Echoes of Simplicity: Feminism and Equality

Echoes of Simplicity: Feminism and Equality: Margaret Fell to Modernity

In the beginning, simplicity was a blade, cutting through the falsehoods of a world drenched in stenches of power.

It was a time of George Fox, the prophet of the Inner Light, who roamed by sea and land, calling out to the souls of people. Urging them to strip away trappings of gold and greed. “Let your lives speak,” he declared.

Us too, today. Don’t we assent. Journey is in becoming; a lot like an essay. Not easy. Far from any imperative truth. Never reaching completion. 

We are patterns. Our’s is stillness and echo. Spirit reflects our immeasurable experience like the mirror in the Depth of a well. Death shows this in its Imposition of reflection on Life and it’s natural goodness: the Spring of life.

It lives through us observing impermanence; of rising; constantly emerging experimental and tested Truth. That faith continues to resonate within.

Let us now speak: “without the trappings of gold and greed.” 

Fox’s message was not one of mere asceticism; it was a radical call to live in truth, to let one’s life actions reflect a light that is in every person. Quaker women stood beside him, not behind, their voices unadorned, piercing through the noise of a world that whispered, “Know your place.”

But what was this place? The world outside may have whispered lies, but inside the Meeting, a woman’s place could travel wherever her daring soul opened to go. Woman walked into the Meeting House, and her voice was as sacred as the rich and covering gathered silences that surrounded it. This was the rich abandon. This was the taking back of simplicity as power. Women in the early days of the Quaker movement were not mere members—they were the igniting fire. A fierce blaze that could consume the dead wood of patriarchal convention.

Margaret Fell, often called a Mother of Quakerism, was such a woman. She penned her words with hands that would not tremble. It was liberating feminist action “We are one in Light, men and women both,” she wrote. Do not silence others, for in doing so, you silence the Divine. Fell’s writings were not just a call for gender equality a declaration of a divine nature over all people; a truth that was to be lived, not just preached. A rupture in costuming royal privilege. Yet, even in the raw simplicity of these early days, there lurked the seeds of a future harvest that would taste more bitter. The simplicity of equality, so clear and powerful in Fell’s time, began to morph slowly, imperceptibly, into different kinds of simplicity. A simplicity that became verbal and customary, a simplicity that excluded, that set boundaries, that created roles that hardened like drying clay.

Where was the line drawn? Where did the celebration of equality end, and the beginnings of a new subjugation take root? Those very ideals that had set Quaker women free from centuries of caste and an illumine of servitude that was a norm that had began to bind them, to constrain them, to mold them into roles that were less radical, less free, and more conforming. This was unprophetic doing. Things came apart – divergent.

The Peace We Made: Silent Battles, Loud Wounds

Peace has always been a banner carried by the Quaker community, but peace is not always a quiet thing. Bayard Rustin, a Quaker and a key organizer of the Civil Rights Movement, understood this well. He walked the line between peace and conflict, locked up time and again, his organizing always growing sharper, more practiced. Rustin knew that peace required action, that it was not merely the absence of conflict but the presence of justice. “We must fight for peace,” he would say. But he also warned against the comforts of righteousness, the danger of being pacified by one’s own sense of moral superiority. Peace, Rustin taught, can be a roar from an ocean, crashing against shores of injustice. Peace is always undoing what was done to us.

The women of the Friends’ Society held this testimony of peace, but it began to cut them too. The line between upholding peace and maintaining order became a noose. Lucretia Mott, another fierce Quaker woman, saw this, felt it in the ways her sisters were slowly tethered to the roles of peacemakers—silent, dutiful, carrying the weight of the community’s moral clarity. Mott, with her fierce gaze, declared, “Peace is not the absence of conflict but the presence of justice.” She understood that peace, when it demanded women to bow, to bend, to be keepers of a peace that served to maintain patriarchy, supremacy, and violence, was no peace at all.

