ABSTRACT

Margaret Askew Fell Fox was one of the most socially prominent, influential, and energetic of early Friends. She acted as an organizer, administrator, polemicist, theologian, treasurer, and corresponding secretary to encourage Quakers, especially missionaries and prisoners. This chapter explores some implications of the term "mother in Israel" for Fell's work and for feminist literary history. Because Fell believed that the Jews would convert to Christianity, they were still part of God's saving plan for humanity and therefore ultimately in alliance with the Quakers, who were "the people of God" in the present age. She addresses people who are divided socially in the present in terms of the one Biblical history they have already shared and of the equality before Christ they will eventually share. For Fell, being called a "mother in Israel" was part of a discursive context through which she shaped and understood her experience and her evangelical impulses.