I. “A Peculiar People”

In June of 1660, Margaret Fell visited Charles II and Parliament to argue for the recognition of Quaker religious rights and liberties. (A committee of male Quakers would follow her example in November that year.) During this visit, Fell stated that, “We desire and also expect to have the liberty of our consciences and just rights, and outward liberties, as other people of the nation.”^{Footnote 6} Fell does not ask for anything. She does not request that the King allow or grant or permit rights to the Quakers. She asserts instead that because they are like “other people of the nation” they should be treated equally. As a result of that equality with other people they “expect to have” certain rights and liberties. And Fell refers to them as already “ours.” Like the rights the Supreme Court upheld against Proposition 22, these are rights and liberties that cannot be “eliminated or abrogated.” They cannot even be created or given. The rights and liberties exist already. They are possessed already. Fell is reminding the King of the existence of these rights, insisting on their grounding in an essential equality among humans, making clear that she knows she possesses them, and affirming her expectation of their continuance.

The passing of the 1664 Clarendon Code only added fuel to the fire of Fell’s arguments. The Clarendon Code was a series of four acts designed to restrict dissident preaching. Among other restrictions, the Code forbade conventicles — privately hosted non-Anglican religious meetings of more than five people — thereby making most dissenting gatherings, like those that Fell hosted in her own home, illegal. The Code was part of a widespread attempt to regulate and quell the activity of the many religious sects that had sprung up in England during the Interregnum. In a brief protest to Parliament about this persecution, Fell describes her husband’s arrest as a result of the Clarendon Code’s outlawing of conventicles:

The enforcement of laws against the victimless crime of hosting conventicles was only made worse and more dangerous for Quakers like Fell who were spiritually committed against the swearing of oaths. When conventicles were broken up, the organizers and participants were often asked to swear the oaths of allegiance and supremacy that justices of the peace could require from any commoner above the age of eighteen. This appears to be what happened to Fell during her arrest for holding conventicles:

Fell’s act of conscience cost her twenty months in prison.

The Quaker prohibition on the swearing of oaths is based in two different theological arguments, depending, in part, upon the kind of oath in question. General swearing of any oath is, for Quakers, prohibited by Matthew 5:33–7 and by James 5:12.^{Footnote 9} The argument is that taking an oath to tell the truth in a particular context brings one’s truthfulness into question the rest of the time. Oaths that are specific attestations of allegiance and supremacy are forbidden for this reason, as well as for the additional reasons that allegiance should be sworn only to God and that only God is supreme. No human agent can have that kind of supremacy and any kind of allegiance grounded on that kind of supremacy is illegitimate as well as unholy. It is these last arguments — that the relationship between God and the individual does not allow one to give allegiance to any human or human institution — that take us deeply into Fell’s arguments about equality and provide the theological grounding that gives her the confidence to argue that her equality preexists human law.

For Fell and her fellow Quakers, the connection between God and the individual has an immediacy and a tangibility that is hard to overstate, and hard for the modern secular world to understand. Fell is not only insistent on continuing to hold illegal meetings because the value of her commitment to God is greater than the restrictions of prison, she is even unable to tell her children when she plans to return from a trip to London, because she is unsure when God will let her go.

Such traveling instructions from God were not in any way unusual for early modern Quakers. Katharine Evans and Sarah Cheevers, for example, were instructed by God to leave their families in England and convert the Turks.^{Footnote 11} While their trip did not go particularly well — they were captured by the Inquisition and held prisoner on the Isle of Malta for over three years — their conviction that their inner light had led them to exactly where they should be never wavered. Nearly every time Fell mentions a trip or a decision of any import, she specifies that “God moved me to” the action.

After the death of her first husband, Fell married Quaker founder George Fox, who described their decision to marry in exactly these terms of divine direction of individual decisions.