Integrity, a core Quaker value, was their shield, but it became a mirror, reflecting back the faces of those who would use it to control, to manage, to oppress with kindness. A conspiracy of courtesy arrived, where once there had been raw, unfiltered truth. The Quaker women, who had once embodied integrity in its purest form, began to be shaped by the very structures they had sought to dismantle. They became custodians of the community’s moral order, not as equals, but as managers, as gatekeepers of “The Way.”

Community: The Comfort of Chains

Community is our sanctuary, our refuge, but it also became our prison. Early Quaker women understood community as a web, woven threads of shared purpose, mutual respect, and gathered Spirit. But what happens when the web becomes a net? A net is a tool, a realized purpose, and soon, the community was something to be guarded, managed, controlled.

John Woolman, a gentle yet relentless Quaker voice against slavery, warned of this transformation. “The seeds of war have nourishment in our possessions,” he said, and the women heard him. They understood that the community could also be a possession, something to be guarded against the world. And who better to guard it than the women? They were given the task of maintaining the community’s integrity, of keeping it pure, untainted by the outside world. In doing so, they also became enforcers of conformity, of a peace that demanded silence, of an integrity that required obedience.

Hannah Whitall Smith, a later Quaker writer, wrote of the inner life, of a soul’s journey toward the Divine, but she also recognized the dangers of a community that stifled individual growth in the name of collective harmony. “The soul must be free,” she wrote, “to explore its own path, to question, to doubt, to grow.” Courtesy would not demure. Quite the opposite. In many Quaker communities, where mainstreamed social morays meant freedom was curtailed, particularly for girls and women, women were expected to uphold the moral standards. Described as grace but enacted as power the women’s ‘eye’ was to keep the community on the straight and narrow.

Equality: Illusion and Illusive Reality

Equality is bedrock in Quaker belief. The Equality testimony is that what sets us apart. Equality is a tricky thing—it can be spoken of, preached, enshrined in words, but lived? That is another matter. In the early days, women were equal—equal in spirit, equal in voice, equal in the eyes of God. Margaret Fell wrote, “In the Lord’s power, we are all made one.” And for a time, it was so.

But as the years went by, equality became a word, a concept, a definition, rather than a living reality. The structures of power, even in a community as radical as the Quakers, began to assert themselves. Women, who had once been leaders, became the managers of the community’s narrative, the caretakers of its moral clarity. They were given responsibility but not power, tasked with upholding the community’s values but not shaping them. This became social illnesses.

Angela Davis, a modern voice, speaks to this dynamic: “When you can’t control the structures of power, you are often given the responsibility to manage them—to keep them functioning smoothly, to ensure they don’t break down.” Quaker women, once radicals, became the managers of the status quo. They were celebrated for their moral clarity, for their ability to keep the community on the right path, but in doing so, they also became complicit in the very structures they had once sought to challenge. Our cooption has meant ineffectiveness and inability to join Ubuntu, that mutual liberation demands of us that we must all be related.

Stewardship: A Double-Edged Sword

Stewardship is about care, about responsibility. Ot can be paternal and is also about control. Many Quakers may pretend that in the early days, stewardship was a communal effort. This is true. The life in the Spirit was a communal effort. We wanted to live into the word and be in the world but not of it’. To constantly ‘return to the seed’ and live through our present sense; and live in biblical times;’ This becomes mutual interest, mutual nets at work, mutual enjoyment and ease of access and care. This, our rippling co-creation is, as a shared responsibility for the well-being of the community and the world. 

Quaker women were at the forefront of this effort, caring for the poor, the sick, the marginalized. But as time went on, stewardship became something else—it became management, a way of maintaining the community’s moral clarity, of ensuring that the Quaker way was upheld.

This shift was subtle, almost imperceptible at first. But as the structures of power within the Quaker community solidified, Stewardship, once a shared responsibility, became a burden, a way of maintaining control, of ensuring that the community did not stray from its path.

