Quaker Women in humanitarian and social action: faith, learning and the authority of experience

Despite often being identified as disproportionally active in educational, political and social action research on Quaker women’s activism and its relationship to their faith in twentieth century Britain is limited. This chapter will focus on a network of women Friends in Birmingham in the first half of the twentieth century who intervened in a broad range of social issues including assistance to women and children of the urban poor, the expansion of adult education, the reform of the treatment of child offenders, housing reform, aid to refugees and humanitarian relief to non-combatants in contexts of war and famine.
Drawing on their published writings and unpublished archival materials this chapter will adopt a prosopographical approach to explore the significance of personal experience in a shared pedagogy for social action that informed their own learning and their strategies to educate the public across the range of causes in which they were active. It will argue that as Quakers their experiential faith provided a significant context both for their conception of experience as a particular way of knowing the social world and as a basis for the construction, performance and maintenance of their authoritative identities. The chapter will analyse their use of autobiographical written and visual texts to perform and articulate their own experiential claims to expertise, and to disseminate the experiences of the women and children with whom they worked. In so doing it will consider to what extent they were engaged in reflecting critically on the limitations of personal experience, the privileged class positions that they occupied, and the relationships of power in which they were engaged, and discuss the implications this had for their personal beliefs and attitudes and for their practice in various areas of voluntary social action.