Margaret Fell takes on the apostle Paul

Women in rhetoric have always had to work extra hard for their credibility and right to speak. Aspasia was called a prostitute, for example, and Margery Kempe was called crazy.

Unfortunately, Margaret Fell, also known as the “mother of Quakerism,” was no different. Although Quakers did have a slightly more egalitarian religion than others, women were still generally discouraged from preaching.

So Margaret claimed her authority a little differently than the women rhetoricians before them — she decided to take on the apostle Paul’s interpretations of scripture (he infamously said that women should “be silent”). Fell took rhetorical strategies and used them to reinterpret the words of Paul, using the scriptures to explain why women should be able to speak and preach in Women’s Speaking Justified, Proved, and Allowed by the Scriptures:

If the Apostle would have had womens speaking stopped, and did not allow of them, why did he entreat his true yokefellow to help those women who laboured with him in the Gospel? Phil 4.3. And why did the Apostles join together in prayer and supplication with the women, and Mary the Mother of Jesus, and with his brethren, Acts 1. 14, if they had not allowed, and had union and fellowship with the Spirit of God, wherever it was revealed in women as well as others?

Margaret Fell used the ultimate authority — scriptures — to argue that Jesus loves women and made them in his image just like men and therefore are worthy of preaching the gospel. She cited biblical women like Mary and Esther who were called by God to preach, so why tell women to be silent? The church, she explained, is Christ’s bride, so women in the church can never undermine her husband’s authority.

Plus, she wrote Women’s Speaking Justified in prison! How cool is that?