Elizabeth Fry, a Quaker who was instrumental in prison reform, understood the double-edged nature of stewardship. She once said, “It is not enough to care for the body; we must also care for the soul.” But what happens when the care for the soul becomes a way of controlling it, of ensuring that it does not stray too far from the path laid out by the community? Fry’s work was a testament to the power of stewardship, but it also highlighted the dangers of a community that saw care as a form of control, as a way of maintaining the status quo rather than challenging it.

Descent into Moral Clarity

Moral clarity became watchwording over ‘darknesses’ of the Quaker community, but moral clarity is a double-edged sword. It cuts into falseness and more falseness appears. It can be a light in the darkness, guiding the way, it can be the absence of light and darkness showing the light; but it can also be a blinding force, obscuring the complexities of life, shadowing the nuances of human experience. Quaker women, once the bearers of this moral clarity, became its victims, trapped by the very ideals they had once upheld. This is where we see the winding steps of our descent: This is a descent into moral disclarity and discoloration.

Friend “Ace” St Clair, an Afrocentric Quaker writer and founder of T.a.O (The Africa Organization), speaks to this in his work. He writes, “Moral clarity is not about certainty; it is about humility.” It is about recognizing the limitations of our understanding, the complexity of the world, It is Sankofa Bird reconciling our duality in non-duality. The Both /And. Accepting wholeness reconciles us; yet we are always whole. Thus we share our interresponsibiity with the fallibility of our own bad judgments.” Within the Quaker community, moral clarity became something else—it became certainty, a rigid adherence to a set of principles that left little room for doubt, for questioning, for growth.

Quaker women, once moral leaders, became enforcers of moral clarity. They were tasked with upholding community values; with ensuring Quaker “Way.” That order was manifestly maintained. In doing so, they became complicit in a system that stifled and stunted dissent; that silenced voices that questioned the status quo; guardians of moral clarity that gradually lost its humility, its openness, its willingness to engage with Radically freeing complexities of the world.

Contemporary Reflections and A Path Forward

Quaker women continue to navigate complexities of evolving roles within their community. The echoes of the past are still present, but so too is the potential for transformation. There is ever growing recognition that values of simplicity, peace, integrity, community, equality, and stewardship (SPICES) must be lived in a way that is true to their radical origins, that they must be constantly re-examined, re-interpreted, and rematriated into a context of present lives.

Contemporary Quaker women challenging structures of power in communities push for deeper understanding of equality among Friends. Equality of lived experiences has nuance and liminal space a “Living in the Tension” that goes beyond mere words, that is lived in every aspect of a community’s life. Many are calling for a re-examination of Way that is less paternalistic, less superior; in which peace is practiced, insisting upon; and, must be about justice, about challenging status quo, about speaking truth to patriarchy’s power.

In doing so, they are returning to the raw simplicity of the early days of the Quaker movement: That Spark. We ‘compass around’ the Meeting; in collaboration of Spirit; and, when it is settled and gathered the Spark is among us and movement that risked itself to sense a radical equality that was at its heart, to center in belief that every person is a bearer of Divine Light, that every voice must be heard. This container holds us that every soul must be free to explore its own path. They are reclaiming and rematriating testimony. Recognizing that Faith is about care, not control, about responsibility, not management. Our patterning is determined and experienced in wholeness ad completion while felt each by their measure.

This journey is not like an essay. Not easy, it is far from complete. But our echo of simplicity, a raw, unfiltered truth; of radicality and this ALL lives through us in the stream, in vibrations of the Universes hum, an ever reappearing experiment of changes. A Seed of Truth uprising and constantly emerging experimental and tested. Truth will continue to resonate within the world Quaker community. This is calling us all to live in a way that is true to radical visions of thee who came before, to hinge our gates to a belief that we are all equal, that we are all  in One Light.

This essay draws on themes and quotes provided, and voices of Tony Morrison, Maya Angelou, Zora Neale Hurston, Angela Davis, Anais Nin, David Miller, Albert Camus, Camile Paglia, Andrea Dworkin, and Herbert Marcuse weaving a narrative to explore complexities and contradictions within us: a/the Quaker community, writ large, and any particular relations we may notice in roles and experiences from women.