This chapter focuses on a group of Quaker women in Birmingham who participated in social, educational and humanitarian action locally, nationally and transnationally in the first half of the twentieth century. Motivated by a faith-inspired witness for peace and social justice, they sought to enable women and children in Birmingham, and in international theatres of war, to “fare well” in a more peaceful and equitable society. The chapter adopts a prosopographical approach to argue that their authority to act was founded on claims to knowledge and expertise that were underpinned by personal experience. As Quakers, their experiential faith provided a significant context for their understanding of experience as a valid way of knowing the social world. Drawing on their published writings and unpublished archival materials, the chapter explores how they constructed and performed their experiential expertise through autobiographical narratives. The emphasis then shifts to consider the ways in which they shared and validated their expertise as a community of experience and drew on a genealogy of earlier Quaker female experience to evolve an experiential pedagogy of social action. The chapter concludes with reflections on how they negotiated the limitations of experiential knowledge that was constrained by privileged class positions.

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Quaker Women in Humanitarian and Social Action: Faith, Learning and the Authority of Experience

  • Siân Roberts

摘要

This chapter focuses on a group of Quaker women in Birmingham who participated in social, educational and humanitarian action locally, nationally and transnationally in the first half of the twentieth century. Motivated by a faith-inspired witness for peace and social justice, they sought to enable women and children in Birmingham, and in international theatres of war, to “fare well” in a more peaceful and equitable society. The chapter adopts a prosopographical approach to argue that their authority to act was founded on claims to knowledge and expertise that were underpinned by personal experience. As Quakers, their experiential faith provided a significant context for their understanding of experience as a valid way of knowing the social world. Drawing on their published writings and unpublished archival materials, the chapter explores how they constructed and performed their experiential expertise through autobiographical narratives. The emphasis then shifts to consider the ways in which they shared and validated their expertise as a community of experience and drew on a genealogy of earlier Quaker female experience to evolve an experiential pedagogy of social action. The chapter concludes with reflections on how they negotiated the limitations of experiential knowledge that was constrained by privileged class positions.