Married in 1632 to a Judge Thomas Fell, sixteen years her senior, and with whom she produced nine children, Margaret Askew Fell became convinced of the rightness of Quaker doctrine after an encounter with George Fox in 1652. Although Judge Fell never embraced the Quaker religion, he did use his power to protect her and her friends from political and religious persecution and harassment and he opened his home, Swarthmore Hall, to gatherings of the Society of Friends. After his death in 1658, his protections ceased and Margaret was repeatedly arrested, questioned, and jailed for her Quaker activities which included writing (at least sixteen books and twenty-seven pamphlets) and preaching Quakerism throughout the country, permitting religious assemblies of Quakers in her home, and financing the religion. In 1669, at age fifty-five and eleven years after Judge Fell's death, Margaret married George Fox, the founder of Quakerism, eleven years her junior.

      Like George Fox, she stressed that each individual had an inner light which could guide them to God. Her work, Women's Speaking Justified (1666), was one of the few works to defend women's biblical and moral right to mount the pulpit and preach Christian doctrines. She exerted a powerful and profound influence on the new religion which asserted that since men and women were equal in the eyes of God, men and women should be equal in all parts of God's church.

      Over the following centuries, Quaker women would preach their gospel both to their own gatherings and, as missionaries, throughout the world, establish and run charitable organizations, and lead reformist organizations, providing women with role models of publicly engaged women and a place for women to acquire organization building skills and challenging the social norms of their community. Leaders and activists in reform movements in a number disproportionate to their numbers in American society as a whole, Quakers were among the first Americans to advocate the abolition of slavery, a movement which helped to spawn the first wave of woman's rights activists. Indeed, Berkin and Norton state, "According to Notable American Women, 1607-1950: A Biographical Dictionary, 40 percent of female abolitionists were Quakers; of feminists born before 1830, 19 percent were Quakers; of suffragists born before 1830, 15 percent were Quakers. Since 2 percent is a generous estimate of Quakers in the total American population in 1800, it is clear that Friends were represented in the leadership of these causes in numbers completely out of proportion to their numbers in the nation. Perhaps we may conclude that though other Protestant sects did not adopt the doctrinal positions that liberated Quake women in the seventeenth century, Quaker women eventually helped lead the way to the political positions through which women might liberate themselves."

      A list of early influential American Quakers include Anne Hutchinson (1591-1643), an early American religious freedom fighter; Mary Dyer, early American Quaker martyr; and William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania (1682). A list of notable nineteenth-century male Quaker abolitionists reads like a "who's who" of the movement and includes Benjamin Lundy, William Lloyd Garrison, Henry Stanton, James Mott, Theodore Dwight Weld, and the poet John Greenleaf Whittier. A list of notable nineteenth-century female Quakers includes Prudence Crandall, one of the first people to open a school for African-American girls; Grimke sisters of South Carolina; Abby Kelly Foster; Amelia Bloomer; Lucretia Mott; Susan B. Anthony; Anna Dickinson; Lydia Pinkham; Alice Paul; M. Carey Thomas; Jane Addams; and Emily Balach. American Quaker women helped Quaker men establish educational institutions for women including the Female Medical School of Pennsylvania (1850), co-educational Swarthmore College (1864), the women's college Bryn Mawr (1880). (If someone in my reading audience has a list of influential non-American Quaker men and women, I'd be happy to link to it. Just send a note to Sunny at sunshine@pinn.net)

      Through the religious movement which she had an enormous influence in creating and the work of Quakers throughout the world, Margaret Askew Fell Fox's influence is profoundly present in today's world.

References

      Carol Ruth Berkin & Mary Beth Norton, Women of America: A History, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1979

      Marla J. Selvidge, Notorious Voices, Feminist Biblical Interpretation 1500-1920, NY, Continuum, 1996

      Doris Weatherford, American Women's History; An A - Z of People, Organizations, Issues, and Events, Prentice Hall, 1994

      Quakers Lead the Drive for Emancipation and Abolition (This site seems to have been purchased by an oganization involved in pornography. The link has been disabled. Too bad. It was a nice article when I accessed it 18 months ago. Sorry for any inconvenience. Sunny. Feb. 15, 2002)

Return to Women's History Month 2001 Table of Contents

e-mail sunshine@pinn.net