The Evolution of Quaker Exhortations on Women's Ministry in the 1650s

While most examination of Quaker women's ministry have focused on Margaret Fell's justifiably renowned "Women's Speaking Justified" (e.g., Donawerth, 2006, 2018; Ruether, 1990; Mack, 1982, 1992; Dale Johnson, 2004; Barbour, 1976), this tends to overlook three influential pamphlets on the subject published in the 1650s: Richard Farnworth, "A Woman forbidden to Speak in the Church" (Giles Calvert, 1654); Priscilla Cotton and Mary Cole, "To the Priests and People of England" (Giles Calvert, 1655); and George Fox, "The Woman Learning in Silence," (Thomas Simmons, 1655/6). Hilary Hinds has given a sensitive reading to the Cotton and Cole work in Hind's book, "God's Englishwomen" (1996). This paper seems to contextualize the Cotton and Cole work in the setting of the two works by English male Quakers Farnworth and Fox.

What tends to be noticed about these three works taken together is that they all are intended to justify the injunction that women should prophesy in Acts 2 and Joel 2. These works are not dealt with in Garman et al., 1996, nor Tarter and Gill, 2018. These works do demonstrate that this is a foundational principle for early Quakerism. But the divergences and other similarities between these texts, and the reasons for them, and their effects on the evolution of the Quaker movement prior to the Bristol event of James Nayler's imitation of Christ's entry into Jerusalem, have not been explored. This paper seeks to undertake such an exploration.

One thing is evident from the start: the two earlier texts, Farnwoth, and Cotton and Cole, spiritualize gender, interpreting the word "women" to mean something like "weak in the Spirit," in the way that the later text by Fox (and Fell's 1666 work) do not. Hinds' exposition thoroughly analyzes the positives and negatives with allegorizing "women" in this way, but that exposition on that question should be extended to the texts by Farnworth and Fox, in order to understand more clearly and fully the evolution of Quaker thought on the subject. In particular, Cotton and Cole are not the writers that pioneer this profound spiritualization of gender; Farnworth is the first to do that.

While Farnworth and Fox both utilize the most difficult texts from the Apostle Paul in their book titles, seemingly to hook their Puritan readers and then to convert them to a different view of women's ministry, they do so in completely different ways. For Farnworth, Paul's exhortation that women should be submissive to their husbands is not a subject that he deals with. For Fox, however, he explicitly affirms that women should be submissive to their husbands, and that women should be saved through childbearing. Despite his concurrence with the previous authors that God's daughters should prophesy, it then appears that only some should prophesy, or that women's prophesying should be restricted in certain ways. He is validating a system of women's ministry in which most of the Quaker itinerant women are unmarried. But his soteriology seems to presume that such women will eventually leave their itinerancy behind, and settle into a more conventional Christian married state. Neither Farnworth nor Cotton and Cole make any such assumption.

Analysis for the audience of these tracts is crucial. Hinds 1996 shows that Cole and Cotton distinguished between (non-Quaker) priest and people. Priests are more difficult to reach and therefore tend to be addressed as unregenerate and as "women," weak in the Spirit, while the people are much more reachable. When we extend our exploration beyond Hinds' work, this argument can also be found in Farnworth's previous work, with an even more stark distinction between priest and people. Fox, on the other hand, seems to have both a Quaker and non-Quaker audience in mind. Previous to his March 1655/6 work, non-Quakers had been vociferously attacking Quakers for what they perceived as their radical and highly dangerous practice of allowing women to prophesy and preach in public. Quaker reply tracts by James Nayler and others pointed to the unpopularity of the Quaker position on this matter by passing over these attacks entirely. Fox is determined to answer these attacks, but he does so in a way that balances conservatism and radicalism: that is, he is willing to adhere to Paul's teachings on the place of women in Christian life when they do not explicitly conflict with the Acts 2 foundational text on daughters prophesying.

This tends to highlight a divide within the early Quaker movement between the northern Quakers, who were more conservative and more inclined toward traditional women's roles outside the matter of women's ministry, and the Quakers, more progressive and eschatologically oriented, who lived around London and other parts of southern England (Cotton and Cole from Plymouth fall into this category) who are much more eager to radically reinterpret Paul. A leading example of this sort of Friend was Martha Simmons, sister to one Quaker printer, Giles Calvert, and wife to another, Thomas Simmons. Martha was publishing tracts in 1655. roughly contemporaneous with the three tracts in question, although engaging their arguments only obliquely, by offering her own spiritual experiences leading her into ministry as an example.

In this context, the argument will be made that the fact that the third tract in this series, the one published by George Fox, was published by Martha's husband Thomas, a different publishing choice than was made by the previous authors Farnwoth, Cotton, and Cole, should be examined for its significance. This change may reflect, at least in part, differences between Giles and Thomas over whether Martha's traveling ministry was too extensive, with her brother Giles, almost a substitute father for her, seeing her travels as about right, with her husband Thomas, wishing that Martha would stay home more, seeing them as too extensive. This may help to illuminate Martha's leading role in the estrangement between Fox and Nayler, and her accompanying Nayler into Bristol, in succeeding months. The disagreements between Fox (and other northern Friends) and Nayler and Simmons over the extent of women's ministry may have helped to lead to the momentous divisions among English Quakers in 1656.