Mary Forster (Quaker)

Mary Forster (c. 1620–1687) was an English Quaker campaigner. She wrote a preface to the 1671 edition of Guide to the Blind, which had been written by her husband, Thomas Forster (died 1660).[1]

This article is about the English Quaker campaigner. For the English watercolourist, see Mary Forster.

A female approach

Mary Forster also composed an address, "To the Reader", which accompanied a petition to the Parliament of England presented on 20 May 1659, expressing the opposition of over 7000 women to "the oppression of Tithes" levied by the established church.[2]

To justify a then unusual political intervention by women in the form of a parliamentary petition, Forster states that it was God's way to employ "weak means to bring to pass his mighty work." She gives testimony in Piety Promoted (1686) on behalf of Anne Whitehead, who is considered to have been the first woman preacher among the Quakers in 1655. As one of five signatories to A Living Testimony from... Our Faithful Women's Meeting (1685) she argues that "we are not to put our Candles under a Bushel, nor to hide our Talents in a Napkin," having gained wisdom of God about "what will do in Families" as "Mothers of Children, and Antient Women in Our Families".[1]

However, Mary Forster still sees the Protofeminist protests of women as a secondary reinforcement to the work of men. She justifies their parliamentary protest against tithes as auxiliary, while noting that it is compatible with the actions of the Quaker "Brethren".[3]

Persecution

Her main issue in Some Seasonable Considerations (1684) is the continuing persecution of the Quakers.[4][5]

Private life

Very little else is known of her private life. Mary Forster died in 1687.[1]

References
  1. Virginia Blain, Patricia Clements and Isobel Grundy, eds, The Feminist Companion to Literature in English. Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present (London: Batsford, 1990), p. 388.
  2. Stephen A. Kent, "'Hand-Maids and Daughters of the Lord': Quaker Women, Quaker Families, and Somerset's Anti-Tithe Petition in 1659", Quaker History, Vol. 97, No. 1 (Spring 2008), pp. 32–61.
  3. Catie Gill: Women in the Seventeenth-Century Quaker Community: A Literary Study of Political Identities, 1650–1700 (Routledge, 2017).
  4. Mary Forster of the Society of Friends, Some seasonable considerations to the young men & women who in this day of tryal are willing to offer up themselves, estates or liberty and suffer reproaches... to bear a testimony for the life, light and truth of Jesus Christ (London, 1684).
  5. Christopher Densmore and Barbara Addison, Quaker History, Vol. 101, No. 1 (Spring 2012), pp. 39–46.
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