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This article explores the "sufferings" of itinerant Quaker women in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Quakers who were Public Friends-who traveled and preached as a testimony of faith-were a formative and highly visible part of the early colonial British American landscape. Itinerant Quaker women faced the perils and discomforts of frequent trans-Atlantic travel, and they were ostracized as well as physically abused on their journeys. But believing that the most genuine followers of Christ suffered in his name, Quakers felt that writing about and experiencing bodily torments and spiritual tribulations identified them as true religious adherents. Many itinerant women wrote about their journeys in printed testimonials, and these writings were celebrated by Quakers and circulated widely throughout Britain and its early colonies. For women Friends, the practices of writing and of suffering also became a testimony of their gender; traveling Quaker women refigured seventeenth- and eighteenth-century constructions of the female body, femininity, and female sociability. Relying on female companions who accompanied them on their journeys, itinerant Quakers sought solidarity with and solace from other women during their travels, and they expected female companions to sustain and succor them during difficult missions. This spiritual society both heightened and reinforced the spiritual, bodily, and emotional experiences of early Quaker women.
In 1753 Mary Peisley Neale and her companion, Catherine Payton, rode through the backwoods of North Carolina, traveling for weeks "without being under the roof of a house." Isolated from friends and family, Peisley Neale wrote proudly that the non-Quakers she and Payton encountered "would look strangely at us, because they understand not the lawfulness of women's preaching having never heard any, - thus did we pass for a sign and wonder."1 Five years later a young Quaker named Hannah Callender experienced her own sense of wonder as she saw and listened to one of these female itinerant ministers at her Philadelphia Meeting in 1758. Grasping for words to describe this fellow Quaker woman, who shared her own faith and yet journeyed long distances and faced considerable dangers in a dramatic demonstration of religious commitment, Callender was at a loss. "There must," she finally resolved, "be something which the World knows not."2
This article explores the writings, travels, and relationships of Quaker women...