadership of Englishwoman Dr. Hilda Clark during World War I.

As with any anthology, some chapters in this book are stronger than others and some topics are downplayed, missing, or ignored. Although a few of the contributors refer to other articles in this tome, more engagement with the intertextuality of this subject would have been beneficial. Similarly, the editors declare this interdisciplinary work “foregrounds the experience of women in transatlantic and transnational contexts,” but more could be done to make this so. Although there are essays by both American and British scholars, few of their analyses go beyond national borders. (A notable exception is Kett's article on Eleanor Clark.) In addition, the piece on Quaker dress only assesses British women when Americans could have easily been included by drawing upon the work of Mary Ann Caton, Amelia Mott, or Alice Morse Earle. Lastly, the editors allege that “gender roles do not appear to be a factor in the schisms” (11) which is debatable (I have argued the opposite in my award-winning article published in Quaker History in 2020). Despite these caveats, all these essays provoke questions for further research to fully acknowledge and apprehend the breadth and depth of Quaker women's historical experience in nineteenth-century England and America.