In every other Christian community in seventeenth-century England, the rule was the same: women might pray privately, might catechize their children, might exhort other women in their homes — but they did not preach in public, did not vote in church matters, did not write theology, and did not travel as ministers. The Anglican Church, the Puritans, the Independents, the Baptists — all agreed on this point, however much they disagreed on others. Let your women keep silence in the churches, said St. Paul, and there the matter was held to rest.
The Quakers broke this consensus from the day they began. They broke it not as a deliberate program of reform but as a consequence of what they believed about the Light. If the Spirit of God is given to every person who comes into the world, and if the Spirit himself, not the speaker’s office, is what makes a ministry valid, then a woman who has the Spirit upon her may speak, and the assembly that hears her hears not her but the Lord. To silence such a woman is to silence God.
This conviction was held with such steadiness that, by 1660, perhaps one out of every three traveling ministers among Friends was a woman. By 1700, the number was higher still. No other religious body in the English-speaking world looked anything like this for another two centuries.
The first generation: convincement and travel
Quaker women were among the very first convinced. At Swarthmoor in 1652, Margaret Fell heard Fox and was changed; her two sisters and her seven daughters followed. Within months, women were leaving their homes — sometimes with their husbands, sometimes alone, sometimes against their husbands’ wishes — to publish Truth across the kingdom.
Mary Fisher, a Yorkshire servant in her late twenties, was beaten in Cambridge for preaching to the students. Undeterred, she sailed for Barbados, then for Boston (where she was stripped, examined for “marks of witchcraft,” and shipped back), and finally for the Ottoman Empire. In 1658 she walked overland from Smyrna to Adrianople and obtained an audience with Sultan Mehmed IV. The Sultan listened to her message courteously, asked whether her companions had given her the message, and offered her safe escort home. She was about thirty.
Elizabeth Hooton, the first person Fox convinced, was over sixty when she began traveling in the ministry. She crossed the Atlantic five times. She was whipped at the cart’s tail through the streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts. She died in Jamaica in 1672, on her last journey, aged probably seventy-two.
Barbara Blaugdone, single and respectable, walked into a Bristol church in 1654 and stood up after the priest finished. She was beaten, jailed, beaten again, jailed again, and on one occasion, on a missionary journey to Ireland, was set upon by a mob with knives and would have been killed had not her dog interposed himself between her and the assailants. She survived to write a Brief Account of her sufferings.
Katharine Evans and Sarah Cheevers sailed for Egypt in 1659 to bear witness. Driven by storm to Malta, they were arrested by the Inquisition, held for nearly four years in conditions of severe deprivation, and pressured almost daily to recant. They did not. Their Brief Discovery of God’s Eternal Truth — written from the Inquisition’s prison and smuggled out — is one of the more remarkable documents of seventeenth-century English religion.
These were not exceptional cases. They were typical. Across England in the 1650s and 1660s, women Friends were preaching in the marketplaces, sitting in the prisons, and producing a small library of devotional and apologetic writing. Joseph Besse’s Sufferings records hundreds of women among the imprisoned. Mary Dyer was one of the four Boston martyrs; she was hanged on Boston Common in 1660, returning a third time after banishment because, as she said, she came “in obedience to the will of the Lord.”
Margaret Fell
Above and behind all of this stood Margaret Fell, born Margaret Askew in 1614 and married at seventeen to Thomas Fell, a Vice-Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and one of the leading Cromwellian magistrates in the north of England. By 1652, when Fox arrived at Swarthmoor Hall, Margaret Fell was thirty-eight, mistress of one of the great houses of Furness, mother of nine surviving children, and the wife of a man whose protection — though Thomas Fell never himself became a Friend — would shield Quakerism in its first decade as nothing else could have done.
Margaret Fell did not, in the conventional sense, travel in the ministry. She did not have to. The movement came to her. From Swarthmoor she ran what amounted to a Quaker general staff: she received the news, kept the accounts of suffering, raised funds for prisoners, wrote letters of counsel to dispersed meetings, intervened in disputes, hosted Friends in passage. She also wrote — with extraordinary clarity and, when needed, with formidable polemical force.
In 1666, after several years of imprisonment in Lancaster Castle for refusing the Oath of Allegiance, she produced what became the foundational document of Quaker (and, in due time, of much wider Christian) thinking on women’s ministry: Women’s Speaking Justified, Proved and Allowed of by the Scriptures, all such as Speak by the Spirit and Power of the Lord Jesus.