Lest twenty-first-century readers find this description of a call to marriage suspiciously patriarchal in tone, it is worth noting that Fox and Fell had what amounted to a prenuptial agreement that prevented his interfering with her estates or the income from them — an astonishing choice for the time. The decision is quite clearly a natural result of the way that the adamant Quaker insistence on equality between humans and before God requires that men and women take practical stances in relation to one another that are quite different from the social norm. This refusal to touch his wife’s estate was so different that Fox writes in his journal that when he was tried for not paying tithes due from Fell’s estate he had to explain to the judges, “That I had engaged never to meddle with my wife’s estate. The judges would hardly believe that any man would do so; whereupon he [Fox’s son-in-law] showed them the writing under my hands and seal, at which they wondered.”^{Footnote 13} Fox is not using the word of God as a cover for a power play. That is the Quaker accusation against established churches. He and Fell are living out, and writing into their marriage settlement, precisely the logical conclusions of their belief in equality. And it would be irresponsible not to trust — in the face of such evidence — that Quakers meant exactly what they said about their immediate experience of God and about their understanding that his intention, from creation on, was equality on all fronts, including that of gender.

II. “Jews or Greeks, Barbarian or Cythian, Bond or Free”

For early modern Quakers like Fox and Fell, the individual’s relationship to the divine, then, is of an intensity and a primacy that overcomes and controls all other connections — personal, romantic, political, and legal. It is a relationship that is open to people of all religions and nations, whether “Jews or Greeks, Barbarian or Cythian, Bond or Free” as Fell frequently quotes from Colossians 3:11. And it is available regardless of social class and position, or as Fell often says “without respect of persons.”^{Footnote 14} It is also a relationship that belongs uniquely to each individual and must not and cannot be mediated. This objection to a mediated relationship with the divine is the source of Quaker objections to state-appointed ministers and to ordained and licensed clergy in general.

Similarly, the same objection leads to a string of further objections to tithing, honorifics in speech, and social niceties such as “hat honor” about which Quakers were famously stubborn. All of these points of resistance rest upon the Quaker insistence that since God’s grace is given equally to all, all are equally endowed with an inner light to direct their spiritual and temporal decisions, and thus it is ungodly to be “respecter of persons.”

Such a belief means that Quaker relations to authority and to hierarchies in general were often, at best, troubled. With the famously absolutist-leaning Stuarts back on the throne of England, the Quakers found themselves chafing against restrictions that had been unenforced or nonexistent during the Interregnum. And many of them were “moved by God to speak” about their sufferings. Fell was a particularly persistent discussant. She writes:

The content of those papers and letters is generally a mixture of sermon, criticism, and advice. She routinely asserts the innocence and loyalty of the Quakers and often, as above, asks to have discourse with Church of England divines in order to prove the theological soundness of Quakerism. A fairly typical passage from one of her letters to King Charles reads:

It is worth noting Fell’s strongly antihierarchical use of language here. She refers to the King, in standard Quaker fashion, as “thee” which was a shocking breach of protocol in the period. She accuses him of making “an act against” the Quakers and then exceeding his own act in severity — a serious accusation to level against the son of a father who was charged with treason for upholding personal interests against the rights of the people. And finally, she asserts that her stating of “these things” is a duty “laid upon me from the Lord.” In other words, not only does Fell deny that the King has any superior authority over her, she asserts that she — moved by the spirit of God — has the right to encounter him on equal footing.^{Footnote 18}

While Charles appears to have born Fell’s chastisements with a goodly amount of patience, we do know at that least once he seems to have lost his temper, perhaps over accusatory passages such as, “What laws have you made or changed, save such as have laid oppression and bondage on the consciences of God’s people, and that of no less penalty than banishment out of their native country?”^{Footnote 19} She writes:

These are, in other words, potentially dangerous and enraging arguments for a small dissenting sect to make, particularly in such strongly couched terms. Much of Fell’s writing, when it addresses earthly politics, is engaged in negotiating a fairly tenuous balance between the claim that worldly authority has no bearing over those perfectly equal beings who are moved by their inner light, and the assertion that Quakers are, nonetheless, prepared to be good subjects to a good king.

