Equality in Church in the Quaker Community

Résumé du document

Just as spiritual warriors had dismantled the contemporary conception of women's social position and rights, Quaker women set out to take the divine by storm. Indeed the Quaker concept of equality also applied to women in church. It was thus considered that they had the same right as their male counterparts to speak, preach and meet, which is why many of the most famous Quaker prophetesses justified and defended that right. The Church had always made a distinction between the sexes. 'Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience, as also saith the law' reflected the general attitude towards women's activities in most of the churches in seventeenth-century England, thus closing most church offices to women. However, the theory of women's equality in Church developed with conviction within the 'Society of Friends'. Quakers used the following Pauline passage, '[t]here is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female, for ye are all one in Christ Jesus,' to demonstrate that in Christ, there could be no subjection; men and women were equal.

Extraits

[...] 463-4 in Irwin, p Among the opponents of women's meetings were John Story and John Wilkinson. George Fox, 'An Epistle relative to the station of women in the Church' in Hope, p Brailsford, p George Fox, "Concerning our Monthly and Quarterly and Yearly Meetings, etc.", Letters of Early Friends, p quoted in B. Qism, p The Book of Christian Discipline of the Society of Friends, Samuel Harris & Co., London p George Fox quoted in London Yearly Meeting During 250 Years, Society of Friends, London p A. [...]

[...] Cor. 14: Galatians Justice Daniel Fleming had imprisoned Margaret Fell both because she had refused to put an end to the meetings in her house: Swarthmoor Hall and to swear allegiance, in I. Ross, Margaret Fell, Mother of Quakerism, p M. Fell, Women's Speaking Justified, Proved and Allowed by the Scriptures, p Idem, pp. 3-4. Ibid. [...]

[...] "God having made [them] ( ) Mother[s] in Israel",[20] Quaker women, able to receive God's messages, were bestowed unparalleled spiritual and apostolic equality with men. Christ was to be heard in both men and women, thus women were able to intervene in public or to speak spontaneously in church since it was in fact Christ who spoke through them. Despised by Thomas Edwards, a Puritan minister of Presbyterian leanings, the proliferation of women preaching from the Civil War period onwards was likened, in his Gangraena,[21] with the eruption of 'pus from a wound.'[22] In the earliest days of the Society of Friends, Quaker women attended mixed meetings, (figure and spoke for the liberty of conscience. [...]

[...] Lloyd, Quaker Social History, 1639-1738, Longmans, London p Bacon, p George Fox Epistles, Manuscript folio 636, p quoted in Lloyd, p.108. Lloyd, p Annual Catalogue, p quoted in idem, p Hope, p Lloyd, p Second Period of Quakerism, pp. 296-7. [...]

[...] The allegorical relationship between Christ and his church in the Song of Solomon provided Margaret Fell with an irrefutable argument in favour of women's speaking, since: [T]hose that speak against this Woman's speaking, speak against the Church of Christ, and the Seed of the Woman, which Seed is Christ; that is to say, Those that speak against the Power of the Lord, and the Spirit of the Lord speaking in a Woman, simply by reason of her Sex, ( ) not regarding the Seed, and Spirit, and Power that speaks in her; such speak against Christ and his Church, and are of the Seed of the Serpent, wherein lodgeth Enmity.[2] The nursing mother of Quakerism thus explained that those who forbade women to speak in church, carrying out the apostle's words to the letter, were prohibiting the church from speaking.[3] She further maintained that women's speaking was justified since Christ recognised the gifts of such women as Mary Magdalene[4] (first to witness and announce Christ's resurrection[5]), making clear that women had served as prophets. Therefore, she specifically refuted the Pauline subordinationist passage. Later on, the weakly constituted but highly gifted Elizabeth Bathurst, convinced in 1678, would develop Margaret Fell's argument, giving a detailed account of all the prophetesses appearing in the scriptures.[6] Why would clergymen make money in quoting women's words that were to be found in the Scriptures, whilst at the same time members of the Anglican Church were denying women the right to speak in church? [...]