Women’s Speaking Justified, Proved and Allowed of by the Scriptures
Margaret Fell1666
A short tract of 1666 in which Margaret Fell argues from Scripture that women who speak by the Spirit of Christ may speak in the church. It is the Quaker case for women’s ministry in the words of one of its first leaders.
The tract takes up the objection drawn from 1 Corinthians 14:34–35 and 1 Timothy 2:11–12. Fell goes through Scripture from Genesis onward, dwells on the women who brought the news of the resurrection to the apostles, and reads Paul’s command of silence as addressed to women who were in confusion and “under the Law”, not to those on whom the Spirit had been poured out. See George Fox and the Quakers.
Cited in
- 1652, firm date