00:04:51.100Well, first of all, you're a little bitchy. That's next-level bitchy.
00:04:56.120Let's picture that Boston pier for a moment. The creek of the rigging, the smell of tar and salt and livestock, the whole busy colonial ballet of barrels and bodies and shouted instructions.
00:05:06.960And then into that very male, very regulated space walk two women in plain gray gowns and broad-brimmed hats, looking like they've shown up to underwhelm everybody.
00:05:16.860No jewels, no silk, no dramatic accessories,
00:05:19.740just that Quaker uniform that basically says,
00:05:22.380I don't have time for your earthly nonsense.
00:29:02.340She is recorded as suspicious in the court records because she leaves the court with Hutchinson.
00:29:07.620For years, that moment is how Mary Dyer appears in the archive, as someone's follower,
00:29:12.900a secondary figure, a supporting character in someone else's story.
00:29:16.840However, when she encounters Quakers, she assumes her own role.
00:29:20.520Like the English women we've been discussing, Dyer becomes convinced that the inner light is real,
00:29:25.720that God speaks directly to individuals, and that obedience to the light sometimes means disobeying human authorities.
00:29:32.460She leaves the safety of the much more tolerant Rhode Island to travel and bear witness as a
00:29:37.020friend. Eventually, that witness brings her back to the very place that exiled her,
00:29:41.580this time with a different label, not suspect Puritan, but Quaker criminal.
00:29:46.960Massachusetts by this point has escalated from anxiety to a full-blown panic that puts the New
00:29:51.800England witch trials to shame. The laws against Quakers grow harsher with each new wave of
00:29:56.620rivals. Fines don't work. Whippings don't work. Ear croppings don't work. So the general court
00:30:02.500takes what, to them, is the logical next step. They pass a law that any Quaker banished from
00:30:07.700the colony who returns will be put to death. They say it's about protecting the flock from wolves.
00:30:13.400Mary Dyer decides to test exactly how serious they are. She is banished. She leaves. Then she
00:30:19.580comes back. She's arrested again, sentenced to death, and brought to the gallows with two male
00:30:24.020friends, William Robinson and Marmaduke Stevenson. At the last moment, the governor announces that
00:30:30.080her life has been spared, thanks to the intercession of influential friends and family,
00:30:35.000and that she will be sent away again. They fully expect her to take the hint. She does not.
00:30:41.280The day after Dyer was pulled from the gallows, she wrote a letter to the general court refusing
00:30:45.780to accept the provision of the reprieve. In this letter, she wrote, and pardon me while I get
00:30:51.500through this, the language is a bit dated. My life is not accepted, neither availeth me,
00:30:57.400in comparison with the lives and liberty of the truth and servants of the living God,
00:31:01.820for which in the bowels of love and meekness I sought you. Yet nevertheless, with wicked hands
00:31:07.240have you put two of them to death, which makes me feel that the mercies of the wicked is cruelty.
00:31:12.700I rather choose to die than to live, as from you, as guilty of their innocent blood.
00:31:19.740If this law stands, if it is right to kill people for obeying their conscience before God,
00:31:25.140then it is not enough for her to survive. She must return and testify against it.
00:31:29.960And so she does. She walks back into the city, knowing exactly what the gallows looks like in
00:31:34.960the morning light, knowing exactly what the drums will sound like when they try to drown out her
00:31:39.460words, knowing exactly how the rope will feel against her neck. It's not that she wants to die.
00:31:45.060It is that she has come to believe that faithfulness might cost her life, and she has already decided
00:31:50.000what she values more. Again, the colony's leaders insist that this is about maintaining order and
00:31:56.100punishing sedition. They write in the stern, impersonal voice of law. But if you listen
00:32:01.180underneath, you can hear that same nervousness about a woman who will not accept her place.
