Gill_Ministering Confusion_ Rebellious Quaker Women (1650-1660).pdf (1.04 MB)
'Ministering confusion': Rebellious Quaker women
This paper assesses the position of women within the Quaker community, concentrating
on their ministerial roles. Female prophets and preachers were visible during the first
decade of Quakerism, and the early years prove fruitful for exploration of women's
experiences. In order to consider the difficulties women faced when taking a public role
in support of Quakerism, some context on seventeenth-century attitudes to women will
be provided. It will be argued that women had to challenge patriarchal notions that the
'weaker' sex should be silent, passive and obedient. In contrast to prevailing seventeenthcentury norms, the potential radicalism of the Quaker approach to gender can be
demonstrated. Yet, the majority of this paper deals with evidence showing that women
were chastised by other Quakers for apparently departing from the conventional female
roles. Hence, this paper examines the co-existence of radical, egalitarian attitudes to
gender alongside more conservative, and restrictive evaluations of women's ministry.
History
School
- The Arts, English and Drama
Department
- English and Drama
Published in
Quaker StudiesVolume
Vol. 9Issue
(1)Pages
19 - 35Publisher
George Fox UniversityVersion
- VoR (Version of Record)
Publisher statement
This is an Open Access Article. It is published by George Fox University under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported Licence (CC BY). Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Publication date
2004Copyright date
2005ISSN
1363-013XPublisher version
Language
- en
Depositor
Catie Gill. Deposit date: 17 June 2020Article number
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