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.”
The Anglican clergy of the seventeenth century bore a high character for learning. “The ordinary sort of our English clergy,” wrote Eachard, “do far excel in learning the common priests of the Church of Rome.” Atterbury is still more emphatic. He declares that “for depth of learning, as well as other things, the English clergy is not to be paralleled in the whole Christian world.” Yet Edward Chamberlayne[54] affirms that “they are less respected generally than any in Europe;” and both Bishop Burnet and Bishop Stillingfleet bewail the contempt with which the clergy were regarded as “too notorious not to be observed.”