ABSTRACT
The story of Mary Morris Knowles is a powerful lens which is to view change and continuity not only in her lifetime but also in subsequent memories and scholarship about her. Knowles and her connections also demonstrate the need to preserve, catalog, and publish primary source materials relating to women, especially to understudied middling women, and the even less studied Caribbean-born women living in England, like Jane Harry Thresher. Knowles furthered women's participation in politics by expressing strong opinions in letters, poems, and conversations with males and females. She used her relationships with the royal family to support Quaker pacifism and request a political favor. As her life story demonstrates, her Quaker beliefs both fostered radical self-representation and engendered self-doubt. It would be worthwhile to discover whether that same dynamic affected other Quaker women and men.
