‘Women’s Speaking Justified’: Women and Discipline in the Early Quaker Movement, 1652–56

Abstract

In October 1655, two Quakers, Priscilla Cotton and Mary Cole, imprisoned in Exeter gaol, published a warning to the priests and people of England. It was in many ways a typical Quaker tract, decrying the national Church of England, and urging people to turn to the inner light of Christ, rather than rely on the outward teachings of the national Church. But Priscilla Cotton and Mary Cole also levelled the following bitter accusation against England’s ministry:

Women, Gender, and the Study of Christian History

“…93 That "women" served as the markers for deviance in early modernity is now a commonplace-whether as "witches" 94 or as the representatives of sexual depravity. 95 And the topos continued to prove useful: thus the "Hallelujah Lasses" of the Salvation Army in nineteenth-century Britain were branded as prostitutes for their association with styles of popular commercial entertainment. 96 As Pamela Walker demonstrates, the "lasses" cleverly changed the valence of the denigrating image by claiming that they would "sweep the sewers" to save the world, go where polite women would not in order to purify pestilence 97 -thus providing a spirited example of how women could invert the rhetoric of denigration in a bid to claim moral superiority.…”