Me, myself and I: Love Is Letting Go of Fear.

Saturday, September 8, 2012

Love Is Letting Go of Fear.

In Philadelphia, a Quaker grocer named Charles Elmer Hires developed a concoction he came to call Root Beer in the hope that his employees and others might come to drink it instead of alcohol.

Elizabeth Gurney Fry, a Friends minister and the wife of a banker, came to be recognized as the pioneer of prison reform the world over.

In England, the Quaker Rowntree and Cadbury families ventured into the chocolate and cocoa business because they saw hot chocolate as a possible alternative to alcoholic beverages. Rowntree's was founded in York in 1862 by Henry Isaac Rowntree, who bought a chocolate company from the Tuke family. In 1824, John Cadbury began selling tea, coffee, and drinking chocolate, which he produced himself, at Bull Street in Birmingham, England. He later moved into the production of a variety of cocoa and drinking chocolates, made in a factory in Bridge Street and sold mainly to the wealthy because of the high cost of production.

Lucretia Coffin Mott ( 1793 – 1880) was an American Quaker, abolitionist, women's rights activist, and a social reformer. In the summer of 1840 Lucretia Mott was excluded for the anti-slavery Convention in London because she was a woman. In 1848 she joined with a few other women in calling the first women's rights convention at Seneca Falls, New York.

William and Esther Tuke, Friends living in York, began to be convinced that the mentally ill might make substantial progress if they were looked after in a loving way. In 1796 William Tuke opened "The Retreat" in York, the first institution in the world devoted to compassionate care for the mentally disturbed. In the latter 1700's it had been the practice in England to keep mental patients locked and chained in institutions where they were treated like criminals, laughed at, humiliated and brutally punished for variant behavior