Gentle Invaders: Quaker Women Educators and Racial Issues During the Civil War and Reconstruction
by Linda Selleck
Category: Education

During & after the Civil War hundreds of Quaker women went south as ministers & teachers to the freed people. These women left comfortable homes & often deferred marriage or put aside the demands of families, if not careers, in response to what they perceived as a divine call. They faced prejudice, ridicule, abuse, & sometimes violence at the hands of Southern whites for whom education of black people was an unthinkable challenge to a racist political & social system that dated back two-&-a-half centuries. As Selleck shows, while by our standards these women were not always free from the prejudice they worked to overcome, they certainly were far in advance of the overwhelming majority of their contemporaries. Quakers may have recognized the evil of slavery earlier than their neighbors, but once they "cleared" themselves of it, their patterns of reluctance to admit black members, & their segregation of those they did admit, were little different from the practice of the larger society. This is also a contribution to women's history. In many ways, the women described were building a long-established tradition of feminine benevolence that was hardly unique to Friends; in others they foreshadowed the civil rights activists who went south in the 1960s.