Marriage and Discipline: The Place of Women in Early Quaker Controversies

For it is one thing to have authority, and another thing to usurp authority; now they that come to hear the power of God, and thereby be moved to speak, the power gives her authority, but she that is not in the power neither doth feele the motion of the Spirit, such a one usurps authority and is unlearned, and such, and they only were prohibited by Paul and no other. (Francis Howgill, One of Antichrists Voluntiers Defeated, 16601)If they would contend, that Women ought not speak in the Church, all that they can pretend with any shew, or colour of Reason, at most is, That Women are not to speak in the Church by permission: if they speak, they are not to do it by permission, but by commandment, whereas it is permitted unto men, at times to speak in the church by permission, when not by commandment: an unlearned man may be permitted to ask a Question in the Church, which is not permitted unto a Woman, nor is it needful, for she may ask her Husband at home.But if the Spirit of the Lord Command or move a godly and Spiritually Learned Woman to speak, in this case she is the Lords more than her Husbands, and she is to speak, yea, thongh [sic] the Husband should forbid her, for she ought rather to obey God than Man. And in Christ Jesus there is neither Male nor Femal but all are one in him. (George Keith, The Woman-Preacher of Samaria, 16742)In their defences of women's preaching, the Quakers Frances Howgill and George Keith reinterpret the well-known and much-debated Pauline command for women to be silent in church to justify occasions when women can lawfully speak. Howgill and Keith distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate speech not according to gender but according to spiritual condition. Women moved by the spirit of God are 'spiritually learned' and possess the authority to speak and thus to teach. Howgill and Keith insist that such women are not those meant by Paul. The Quaker reinterpretation of Paul accords men and women spiritual equality. Furthermore, the distinction Keith makes between 'permission' versus 'commandment' to speak, essentially a distinction between human desire and divine will, emphasises not only the legitimacy of women's speech but more crucially the compulsion and obligation that the woman has to speak when she is impelled by the divine. To keep silent in this case would be to deny God.Given this sort of understanding of men's and women's place in the Quaker church, it is not surprising to find the Quaker historian William C. Braithwaite praising the Society of Friends for the 'equality of men and women in spiritual privilege and responsibility'.3 More recently, Phyllis Mack examines the ways in which early Quakers appear to transcend gender in the language they use to describe their spiritual state. She argues that the 'importance of the [Quaker] doctrine of perfection was not only, or even primarily, in granting authority to individual women but in what we might call its liquifying aspect, its potential for decomposing the individual, gendered personality and encouraging women and men to speak and act with the traditional attributes of both sexes'.4 Gender becomes disconnected from biological sex such that Quaker women can claim spiritual manhood: 'One Williamsons wife, a Disciple of [James] Milners [a follower of George Fox], when she came to see him at Appleby, said in the hearing of divers there . . . that she was the Eternall Son of God; And when the men that heard her, told her that she was a woman, and therefore could not be the Son of God; She said, no, you are women, but I am a man'.5 The belief in a levelling of gender hierarchy is a common Quaker one. In my epigraph from The Woman- Preacher of Samaria, George Keith similarly reiterates the conviction that in Christ 'there is neither Male nor Femal'. The woman disciple of James Milner is perhaps more confrontational. She does more than simply assert that there is no difference in gender; she in fact reverses both her gender and the gender of the scoffing men. …