Fell’s A Declaration and an Information from Us the People of God called Quakers which was “Delivered into the Kings hand, the 22nd day of the Fourth Month by M.F” must surely be the type of long paper that annoyed Charles. Fell begins by listing the persecutions the Quakers have suffered for their faith for the past twelve years, regardless of the many political changes between 1648 and 1660 when she wrote. They have been “persecuted & prisoned till death, others their bodies bruised till death, stigmatized, bored thorow the tongue, gagged in the mouth, stockt, and whipt thorow Towns & Cities, our goods spoiled, our bodies two or three years imprisoned”^{Footnote 21} and all “ . . . for Conscience sake, because we cannot bow to mens wills and worships contrary to the Command of Christ Jesus our Everlasting Priest, King and Prophet, whom we serve with our spirits and worship in that, which the World calls Heresie.”^{Footnote 22} It is worth noting that Fell may well have been moved to write and deliver this declaration herself because most of the male Quakers had been arrested in an intensification of persecution. “After the Fifth Monarchy men raised an insurrection and tumult in the city of London, and then all our meetings were disturbed, and Friends taken up.”^{Footnote 23} With these sufferings established, Fell moves to argue for the innocence of the Quaker — particularly in contrast to sects like the Fifth Monarchists.

She opens her argument by suggesting that, if the Parliament and King knew more about Quaker doctrine and about their sufferings, there would be no question of their loyalty as subjects.

I am at a loss to say whether Fell is being disingenuous or not here. She is aware of the dangers of offending the present governors, as the long list of torments that opens the Declaration and Information makes clear. But it is hard to read her statement that these have “not done us much wrong” yet, without a sense that this is as much a warning as an “information.” And it is equally hard to believe that Fell is unaware of the politically radical implications of Quaker doctrine.

This radicalism comes increasingly to the forefront as Fell continues with an increasingly tangled mixture of warnings and affirmations of fidelity.

Fell’s insistence that Quakers are loving and obedient subjects is followed instantly by a series of riders to that contract between people and sovereign. The very presentation of governance as a bargain or a contract implies, in many ways, an equality of standing among all the participants, and the possibility that the contract can be broken if one of the parties fails to adhere to the terms. The Quakers “do love, own, and Honour the King and these present Governours” but this is clearly a conditional agreement that exists only so long as the King and governors fulfill what the Quakers see as their side of the bargain. This includes ruling for “God and his Truth,” tolerance for others’ religious consciences, and a very Quaker — and very un-Laudian — acceptance of free access and interpretation of the Gospel for all.

Fell’s language has, again a decided tinge of warning to it, particularly in her use of words such as “present” and “as yet” which suggest to King and government as well as to the Quakers that all these arrangements are temporary and contingent. Perhaps, as well, the phrase “these present Governours” is meant as a particularly stinging reminder of how much political change England had seen of late, particularly when placed over against the steadfastness of the eternal.

Indeed, Fell reminds her readers of precisely this context of political change and unpredictability just a few pages later.

Here Fell is much less ambiguous about her warnings. Previous English governments have failed to protect England from the scourges of state religions, licensed ministers, and the tithes used to support them, and previous English governments have been overturned and broken. With a recent political history like that, Fell argues, there is only one logical royal response.

But with a recent political history marked by incessant upheaval and populist uprising, how could the English King and Parliament be made anything but nervous by these disturbingly familiar appeals to liberty and conscience, and these equally familiar objections to quietly paying the money demanded by the crown?

Fell works to assuage that concern with recourse to language that echoes that of the Magna Carta — a document that insists at the same on the rights of the individual and the sovereignty of the monarch.

Here, Fell is very careful that her arguments for Quakers having “rights and liberties of subjects as freeborn Englishmen” and “outward Liberties as other people of the Nation” are grounded in the Quaker insistence on equality among human beings. They are not requesting special recognition or treatment, but equal footing with their fellow freeborn Englishmen. It is this mutually respectful give and take between equal subjects and their bargain-respecting King that Fell and her fellow Quakers are seeking.

