This blog is just a collection of quotes that I found useful.
It’s not that hard to be a Christian feminist. If you want to read some radical theology that tackles misogyny and antisemitism, read Rosemary Radford Ruether (she’s Catholic). Plenty of queer theology and eco-feminist theology too. You might also want to check out the Quakers – they had women preachers from the late 1600s onwards, and unanimously embraced LGBT equality back in the 1980s.
“Quakers actively promoted the education of girls as well as boys. As early as 1668, George Fox set up Shacklewell School “to instruct young lasses and maidens in whatsoever was civil and useful.” In Pennsylvania, Bryn Mawr was founded in 1833 as a liberal arts college for Quaker women. Quakers were also among the first to encourage women into medicine, founding the Female Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1850. In the first year, eight women, five of them Quaker, enrolled for the degree of Doctor of Medicine. Those students included Ann Preston (1813-1872) who later became the first woman dean of the college and campaigned to have female students admitted to clinical lectures at Philadelphia and Pennsylvania Hospitals.
In 1848 Lucretia Mott, a Quaker prominent in the abolition movement, was one of a small group of women, almost all Quakers, who organised the First Woman’s Rights Convention at Seneca Falls, New York – often seen as the birthplace of the modern Women’s Movement.
In Britain, the role of Quaker women in the Women’s Suffrage movement is less well known but nonetheless significant. Anne Knight, an elderly Quaker, published the first leaflet that advocated votes for women in 1847. In the 1870s, Ann Maria Priestman and her sister Mary were first suffragists to use the method of non-payment of taxes as a means of protest. They also saw beyond the question of women’s suffrage and campaigned against the exclusion of women workers from skilled trades.
In 1876, Helen Bright Clark (1840–1927) gave a speech in favour of a Bill to remove voting disabilities for women, in opposition to her own father (a liberal MP). Her daughter, Alice Clark (1874–1934) founded the Friends League for Women’s Suffrage in 1912.”
Quakers are a “peace church” and were against the war in Iraq (and all war), and take a pretty firm stand against imperialism.
I’m not pretending that first wave feminism was perfect or that Quakers were perfect, but many Quaker women were respectful enough to speak well of Islam, too, which is much more diverse that stereotypes would have it (as anyone who has studied the history of Spain, for example, would know). I’m going to link you to an academic paper which argues:
“Elements of a culture of tolerance in early modern Islamic societies thus filtered through to the West through the pioneering work of the extremely influential Quaker movement. The Quakers adapted this seed of Islamic tolerance that was lacking in their own culture of seventeenth-century England, and they developed it in their own way into a worldview that would evolve with time to promote radical social activism.”
http://muse.jhu.edu/…/summary/v100/100.1.vlasblom.html
Information on Quakers:
http://www.quakersintheworld.org/quakers-in-action/166
hannamaria 