“Rebecca Larson offers a deeper and more daring probe into colonial religious life. To recover the long-obscured lives of Quaker women preachers, Larson ventures far beyond print sources into a diverse array of previously untapped manuscript letters, diaries, journals, and church records from many archives in both Great Britain and the United States. From new sources, she documents ordinary people with extraordinary experiences to reveal eighteenth-century spirituality from a provocative new angle.” — New Republic
“Daughters of Light is a sustained act of historical recovery. . . . [Larson] has given us the stories of thousands of women whose words and courageous deportment forced large numbers of British North Americans to admit female competence.” — Women’s Review of Books
“Larson has written the first comprehensive account of the role of 18th-century Quaker women ministers. . . . Daughters of Light will also be useful for scholars of women’s history because it shows how itinerant women ministers created a visible public role, exercising authority within and outside the Quaker meeting.” — CHOICE
“Daughters of Light should be required reading for everyone engaged by present-day debates about whether the clergy should be open to women.” — Philadelphia Inquirer
“Wonderfully researched and written. . . . One of the best books ever on women and Quakerism.” — Kirkus Reviews
“With grace and insight . . . Larson brings to light a story too long left in the shadows of Colonial American and religious history. . . . [She] has resurrected these remarkable women and makes us rethink basic assumptions about women and religious tolerance in Colonial America. Larson is our own ‘daughter of light’ in giving us so rich a history.” — Library Journal
“[Larson] provides a welcome corrective to popular historical accounts that underestimate the roles of women and religious diversity in early American history.” — Booklist
“No other historian has so movingly captured the lives of 18th-century Quaker female preachers. . . . Daughters of Light is a thoughtful, beautifully written book that bursts with stories of unforgettable women.” — Catherine Brekus, author of Strangers and Pilgrims
“A remarkable portrait. . . . This fascinating book will generate a new and more complex understanding of the place of women in colonial American history.” — Drew Gilpin Faust, author of Mothers of Invention
“A highly readable story of the remarkable lives of travelling Quaker women ministers whose faith and fortitude took them regularly throughout the American colonies and back and forth to England and beyond. If one marvels at the family management of soccer moms, this is an eye-opening account of how it all worked in the 1700s.” — Robert Lawrence Smith, author of A Quaker Book of Wisdom