III. “This Was a Woman That Taught”

But Fell does not just use theology to argue on behalf of Quakers and for the equality of all “freeborn English men.” She also makes a famous and very particularized argument about the equality of Quaker women. Fell’s argument is not unique — though it is, perhaps, uniquely well done. With restrictions on printing lifted and/or neglected during the interregnum, more women’s writings made it into print. It is no surprise then that arguments about the rights of women rose during the civil war and interregnum, as did women’s participation in politics and in religion, particularly as a result of the ever-increasing number of dissenting sects in England.^{Footnote 29}

A certain portion of that activity centered on the question of women’s right to preach and teach in churches and in conventicles. In 1646, the House of Commons voted to outlaw preaching by any but licensed male ministers, thereby creating a legal fiction of spiritual inequality. The further limiting legal requirements of the Clarendon Code did nothing to alleviate this restriction. For dissenting sects “where in most cases neither male nor female preacher was ordained [and] lay preachers of both sexes exhorted and preached”^{Footnote 30} this was unacceptable. Fell’s Women’s Speaking Justified (1666/7) is an important text within that argument, for its expertise, its influence, and its “lucid and more measured rebuttal to the standard arguments.” In a time when women’s political and religious participation often led to their characterization as “fishwives, Billingsgate women, or simply ‘scum,’”^{Footnote 31} Fell’s measured and magisterial response was crucial for making the point that Fell and other Quaker women, while persistent and determined, were neither ranting viragoes nor madwomen. They were not, in other words, Dame Eleanor Davies, who claimed that the anagram of her name “Eleanor Audelie” as “Reveal O Daniel” testified to her prophetic gifts — which she used to “predict” the death of Charles I and the Duke of Buckingham.^{Footnote 32}

It would be a mistake to think, though, that Fell’s relatively moderate tone is evidence of a more moderate commitment to her subject or even of a more moderate set of beliefs. Indeed, compared to other petitions of the time, Fell’s rhetoric is remarkably empowered. When the 1640 “Root and Branch” petition requested the abolition of “the said government with all its dependencies, roots and branches . . . and all laws in their behalf made void,”^{Footnote 33} it did so with four assertions of “humbleness” and the (fairly counterintuitive) promise that the petitioners “will daily pray for his majesty's long and happy reign over us, and for the prosperous success of this high and honourable Court of Parliament.” Petitions specifically from women made even greater use of a humble and supplicating rhetoric. Patricia Higgins observes that the writers of women’s petitions:

Contrast such locutions with Fell’s opening statement, “First let me lay down how God himself hath manifested his Will and Mind concerning Women, and unto Women.”^{Footnote 35} There is no humbleness or supplication here. Instead we have the near Miltonic claim that Fell will “justify the ways of God to man.” And this is precisely what Fell proceeds to do.

Fell begins to “lay down” her evidence with an extended discussion of God’s creation of humanity, insisting throughout her text that women received an equal creation with men, deliberately using the “in the image of God created he them” version of the Creation story from the first chapter of Genesis rather than the version in the second chapter that depicts Eve as created later and created from Adam’s flesh. Fell notes that not only is their creation equal and simultaneous, so are the injunctions given to them about how to take care of the world. “Here God joyns them together in his own Image, and makes no such distinctions and differences as men do; for though they be weak, he is strong . . . And God hath put no such difference between the Male and Female as men would make.”^{Footnote 36}

IV. By Weak Means

Fell’s use of the word “weak” so early in her piece, and her use of it in relation to both Eve and Adam is important, as arguments about weakness were central to questions about whether women could have equal political and spiritual authority. For those who argued against women’s right to preach, weakness was one of the more popular rationalizations. Women were simply too weak to carry the same spiritual authority men have. Had this not been clearly in evidence from the moment that Eve’s weakness led her to be seduced by the serpent? Even the Book of Homilies made it clear that the official position of the English church was that, “the woman is a weake creature, not indued with like strength and constancie of minde, therefore they be the sooner disquieted, and they be the more prone to all weake affections & dispositions of mind, more then men bee, & lighter they bee, and more vaine in their fantasies &opinions.”^{Footnote 37}

I have already pointed to the humble and submissive language generally used by female petitioners as a way of highlighting their weakness and vulnerability and — they hope —inspiring a protective male response. Elaine Hobby observes that in a petition to Cromwell, Mary Blaithwait does exactly this. She presents her need to write a petition as a shameful action forced on her by circumstance, and then uses appeals to feminine weakness and need for protection in order to sway Cromwell to her point of view.^{Footnote 38} When a group of gentlewomen and trademen’s wives petitioned Parliament in 1642, they emphasized their collective weakness and vulnerability as well, expressing their fears about anticipated Catholic-instigated treason and violence, “the thoughts of which sad and barbarous events maketh our tender hearts to melt within us, forcing us humbly to petition to this honorable assembly, to make safe provision for yourselves and us, before it be too late.”^{Footnote 39} Later in the petition, they paint graphic images of what they fear will become of them because they are weak and unprotected.

