Title: Quaker Life in the 1700s - Ancestry Insights
Headings: Quaker Life in the 1700s
Historical Insights Quaker Life in the 1700s
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Credit: Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group/UIG via Getty Images
Historical Insights Quaker Life in the 1700s
Believing that children needed to be nurtured, not punished, the Quakers revolutionized American childrearing during the 1700s. They adopted the idea that children were born blank slates tabula rasa, a radical idea for its time. About 1650. Credit: Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group/UIG via Getty Images
Quaker Life in the 1700s
The Quakers’ arrival in the New World helped shape its moral and political fabric, including the eventual abolition of slavery. Dubbed the “Quakers” because they “trembled at the Word of the Lord,” the Religious Society of Friends fled persecution in England, Germany, Ireland, and Wales for the shores of the North American colonies in the 1600s. Though the Quaker beliefs of gender equality, universal education, and positive relations with Native Americans were rejected by most colonists, by 1700 more than 11,000 Quakers had made America their home and come to dominate politics and daily life in Pennsylvania and parts of New Jersey. Other colonies were not as tolerant. Quakers stood out from other settlers because of their egalitarianism, rejecting the bow as a greeting and popularizing the handshake.