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Quaker Women in Overseas Ministry Margaret Hope Bacon* One ofthe truly revolutionary aspects ofthe early Religious Society of Friends was the freedom granted Quaker women to preach, prophesy , and travel in the ministry. While a few other radical Puritan sects allowed some women to preach, Quakerism introduced a concept of gender equality into both the ministry and the conduct of church business unparalleled by other groups. George Fox's belief that Christ had come to teach His people, and to restore men and women to the situation of equality as helpsmeet they had enjoyed before the fall, was shared by many of his followers, and ultimately institutionalized in the unique separate women's business meeting and in the traveling women's ministry. Both the women's meetings and the women's ministry in turn reinforced the concept of equality. In the separate meetings women developed their talents for speaking, for raising money, for keeping minutes, for writing epistles, for influencing their bethren. In their travels the Quaker women ministers came to rely on their own capacities, supported by the guidance of God, and to demonstrate to both men and women what devotion and heroism women were capable of. Returning from these travels to take part in the separate women's business meetings, the ministers further reinforced the women's growing sense of their own powers, at the same time that they elevated the status of women in the wider Quaker community. Without the traveling women ministers it is conceivable that the women's business meetings would not have flourished. The two were symbiotic. Together, they developed the testimony for gender equality which has been a mark of Quakerism, and a contribution of Quakers to the larger society. Quaker women were among the Valiant Sixty who carried the Quaker message up and down England in its early years, and Quaker women were the first to bring the Quaker message to London and to the American colonies; Mary Fisher and Ann Austin to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and Elizabeth Harris to Virginia and Maryland. Mary Fisher later made a trip to preach to the sultan of Turkey, while Mary Dyer, one of the pioneer women ministers, was hanged on Boston Common for defying a law banning Quakers. In addition to these heroes, however, there were a large number of traveling Quaker women ministers in the seventeenth and eigh- * Margaret Hope Bacon is the author of several books on Quaker women. 93 94Quaker History teenth centuries whose stories are not well known. Probably most of them kept journals, as was the Quaker custom, but some of these journals have been lost to us, and others have never been published. No studies have been made of early traveling Quaker women ministers as a group. Historians have tended to write about the individual British Quaker women who traveled in the ministry to America, rather than those who made the reverse trip. In the Quaker Collection at Haverford College is a list of American Public Friends who made the trip back to England between 1685 and 1835. Entitled Ministering Friends ofAmerica who have visited foreign parts in Truth 's Service, this clear and useful list cites the meeting of origin, the date of the trip, the age of the traveler, and mentions relevant experiences, including those of the ministers who were making the trip for the 2nd, 3rd, or 4th time. While the list may not be entirely inclusive, it is probably one of the best sources we have for American ministers traveling in the British Isles. All told, and not counting repeat trips, there were 141 ministers, according to this list. Of these, forty-seven or 34% were women. This is a considerably higher percentage of women ministers than has generally been thought.1 These forty-seven traveling women ministers can not be seen as typical. Obviously the ministers who traveled overseas had more daring, resources, experience, meeting support, and possibly a greater sense of leading than those who traveled only in this country, or only in the territory covered by their home yearly meetings. Nevertheless , a study of them can make a beginning toward a more systematic study of the traveling women's ministry...
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