With its echoes of some of the grisliest moments from the book of Psalms and Deuteronomy, and references to some of the bleaker moments in early modern history, the passage is clearly a sophisticated attempt to use weakness as a weapon. By reminding the (strong male) politicians of their duty to protect the weak and the helpless, the gentlewomen and tradesmen’s wives expect that they will more easily get what they want.

Even women speaking with authority and those defending that kind of speaking used the trope of womanly weakness as part of their defense, arguing that “women’s very weakness makes them the most appropriate bearers of truth, ‘it being a usual thing with God, by weak means to work mighty effects.’”^{Footnote 41} As Phyllis Mack points out, when Arise Evans edited the prophecies of Elinor Channel for publication, he emphasized the weakness that allowed her to be overcome by the divine. “Now this woman was very sensible and profound in what she spake to me, as she said, when she is dumb, all her senses are taken up, and then the matter which troubles her mind is dictated and made plain to her by the spirit of God.”^{Footnote 42} Thickstun elaborates: “Women’s religious authority derived not from personal power but from a belief in God’s tendency to choose unlikely vessels to confound the proud.”^{Footnote 43} No matter what argument an early modern individual wanted to make about the status of women, it seems that the trope of their weakness, as contrasted with male strength, was a useful component to bring into play.

Fell, however, does not seem to find it so. She carefully counters each part of the attempt to silence women because they are weak. First, she argues that it is important to discern which kind of weakness is under discussion. Women who do not “wear modest apparel and such as were not come to shamefastness and sobriety”^{Footnote 44} are the women who are truly weak. We might call this kind of weakness, “worldly weakness.” These are the women to whom the Apostles’ injunctions to learn in silence are directed. And rules that are made for women like these have no bearing on Fell and other Quaker women.

This kind of womanly weakness, suggests Fell, is the result of particular women’s particular bad behavior. It does not apply, and should not be applied to all women in general. To do so is a corruption of the scriptures. It is to make the same error as those who do not understand that the coming of Christ has freed Christians from the tyranny of Old Testament law.

The assertion that Christians must follow the laws laid out in the Old Testament had been roundly rejected by reformed protestants of all sects since Martin Luther wrote “a Christian has all that he needs in faith and needs not works to justify him; and if he has no need of works, he has no need of the law; and if he has no need of the law, surely he is free from the law.” ^{Footnote 47} Fell simply takes this argument to its next logical step. Moral, godly, Christian women, led by the Spirit of God and prompted by their inner light to speak are not subject to the law, argues Fell. Thus all law-based arguments made by men who oppose women’s speaking are ludicrous on their face.^{Footnote 48}

Fell does ring her own unique variation on the trope of weakness in her writing, however. She plays with the idea of something we might call “divine or godly weakness” that, as it turns out, is entirely unlike weakness at all. Fell explains it thus:

Those who are only worldly wise, who have “the wisdom of man, that never knew God” are always ready to overrule those who seem to be weak. But this merely demonstrates their mistaken understanding. They fail to realize that when God chooses “the weak” for his own purposes this utterly transforms the category of “the weak.” “The weak” are now weak only by divine standards, not by worldly ones. Because of the influence of the divine, that which God calls weak is still stronger than human strength, and that which God calls foolish is wiser than human wisdom. This divine weakness is tangentially related to the argument that women’s weakness makes them appropriate prophetic vessels for God’s spirit to flow through. The difference is that the weakness that invites God to use women as prophetic vessels is still weakness. When the spirit of God is not actively flowing through a woman used as a prophetic vessel, she is merely a woman again, as incapable and weak as other women. Fell’s divine weakness is not something that is temporarily overcome when preaching and returned to when silent. It is a weakness that is weak only in comparison to the strength of God. In comparison to human strength, the divine weakness that Fell claims for herself and other female preachers is a power beyond anything but God’s.

