Women's Speaking Justified & Selected Writings
The founding text of Quaker women's ministry, modernized for today's reader. Margaret Fell — the 'Mother of Quakerism' — wrote Women's Speaking Justified from a prison cell in 1667, marshaling scripture from Genesis to Revelation to answer those who would silence women in the church. This Friends Illuminated edition gathers the complete tract with its Further Addition, together with Fell's own account of her convincement, her long imprisonment and sentence of praemunire, and her fearless examination before Judge Twisden at Lancaster Assizes. A modern English edition with linked scripture and historical references, drawn from the 1667 corrected London edition and the 1710 Brief Collection.
- Fell's landmark 1667 defense of women's ministry, complete with its Further Addition
- Her own account of convincement, imprisonment, and praemunire, in her plain first-person voice
- Her examination before Judge Twisden at Lancaster (1664), where she refused the oath
- Modernized spelling and syntax, with scripture and historical references linked · EPUB format
This edition
Read itE-book · EPUB
- Time to read1.3 hours
- Length18,137 words
- Files1 EPUB, DRM-free
How we get 1.3 hours
This figure is here so you can compare one book against another. Every title on the site is timed from its own word count at the same reading speed — nothing is adjusted book by book — so if this edition says 1.3 hours and another says half that, the second one really is about half the reading. It is a measure of size, in the way a page count is. Your own pace is your own: at the speeds typical adult readers actually manage, this edition runs anywhere from 1 hour to 1.7 hours.
What is in this edition
| Modernized text | 17,194 words |
|---|---|
| Introduction, chapter summaries and notes written for this edition | 943 words |
| Total | 18,137 words |
The introduction, the chapter summaries and the notes on people, places and unfamiliar terms were written for this edition. They are 943 of the 18,137 words above, and they are part of what you are buying.
Counted from the text of the EPUB you receive. Navigation, the title page, the table of contents and the licence page are excluded — they are packaging, not reading.
The reading rate
238 words per minute, for adult silent reading of non-fiction, applied unchanged to every title on the site. We did not pick the number; it is the pooled result of a published meta-analysis. Nothing is adjusted book by book — that consistency is what makes two of these figures worth comparing.
Brysbaert, M. (2019). How many words do we read per minute? A review and meta-analysis of reading rate. Journal of Memory and Language, 109, 104047. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2019.104047
190 studies, 18,573 participants.
The same paper puts most adult readers between 175 and
300 words per minute, and those two speeds give the
1 hour and 1.7 hours above.
Because time is words divided by speed, an even range of speeds produces an
uneven range of times, so 1.3 hours sits nearer the fast end of that
range than the middle of it.
If it were a paperback
Roughly 52–73 pages.
Words per printed page is a typesetting convention, not a measurement — it moves with trim size, type size and leading. The range above assumes 250–350 words a page. Friends Illuminated publishes no print edition of this book; the figure is here only because pages are a more familiar size than words.
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About This Edition
When Margaret Fell sat down in Lancaster prison in 1667 to write Women’s Speaking Justified, she was answering a question that had troubled the early church and troubled it still: may a woman speak in the meeting of God’s people? The professors of her day said no, and pointed to Paul. Fell — already the great organizer of the Quaker movement, already under sentence of praemunire for her faith — answered them from the whole of Scripture, and answered them for good.
Her argument is bold and close-woven. God made male and female in his own image; Christ appeared first to women at the resurrection and sent them to preach to the apostles; the prophetess and the handmaid poured out the Spirit alongside the men; and the Church herself is spoken of throughout Scripture as a woman and a bride. To forbid women to speak, Fell held, is to silence the very voice through which God has so often chosen to speak. The tract’s Further Addition, written the same year, gathers still more witnesses — Ruth and Hannah, Esther and Judith, the prophetesses of the Gospel — until the case is overwhelming.
This Friends Illuminated edition sets the complete 1667 text (with its Further Addition) alongside Fell’s own life and trial. Here, in her plain first-person voice, is her convincement under George Fox’s preaching, her tireless service to the scattered meetings, her long imprisonment and the sentence of praemunire that stripped her of her estate, and her faithful later years. And here is her examination before Judge Twisden at Lancaster in 1664 — the moment she refused the oath and stood on the ground of conscience, whatever it cost her.
The text is drawn from the 1667 corrected London edition of Women’s Speaking Justified and from A Brief Collection of Remarkable Passages (1710), modernized in spelling and syntax so it reads cleanly today while keeping the plain speech where it carries the weight of Fell’s meaning. Scripture and historical references are linked throughout.