The pamphlet runs only about thirty quarto pages, but it does what no English Christian work before it had quite done: it methodically defends the public ministry of women from the Bible itself. Fell takes up every text that had been used to silence women in the church and reads it back through the prophet Joel — I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy — and through the practice of Christ and the apostles, who plainly received women’s witness, sent women on missions, and conferred Spirit-gifts on women without distinction.
And God hath said that His Daughters shall Prophesy, as well as His Sons; and they may be Ministers of His Word, as well as they. — Margaret Fell, Women’s Speaking Justified
The argument is neither shrill nor sectarian. It is steady, biblical, and quietly devastating. To read Fell after reading the standard seventeenth-century treatments of “the woman question” is to feel a window opened.
In 1669, eleven years after Thomas Fell’s death, Margaret Fell married George Fox. They lived together as husband and wife for the rest of his life — though she remained at Swarthmoor and he traveled — and she outlived him by eleven years, dying at Swarthmoor in 1702 at the age of eighty-eight. The Quaker movement is unimaginable without her. Friends called her, justly, the nursing mother of Quakerism.
Women’s Meetings
By the 1670s the Friends had developed an institution that gave women’s testimony permanent shape: the Women’s Monthly Meeting, parallel to the men’s Monthly Meeting, with responsibility for the oversight of marriages, the relief of the poor, the discipline of women members, and a share in the corresponding governance of the local Society.
The Women’s Meetings were controversial inside Friends as well as outside. Some Friends, including the influential Bristol Quaker William Rogers, argued that they usurped the husband’s headship. Fox defended them passionately. They were retained, and they became one of the most distinctive features of Quaker community life — a place where women had real authority over real questions, in a century where almost nowhere else in Christian Europe was that true.
It is worth noting what the Women’s Meetings actually did. They examined prospective marriages — both sides — to see whether young Friends were entering with sober purpose. They oversaw care of widows, orphans, prisoners’ families. They received reports on travel in the ministry. They corresponded with sister meetings across the country. They kept their own minutes, signed by their own clerks. None of this would have surprised a modern observer. It was unprecedented in 1675.
A theology, not a program
It is important not to read modern feminism back onto early Quaker women. They did not argue, as later reformers would, that women had natural rights equal to men’s. They argued something narrower and, in their time, more startling: that the Spirit of God speaks where it will, that the Spirit had spoken through women in the Bible (Deborah, Huldah, Anna, the daughters of Philip), that the Spirit was speaking through women now in their own meetings, and that no church which silenced what the Spirit was saying could be the true church of Christ.
This is why their argument carried weight where merely social arguments did not. It was a theological claim. It rested on the same conviction that grounded everything else in the Quaker movement — the conviction that the Light is given to every soul, and that no human authority can override what the Light says.
If they had argued for women’s ministry on the grounds of equality alone, they could have been answered from a hundred sermons. By arguing for it on the grounds of the Spirit, they put their critics in an awkward place: to deny the women was to deny the Spirit, and the Friends knew, and the critics knew, that this was a costly thing for an Englishman of 1670 to do.
The long influence
The witness of seventeenth-century Quaker women did not stay quietly within the Society. It seeded a tradition. By the eighteenth century, Quaker women were the most visible body of female public ministers in the English-speaking world. Catharine Phillips, Mary Peisley, Sophia Hume, Patience Brayton, Rebecca Jones, and dozens of others crossed the Atlantic, preached in Pennsylvania and the Carolinas, met with governors and bishops, and wrote Journals of their travels.
By the nineteenth century, this tradition had produced Lucretia Mott, the Quaker abolitionist who organized the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 — the first women’s rights convention in the United States — alongside Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Mott’s reasoning at Seneca Falls is recognizably the reasoning of Margaret Fell at Lancaster: that the same Spirit which lit the early church speaks today, and that what the Spirit says cannot be silenced by custom.
It is fashionable now to credit later movements with this insight. The earlier credit belongs to a generation of Quaker women who, between 1652 and 1700, walked into Cambridge to be whipped, sailed to Boston to be hanged, sat in Maltese dungeons for years rather than recant, and wrote — with their own pens, in their own names — the foundational texts of a tradition that would not die.
And the Lord hath called for an army out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, both men and women, to be His witnesses in the earth. — Margaret Fell