Margaret Fell

Fell is another example, along with people like John Woolman, of the Quaker tendency to produce leaders who are “ahead of their time.” It was encouraging to see in Margaret Fell’s “Women’s Speaking Justified, Proved, and Allowed by the Scriptures” that skillful and powerful arguments against the patriarchal treatment of women in church have been around for quite a long time. She shows no reluctance to using all of the resources of rhetoric to prove her thesis.

For one thing, Fell uses many examples from the Bible, which in that time would have been seen as a good source of evidence for this kind of argument. She speaks of women like Priscilla and Hulda who were clearly respected enough to instruct men while quoting speeches given from revered women in the Bible, such as Esther and Hannah. Other examples include passages that talk about women speaking in congregational settings; Joel 2, for instance, says women will prophesy. Moreover, Fell refers to Jesus’ treatment of women, primarily in Luke, to show that if He honored them and seen their value, who could do anything different?

Besides logical examples, Fell also effectively uses emotion. Rather than drily listing examples, she explains and emphasizes how weighty they are. For example, she incites indignation by saying things like “blind Priests say to the contrary, and will not permit holy Women to speak” even though biblical prophets said they should (757). Some of her long sentences also work to build up emotion; when she is talking about the resurrection on 754, the sentence ending with “how should his Disciples have known, who were not there?” serves to show that without women speaking of Christ, the men might not even have known that He had risen from the dead. . .