The natural result of Fell’s theory that women’s equal right to speak is based in their possession of this divine weakness that is greater than human strength is the accusation that those who deny women’s right to speak are blasphemers and enemies of God. Because God said to the Serpent, “I will put enmity between thee and the Woman, and between thy Seed and her Seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel,”^{Footnote 50} enemies of women, Fell argues, are descended from the serpent.

And a little later she becomes even more fervent, using the language of Hell and of the Book of Revelation to make her point:

Fell’s rhetoric has left the — frank or feigned — humbleness of other female petitioners far behind at this point. Her condemnation of those who oppose her arguments is wholesale. In the realm of the spiritual, which is the only realm that matters to her at all, those who have voted against women’s preaching, those who preach and write against it, and those who uphold the law against it are clearly the enemy. The spirit of darkness has overtaken England for hundreds of years — until the awakening of the light of Quakerism. And those who would silence male or female Quaker speech are servants of that darkness and residents of that bottomless pit.

So great is the enmity that not only are those who oppose women’s speaking “the Seed of the Serpent,” they are also intentionally opposing the will of God that has, from the beginning, created men and women equally and, from the beginning, treated them as such.

The catalogue of women who had direct interactions with Christ that concludes this quotation is not merely a tidy summation of the exegetical work that Fell has done earlier in Women’s Speaking. While it certainly is that, it is also a reminder that in arguing for women’s speaking, Fell is not making an argument about weakness that deserves special consideration from the strong, or an argument about the powerful voice of Jesus flowing through a weak and surprising conduit. She is proclaiming a radical vision of a long history of women who are powerful speakers of the word of God, on equal terms with male prophets and disciples.

V. No Man Could Teach It Us

Women’s Speaking is not, then, a request for the granting of gender equality. It is a demand for the King and parliament to recognize the equality that Fell knows she already possesses. Based in an equal creation, bolstered by a theology that allows for immediate and direct access to the divine for all individuals, and supported by a radical overturning of the trope of feminine weakness, Women’s Speaking asks for nothing and makes it clear that the King and Parliament it addresses have no power to give anything of real import.

Fell says again and again, in ways both subtle and unsubtle, that none of this spiritual equality, gender equality, or access to the divine derives, in any way, from worldly and human authority. In The Daughter of Sion Awakened, she tells her readers that nothing human can overcome the light of the divine.

Human teachings are unnecessary and irrelevant. Divine anointing, however, “abideth.” This is because, as Fell says by way of a common Reformed Protestant image, “He is the Mediator of a better Covenant, established upon better Promises, an everlasting Covenant, that never can be broken, written not in Tables of stone, but in fleshly Tables of the heart.”^{Footnote 55} Physical human writing is as nothing in contrast with spiritual understanding and guidance.

The argument is even clearer in A True Testimony of the People of God where Fell claims of the spirit that guides Quakers that:

Learning and authority, says Fell do not come from men, but from revelation. They cannot be received by men from men nor can they be taught. Only revelation can teach. And no mediating clerical or governmental authority is necessary for that. Fell makes it clear that this does not mean that Quakers cannot preach at all — as that would put paid to her justification of women’s preaching. It means that when Quakers preach, the Spirit in them speaks to the Spirit in their congregation. Human authority and human agency are left entirely out of the matter.

And if the government and its ordained official ministers cannot even teach truth, how can they possibly create equality?

Fell’s answer, the answer of early modern radicals in general, and the answer that we must recover in our own political discourse, is that they cannot. From the moment of creation, equality existed. Any distinctions made thereafter were entirely human innovations, having no bearing on the intent of the Creator, and carrying no weight in considerations of how humans should be treated. From the standpoint of twenty-first-century secularism, it can be hard to imagine that Fell’s argument for Quaker women’s equality could have any serious connection to modern political rhetoric. After all, we tend to blandly assume that religious faith and its language must be a source of oppression and patriarchy rather than a site of liberation and equality. But reading writers like Fell must give us pause about that assumption, about the assumption that governments can give or grant or create equality, and perhaps about many of our other assumptions as well. And we are left, at least, wondering how our political discourse would be changed were we to insist — in a Fell-like exegetical moment — that the government never gave, but hath only taken away.