14 Frost, Quaker Family, chap 9; for descriptions of Quaker marriages see Peter Kalm, Peter Kalm’s Travels in North America: The America of 1750 (2 vols., New York, 1937), II, 677; Gottlieb Mittelberger, Journey to Pennsylvania (Cambridge, 1960), 69; Moreau de St. Méry, Moreau de St Méry’s American Journey, 1793-1798 (Garden City, N.Y., 1947), 286-87.

1 Perm actually wrote, “ … sexes made no difference; since in souls there is none.” Some Fruits of Solitude, 33; for the proverb itself see Margaret Hope Bacon, Mothers of Feminism: The Story of Quaker Women in America (San Francisco and New York, 1986), 2; in a large literature on this subject, specially helpful works are Mary Maples Dunn, “Women of Light,” in Carol Berkin and Mary Beth Norton, eds., Women of America: A History (Boston, 1979), 114-36; Jean R. Soderlund, “Women’s Authority in Pennsylvania and New Jersey Quaker Meetings, 1680- 1760,” WMQ3 44 (1987), 722-49; Joan M. Jensen, Loosening the Bonds: Mid-Atlantic Farm Women, 1750-1850 (New Haven, Conn., 1986).

2 In his ministry, George Fox labored repeatedly to reach the most miserable and abandoned female outcasts of English society. In 1649 he found a raving madwoman at Nottingham Jail. “The poor woman would make such a noise in roaring,” he wrote, “ … that it would set all the Friends in a heat … and there were many friends who were overcome by her with the stink that came out of her, roaring and tumbling on the ground.” Fox comforted her and in his care she became calm and well. At Mansfield-Woodhouse, Fox found a “distracted woman under a doctor’s hand, with her hair loose all about her ears.” As the doctor was about to bleed her, “she being bound, and many people being about her holding her by violence.” Fox intervened and set her free, and “bid her be quiet and still, and she was so. The Lord settled her mind, and she mended and afterwards received the Truth, and continued in it to her death.” Fox, Journal 8, 43 (1647, 1649).