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Abstract
This paper challenges the view of Quakers as middle-class by examining the spread of eighteenth-century English Quakers in the labour markets. The data from the marriage records shows that the largest sector of economic activity for Quakers was as artisans, with another significant activity in retail. Together these covered 41% of Quakers declaring an occupation. In modern terms these sectors could be argued as lower or middle class. A second challenge to the middle-class view is the possibility of an unrecorded coterie of agricultural labourers in regions remote from London. This group is postulated because of the observation of a clear pattern of reduced levels of occupational recording in the marriage records as distance from London increases. The regions where these lower recording levels occur are often economically poorer and significantly agricultural. Thus, while Quakers cannot be described as lower-class, neither should they be taken as wholly middle-class.
The role of young adults as a specific, coherent identity group in North American religious communities remains understudied, even despite their past and ongoing invocation in the problem of declension among North American religious communities. Using the example of the Young Friends, a loose confederation of young-adult Quaker organizations in the early- to mid-twentieth century US and Canada, this paper exposes the perceived and actual role of young adults in attempts to stem the tide of declension and organizational rupture, i.e., schism. The paper also offers tools for thinking more broadly about scholarship on oppressed or marginalized groups, namely through a theoretical tool I call “triple self-sufficiency.” Triple self-sufficiency allows us to identify institutions and organizations that both engender a consciousness of shared identity and ontologically represent this shared identity.