A Quaker Woman Says Get Out of Town: Conflict & Gender in Quakerism

After the first decades of the Quaker movement, a division amongst the Quakers affected the unity, clarity, and authority of the movement itself. Conflict began to slowly take hold starting in the late 1660s with a group termed the Separatists arising to critique and challenge original leadership of the movement. This schism in leadership and mission coincided with an overall turn towards a more organized and systematic approach to the spiritual process at large. Relatedly, Quakers experienced heightened persecution at the time. Therefore, it may have been natural for the Quakers to rely on increased organization, as opposed to spontaneous spiritual practice, in order to achieve solidarity. Ironically, the struggle between factions occurred even as the movement sought to strengthen bureaucratically (Mack 273-280). The conflict holds interest in relation to my paper because it signifies an evolving landscape for women leaders in Quakerism. As Phyllis Mack explains, the women preacher who “had engaged in a sort of spiritual cross-dressing by adopting the persona of the rowdy, male, Old Testament prophet was to be metamorphosed into the virtuous and respectable clerk of the women’s meeting” (Mack 275). Here, Mack demonstrates the important limiting factor of further consolidation and organization of the movement. Legitimization of the movement inherently meant that women were relegated to the traditional role of virtue, a means of reigning in earlier, unregulated speech, experience and emotion (Mack 275-277). Organization signified cutting out the unknowable, uncontrollable elements of the movement- as Mack argues, women in spontaneous roles of power. In general, the division amongst Quakers is significant to my paper in a few ways. One, it begs the question of whether the initial authority of women in the movement was somewhat an anomaly and if so, did women’s authority swiftly die off to a decidedly un-radical limitation of virtue? Two, it demands that traditional power structures be seen as crucially tied to gender concepts; hence, women operated more freely when the structures of Quakerism were far more influx.

Lastly, in conjunction with the idea of division in the Quaker movement, I would like to illuminate some of the ideas from Elizabeth Stirredge’s autobiography. She spoke out against John Story, one of the leaders of the Separatists, and she described, “John Story and three of his party came to my house to rebuke me...I told him, What I had against him I never received from man, nor by any information from any one, ‘But what I have against thee is from the evidence of God in my own conscience” (Stirredge 131). She goes on to relate criticism of his conduct of meetings, even going as far as to state, “this was not his place to abide here a-preaching...[his] place is to return home into the north” (Stirredge 132). Therefore, although the movement was barreling towards engendered structures, women continued to employ spirituality as a way in which to maneuver Quaker politics and remain less subject to the effects of organization. As Stirredge states, she heard from no man, but directly from God. Undoubtedly, Stirredge agreed with the spiritual impetus driving her, willing to express objections in the city she perceived as her domain of influence, not Story’s as she so expressed.

Mack, Phyllis. Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England. Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1995.

Stirredge, Elizabeth. “Strength in Weakness Manifest.” Autobiographical Writings by Early Quaker

Women. Edited by David Booy. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004.