Daughters of Light: Quaker Women Preaching and Prophesying in the Colonies and Abroad, 1700-1775

From Chapter One

Beginnings

You that cannot own [acknowledge] the prophesying of the daughters, the woman-labourers in the gospel, you are such as the apostle speaks of . . . which serves not the Lord," George Fox wrote in 1656, referring to the majority of his Christian contemporaries. The Quaker leader's inclusion of women in the ministry challenged fundamental assumptions of established Christianity. "Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy," according to the biblical verse Joel 2:28. But "that kind of prophesying which consists in interpreting Scripture . . . cannot bee meant in this place," argued a seventeenth-century Anglican priest, giving the traditional interpretation, "because in that kind of prophesying the daughters of God have no part nor fellowship with the sons of God; for God hath excluded them."

Origins of Quakerism

Quakerism emerged during a turbulent era in English history, when political, social, and religious upheaval created "a world turned upside down." "Bold impudent huswives" and uneducated laborers preached on stools, spreading "new and strange blasphemies." Civil war and regicide heightened the intensely apocalyptic atmosphere. Attacks on the authority of both church and state generated a creative ferment of ideas in mid-seventeenth-century England. Traditions were repudiated or reexamined. Conflicting biblical interpretations were fiercely debated in pamphlet wars. Diverse sects and movements arose in the absence of a controlling orthodoxy: including the Ranters, the Diggers, the Levellers, the Muggletonians, the Grindletonians, and the Fifth Monarchy Men. The Quakers were one of the few sectarian groups from thisheady period to survive the restoration of the monarchy in 1660.

The Protestant Reformation, over a century earlier, initially had released forces of dissent. In accepting the Bible (the revealed Word of God) as a sufficient guide to salvation, Protestants promoted individual scriptural interpretation: "a priesthood of all believers." The Protestants' rejection of the Roman Catholic Church as mediator between God and humankind placed every man and woman in a direct relationship to the Divine Being. When Martin Luther posted his ninety-five theses on the door of the Wittenberg church in Germany in 1517, he stimulated a reforming zeal to purge Christianity of corruption and practices not based on Scriptures.

The Reformation had proceeded in a distinctive manner in sixteenth-century England, paving the way for future religious conflicts. King Henry VIII's desire to break with Rome had been fueled less by Protestant convictions than by his aim to establish the state's authority over the church, and his need for a divorce. Rejecting papal authority, the Church of England had retained most of the Catholic ecclesiastical organization and ceremonial forms. English Protestantism divided into two factions: Anglicans (those who supported the Church of England as established) and Puritans (those who wanted further reformation). Puritans sought to replace the bishops, whose authority, like that of the pope, supposedly derived from Saint Peter, with a presbyterial or congregational form of church government in which all clergymen were of equal rank. Many reformers wanted to purify the church of other vestiges of Catholicism, including priestly garments, statues, and elaborate rituals, construed as symbols of idolatry or superstition. They endeavored to recapture the simplicity of early Christian worship.

The cruel measures adopted by William Laud, King Charles I's archbishop of Canterbury, to enforce religious uniformity in the 1630s exacerbated these disputes within English Protestantism. Laud's persecution of Puritans angered those who perceived his exalted view of episcopal authority as crypto-Catholic. Popular fears that a design existed "to alter the kingdom both in religion and government" by returning it to Catholicism and erecting a despotism were stimulated by Charles I's ineptitude and his devotion to his Catholic queen. Alarmed Protestants viewed the pope as the Antichrist who had led believers astray and plunged the church into spiritual darkness with his deviations from God's Word.

Archbishop Laud, "that Arch-enemy of our Prosperity and Reformation," was impeached by the Long Parliament in December 1640 and sent to the Tower. Antiprelatical feeling was so widespread that even vendors in the streets of London "lock'd their Fish up, / And trudg'd away to cry No Bishop." The imprisonment of Laud led to the almost total collapse of ecclesiastical authority in England. Puritans in Parliament debated the proper form of church government, liturgy, and teachings, unable to settle the "Church Question." As John Milton wrote in "The Reason of Church Government Urged Against Prelaty" (1642), people were seeking "to inform their understanding in the reason of that government which the church claims to have over them." Milton lamented that "whether it ought to be presbyterial or prelatical [church government by bishops], such endless question, or rather uproar, is arisen in this land. . . ."

In the unaccustomed fluidity of national religious practice, sects representing a variety of theological opinions mushroomed. Disorder increased with the outbreak of civil war in 1642 between the parliamentary army and forces supporting Charles I. The catastrophic events convinced many that the Millennium, the thousand-year-period predicted in the Bible when Christ will reign on earth, was imminent. A "Babelish confusion" of contending voices proposed to redeem the nation from its spiritual and political ills during the revolutionary fervor surrounding the execution of the king in 1649.