With Joy and Gladness They Are Led Along

The princess is decked in her chamber with gold-woven robes;
    in many-colored robes she is led to the king;
    behind her the virgins, her companions, follow. 
With joy and gladness they are led along
    as they enter the palace of the king.
(Psalm 45:13-15, New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition)

Quakers often speak with pride of the prominent role women have played in shaping the spiritual life of their community from the very start. Of course, Christianity had its share of prophetic and mystic women in previous centuries—but the Church would do its best to marginalize those voices, often by confining the women to convents and subjecting them to intense discipline. (Happily for us, nobody could completely silence the likes of Teresa of Avila or Hildegard von Bingen.) The earliest Friends did not immediately reject the imbalances of patriarchal power, but after extensive debate they came to embrace the principle of spiritual equality. 

In late June 1652, not too long after his prophetic experience at the summit of Pendle Hill, George Fox came to Swarthmoor Hall, the home of Thomas and Margaret Fell. “Our house being a place open to entertain ministers and religious people at, one of [Fox]’s friends brought him thither,” Fell would recall, several decades later, in her introduction to a posthumous edition of Fox’s Journal.

He stayed overnight, and accompanied Fell and her children to the church in nearby Ulverston the next morning.

When he came in and spoke, Fell said, “I stood up in my pew, and wondered at his doctrine; for I had never heard such before…. This opened me so, that it cut me to the heart; and then I saw clearly, we were all wrong.” Fox returned to Swarthmoor Hall after the services had ended, “and he spoke in the family amongst the servants, and they were all generally convinced,” Margaret most keenly of them all.

As a local circuit judge, Thomas Fell had been traveling when all this happened, and the neighbors had plenty of tales to tell him about “witches” who “had taken us out of our religion” when he finally came home. Margaret asked him to meet with George Fox; he agreed, and though Thomas Fell did not become a Quaker himself, and would continue to attend church services in Ulverston, he dropped all objections to his wife’s spiritual pursuits, and allowed Friends to gather for worship at Swarthmoor Hall, meetings that would go on (with minor interruptions) after his death in 1658.

Without Margaret Fell’s support, and her and Fox’s eventual marriage in 1669, the history of early Quakerism would have proceeded much differently—and, one suspects, the movement might not have gained as strong a foothold in England’s religious consciousness. “Together they were a dynamic duo of contemplation and action,” Amos Smith has written in Friends Journal, speaking to the strength of their egalitarian partnership.

Margaret Fell celebrated her second husband as “the instrument in the hand of the Lord in this present age,” but in doing so modestly understated her own contributions to Quaker faith and practice. On that front, we probably remember her best as the author of Women’s Speaking Justified, which demonstrates, with ample scriptural evidence, that “women were the first that preached the tidings of the resurrection of Jesus, and were sent by Christ’s own command, before he ascended to the Father,” and makes the case for accepting the ministry of women in contemporary times. 

Quakers (and others) rightly honor that document as a cornerstone of feminist spirituality.

To fully honor Fell, however, we should look beyond the mere existence of her ministry and delve wholeheartedly into its substance. We should share in her joy that, as she wrote in The Daughter of Zion Awakened, “the universal, divine, glorious, infinite, invisible God is shining in the dark places, in the hearts of men and women.”

And not just Margaret Fell, of course. We should pay heed to the prophetic voices of her contemporaries, like Sarah Blackborow, who begged readers to “cease your quarreling against that which should lead you to the help of the Lord,” or Priscilla Cotton, who called on Friends to “keep to the light, love it, dwell in it… for it leads to God himself, and keeps with him.”

Some Christians read the 45th Psalm as an allegory for the relationship between Christ and the church, using whatever parameters their theology sets to define “the church.” (Friends of a non-Christocentric persuasion may prefer to call the object of our devotion “Spirit.”) From such a perspective, we might see Margaret Fell, Sarah Blackborow, and Priscilla Cotton among those led “with joy and gladness” into a new life, illuminated by an Inward Light. And, perhaps, we all—women, men, non-binary folks, all of us—might choose to join them in the procession.