Margaret Fell 1614 – 1702

Margaret Fell was an English philosopher, religious organizer, and the principal early architect of the Religious Society of Friends, the Quakers, alongside her second husband George Fox. Her Womens Speaking Justified, Proved and Allowed of by the Scriptures of 1666 mounted one of the most sustained early-modern Christian arguments for the right and duty of women to preach, on the basis of a close philosophical and exegetical reading of the Old and New Testaments. Her home at Swarthmoor Hall in Lancashire became the organizational and intellectual heart of early Quakerism, and she is sometimes called the mother of Quakerism.

Margaret Fell was born at Marsh Grange in north Lancashire in 1614 into a comfortable gentry family and at seventeen married Thomas Fell, a barrister and from 1641 a judge of the Chancery Court at Lancaster. As mistress of Swarthmoor Hall outside Ulverston she ran a large household and estate, and in the summer of 1652, when George Fox preached in the parish church of Ulverston, both she and many of her servants were convinced of his message and Swarthmoor Hall became the practical headquarters of the young Religious Society of Friends. After Thomas Fell's death in 1658 she travelled in the ministry, organised the Quaker correspondence, and managed the Kendal Fund for imprisoned Friends.

She was herself imprisoned at Lancaster Castle from 1664 to 1668 for refusing the oath of allegiance and again from 1670 to 1671 with her second husband George Fox, whom she had married in 1669. Her writings, published as tracts and as A Brief Collection of Remarkable Passages and Occurrences (1710), include the great defence Women's Speaking Justified, Proved and Allowed of by the Scriptures (1666).

Fell organised the practical infrastructure of early Quakerism — its meeting houses, its women's meetings, its system of mutual support and collective discipline — and supplied in Women's Speaking Justified the foundational early-modern Christian argument for the spiritual equality of women in the ministry. She is rightly called the Mother of Quakerism. She died at Swarthmoor Hall in April 1702.