Hello! I’m studying The Friends Church for academic purposes and I’d love to hear from someone with firsthand experience. How easy is it to become a quaker? Do you ever feel people treat you differently because you’re a quaker? Do you think there should be more representation of quakers in the media? Thank you so much for your time. I’m very eager to hear back from you!
Since my experience is just one data point, I hope others will use the comment section below to add their stories.
I found becoming a Quaker to be something of a spiral process. I first walked into a Friends meetinghouse at the age of 20 and only slowly took on an identity as a Friend. At each step of the process, I learned more clearly what that might mean and have strived to grow into deeper faithfulness. I didn’t formally apply for membership until a decade or so after I became a regular attender. This time lag is not unheard of but I don’t think it’s usual. It’s more of an insight into my own carefulness and reticence about joining things than it is an indication of anything the meetings I attended required. When I did finally apply for membership I was quite qualified and wanted the clearness process to be exacting: again, this is an insight into my psyche!
Most people on the street don’t quite know what Quakers are so I can’t say I’m always treated differently. I guess seeing more Quakers in the media would be helpful, though given our overall small numbers I suspect even our fleeting appearances in TV shows and movies are more than we might proportionally expect.
I’m interested to hear how other Friends would answer Ruby’s question.
Update: reader answers by email and commentary
Jessica F: I’ve wanted to be a Quaker since I learned about the Abolitionists who helped with the Underground Railroad and prison reform. Unfortunately, the movie Gentle Persuasion presented Quakers as being against music so I became a Unitarian instead. Eventually I learned that wasn’t true for many Quakers and I found that all of the values I had developed through the years were also Quaker values and so becoming a Quaker gave me a support system and a community of like minds.
Frances William Browin from the September 15, 1968 Friends Journal.
When I became an editor at Friends Journal in 2011, I inherited an institution with some rather strong opinions. Some of them are sourced from the predictable wellsprings: William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White’s foundational mid-century style guide and the editorial offices of the Chicago Manual of Style. But some are all our own, logically tested for consistency with Chicago but adapted to Quaker idiosyncrasies.
One of our most invariable (and contested) formats comes from the way we list congregations. Quick aside for non-Quakers: you will often see a Quaker meeting variously named as “Town Monthly Meeting,” “Town Friends Meeting,” “Town Quaker Meeting,” etc. People often have strong opinions about the correct form. Occasionally an author will insist to me that their meeting has an official name (“Springfield Friends Meeting”), used consistently across their publications and business minutes. But after a few minutes with Google I can usually find enough counter-examples (“Springfield Monthly Meeting”) to prove their inconsistency.
To cut through this, Friends Journal uses “Town (State) Meeting” everywhere and always, with specific exceptions only for cases where that doesn’t work — for example, the meeting is named after a street or a tree or isn’t in the town it’s named for (after 300 years identities sometimes get messy). This formatting is unique to Friends Journal—even other Philadelphia-based Quaker stylesheets don’t follow it. We’ve been doing it this distinctively and this consistently for as long as I’ve been reading the magazine. Where does our stubborn naming convention come from?
Fortunately, thanks to Haverford College’s Quaker and Special Collections we have digital archives going back to the mid-1950s. A few months ago I dug into our archives and used keyword searches to see how far back the format goes. Traveling the years back it time it’s held remarkably steady as “Town (State) Meeting” until we get back to the fall of 1962. The October 15 issue doesn’t have consistent meeting listings but it does announce that longtime Friends Journal editor William Hubben was to begin a six-month sabbatical and that Frances Williams Browin was to fill in as acting editor.
It didn’t take her long to make her mark. Friends Journal came out twice a month in the 1960s and the next issue sees a few parentheses unevenly applied to meeting listings. But by the November 15th issue, nineteen meetings are referenced using our familiar format! There’s the “member of Berkeley (Calif.) Meeting” who had just published a pamphlet of Christmas songs for children, an FCNL event featuring skits and a covered-dish supper at “Swarthmore (Pa.) Meeting” and the announcement of a prominent article by “Kenneth E. Boulding, a member of Ann Arbor (Michigan) Meeting.”
I’ve tried to imagine the scene… Browin situated in her new temporary office… going back and forth, forth and back on some listing… then finally surprising herself by shouting “enough!” so loudly she had to apologize to nearby colleagues. At the end of the six months, Hubben came back, but only as a contributing editor, and Browin was named as full editor. Friends Journal board member Elizabeth B Wells wrote a profile of her upon her retirement from that position in 1968:
Her remarks usually made sparks, whether she was expressing an opinion (always positive), exerting pressure (not always gentle), or making a humorous aside (often disturbing). For in her amiable way she can be tart, unexpected, even prejudiced (in the right direction), then as suddenly disarmingly warm and sensitive.
This sounds like the kind of person who would standardize a format with such resolve it would be going strong 55 years later:
She was so entirely committed to putting out the best possible magazine, such a perfectionist, even such a driver, that her closest colleagues often felt that we knew the spirited editor far better than the Quaker lady.
It’s a wonderfully written profile. And today, every time an author rewrites their meeting’s name on a copyedited manuscript I’ve sent them for review, I say a quiet thanks to the driven perfectionist who gives me permission to be “prejudiced in the right direction.” Wells’s profile is a fascinating glimpse into a smart woman of a different era and well worth a read.
And for uber word geeks, yes our Friends Journal style guide is a public document. While parts of its proscriptions go back to the early 1960s, it is very much a living document and we make small changes to it on an almost weekly basis.
