Naomi Pullin. Female Friends and the Making of Transatlantic Quakerism, 1650–1750

The history of the Society of Friends in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has received abundant scholarly attention, in part because unlike other religious dissenters, Quakers produced a rich written record of meeting minutes, epistles, and spiritual diaries. But historians have also studied Quakers extensively because of Friends’ insistence on the spiritual equality of all believers and the prominent role that women played as preachers and elders in the Society as a result. Thus, it comes as a surprise to read in Naomi Pullin’s Female Friends and the Making of Transatlantic Quakerism, 1650–1750 that “women’s position within colonial Quakerism remains a largely neglected subject,” and that scholars have demonstrated a “general lack of interest . . . in those generations of Friends that followed the institution of the Quaker Meeting system” in the 1660s—assertions belied by the book’s twelve-page bibliography of secondary sources (22). But if Pullin overstates her study’s

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