Prophecy and polemic: Quaker women and English political culture, 1650–1700

Susanna Catherine Calkins, Purdue University

Abstract

This study explores how Quaker women positioned themselves amid the shifting English political climate as they sought to defend themselves and their beliefs on religious, political, and legal grounds in the late seventeenth century. Although the early Quakers were wary of a legal system that was often punitive towards them, female Friends were among the first women to petition Parliament, the monarchy, and the Anglican Church hierarchy. I argue that Quaker women, exhibiting agency or self-sufficiency, entered into a larger political debate with these religious and secular authorities as they petitioned for the restoration of the monarchy and protested injunctions, the payment of tithes, forfeiture of property, the tendering of oaths and imprisonment, on behalf of themselves and their spiritual sisters and brothers. This shared dialectic—centering on ideas of subjugation and resistance, obedience and punishment, coercion and subversion—demonstrates how the women used their positions of spiritual authority to actively negotiate for power and to gain legal redress. From the emergence of the sect in the 1640s until the mid-1670s, the body of the Quaker woman became a site of legal and political contest as female Friends sought to display the detrimental physical and emotional effects caused by official harassment, imprisonment, and the anti-Quaker legislation. They deliberately reminded authority figures that as handmaidens selected by God, no earthly authority could gainsay their claims. From the 1670s to the end of the century, as the Society of Friends grew more institutionalized, a shift occurred as Quaker women gradually adopted intelligent and logical arguments based on carefully culled biblical examples and legal precedents. Using reasoned and calm voices, they aimed their publications at a court of public opinion to persuade their readers, as well as the authorities they opposed, of the legitimacy of their ideals and beliefs. In a period when the monarchy and Parliament fought colonial authorities and themselves, I contend that Quaker women recognized and positioned themselves within these larger contests of power—physically, spiritually, and intellectually—allowing them to participate in the political community in ways that women usually could not in the late Stuart Era.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Zook, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Religious congregations|European history

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