That the women endured an abundant share of the persecutions and martyrdoms which befell the Society is proved by the records. They were scourged and ill treated in every possible way. Not only did they endure great suffering, but took active steps in trying to rescue their fellow-members from evil plight. When George Fox was apprehended, in 1660, at the house of one Margaret Fell, a widow of Judge Fell, at Swarthmore (Lancashire), his entertainer, accompanied by another Friend, Anne Curtis, procured an interview with the king. Anne Curtis gained the royal ear through being the daughter of a Bristol sheriff who had been hanged for his devotion to the Stuarts.[53] Not much came of the interview, however, for, although the king was ready enough to listen, and gave an order for Fox to be brought up, it was evaded, and a delay of two months ensued.
Barbara Blangdon, who suffered persecution and imprisonment for her preaching in the west of England in 1654, made an effort, as soon as her own release was effected, to procure that of two other members at Basingstoke, and was successful, through her intercession with the mayor.
In 1656 two Quakeresses were placed in the stocks at Evesham by the mayor, with every circumstance of indignity, for visiting some prisoners. Two years before, the Oxford scholars so violently maltreated two Quakeresses who preached in the streets that one of them succumbed shortly after. With the end of the seventeenth century persecutions for the most part ceased, and a period of quiescence set in. There was a good deal of discussion going on in the eighteenth century anent Quakerism, and many satires and skits were issued against the sect, but it was a war of words only.
The Quakers always maintained the equality of women with men in religious matters. It was one of the cardinal articles of their belief.
“As we dare not encourage any ministry but that which we believe to spring from the influence of the Holy Spirit, so neither dare we to attempt to restrain this ministry to persons of any condition in life, or to the male sex alone; but as male and female are one in Christ, we hold it proper that such of the female sex as we believe to be endued with a right qualification for the ministry should exercise their gifts for the general edification of the Church.”
The first woman among the Quakers to preach in London was Ann Downer, afterwards married to George Whitehead. Private residences were frequently used as places of worship, and women are often mentioned as lending their houses for this purpose.
Women, being able to exercise the function of preaching, were naturally prominent in other departments of work.
“As we believe women may be rightly called to the work of the ministry,” say the Friends, “we also think that to them belongs a share in the support of our Christian discipline: and that some parts of it, wherein their own sex is concerned, devolve on them with peculiar propriety. Accordingly they have monthly, quarterly, and yearly meetings of their own sex, held at the same time with those of the men; but separately, and without the power of making rules; and it may be remarked that during the persecutions which formerly occasioned the imprisonment of so many of the men, the care of the poor fell on to the women, and was by them satisfactorily administered.”
They have always continued to maintain the right of women to become preachers, a right which seemed an exceedingly strange one, in the last century, to members of other religious bodies. The Quakers were quite aware of the weak points in their adversaries’ armour, and quick to perceive the ground of the objection against their own broader view of the position of women.
“There is yet another strong prejudice against women’s preaching,” says one of the Quaker Dissertations, “and this no less than the united interest of the whole body of men called clergymen. For if, say they, the pastoral function may be exercised by laymen and even women, then we shall be deemed no longer necessary, nay, perhaps, down goes our trade, our pomp, and revenues. And, indeed, it is hardly credible to me that these men would have ever made the opposition that some of them have done to a woman’s preaching Jesus in a sensible manner, if preaching were a profession which there was nothing to be got by.”