00:32:06.680Because here's the nightmare scenario for patriarchal theocracy, a woman who is calm,
00:32:11.600articulate, scripturally literate, absolutely unafraid of their punishments, and visibly more
00:32:17.240committed to her understanding of God than they are to theirs. Executed Quakers like to say that
00:32:23.520they seal their testimony with their blood. It's a grisly metaphor, but also a revealing one. The
00:32:29.160state hopes to seal off a contagion by cutting off the carrier. The Quakers interpret the same act
00:32:34.580as sealing a covenant, making the message permanent. When Mary Dyer dies, she does not
00:32:39.700end a movement. She amplifies it. Her story is written, copied, and preached. It circulates
00:32:45.980among friends and beyond, making Boston look less like a shining example of godliness and more like
00:32:52.040a place where authorities are so afraid of dissent that they hang middle-aged mothers for refusing
00:32:56.620to follow the rules that they've made up. Over time, even people who aren't Quakers begin to
00:33:02.000use her as a cautionary tale, not against her, but against the colony. She becomes, in various
00:33:07.820retellings a symbol of conscience, a gentle martyr, a piece of moral leverage in debates
00:33:12.840about tolerance. Later authors will sand down her rough edges and make her safer, but in the moment
00:33:18.600what makes her powerful is her stubbornness. I came to keep blood guiltiness from you, desiring
00:33:24.060to repeal the unrighteous and unjust law of banishment upon pain of death, made against the
00:33:29.560innocent servants of the Lord. Therefore my blood will be required at your hands who willfully do
00:33:35.020it. If you read that slowly, you can hear the subtext. You may hang me, but I am not the one
00:33:40.540who will have to answer for this before God. Authorities can't argue with that. They can
00:33:45.240only pull a lever. Meanwhile, back in the wider Quaker world, something else is happening that
00:33:50.400will matter in the long run. Women are not just speaking as individuals anymore. They're building
00:33:55.680their own structures. As the movement stabilizes, especially in places like Pennsylvania, founded
00:34:01.020under Quaker leadership. Friends begin to formalize their communal life. They hold regular meetings
00:34:06.340for worship and meetings for business, where they address discipline, charity, marriages,
00:34:10.960and disputes. Crucially, they also establish separate but parallel meetings for women.
00:34:16.460On paper, this might look like segregation. Women over here, men over here. In practice,
00:34:22.360these women's meetings become places where women exercise real authority over matters that concern
00:34:27.140them. They review proposed marriages, deciding whether a couple is spiritually and materially
00:34:32.400ready. They oversee charitable aid. They handle discipline among female members. They write
00:34:37.940epistles, letters of counsel and encouragement to other women's meetings across the Atlantic.
00:34:43.040If you're noticing that these are exactly the skills you need to become, say, a 19th century
00:34:47.860feminist reformer, you're not wrong. During these meetings, women are learning to argue,
00:34:53.220interpret rules, organize relief, navigate conflict, and lead. They are doing so within
00:34:58.680a religious framework, under the banner of the inner light and Quaker order, but the habits are
00:35:03.500going to carry over. A girl who grows up watching her mother go to women's meetings, come home with
00:35:08.740stories of what they decided, and see something different from the standard patriarchal script.
00:35:13.920She sees her mother not just as a private caregiver, but as a public actor in the community.
00:35:18.640When that girl later hears a call to speak about slavery, war, or women's legal rights, there is a precedent already burned into her imagination.
00:35:28.100Women can meet, women can deliberate, and women can speak and create change.
00:35:33.320That's how you get someone like Lucretia Mott in the 19th century, raised in a Quaker environment, accustomed to female speakers, and highly comfortable speaking in mixed meetings.
00:35:43.520looking around at the legal system and asking, essentially,
00:35:46.400if we believe in equality before God, why are women treated as property under the law?
00:35:52.060Her feminism doesn't drop out of the sky, it grows out of these earlier practices.
00:35:57.060And all of that quietly connects back to Margaret Fell,
00:36:00.480sitting with her Bible, insisting that there is no divine law against women speaking.
00:36:05.840Of course, we have to be honest, this isn't a utopia.
00:36:09.060Quaker women do not achieve full equality in every sense.
00:36:11.960There are still tensions, pushback, moments when male friends worry that women are going too far
00:36:17.280or becoming too visible. The same movement that nurtures radical women also disciplines plenty
00:36:22.680of them for stepping outside of the accepted norms. But compared with almost every other
00:36:27.640Christian group in the 17th century, Quakers offer women a staggeringly broad space for
00:36:32.980spiritual agency, a space to preach, to travel, to write, to organize, to lead, a space to say
00:36:39.240without flinching, God told me to speak and expect at least some portion of the community to back
00:36:44.700them up. That is what makes them so frightening to everyone else. Because once people see it is
00:36:50.140possible, once they have watched a woman stand in a meeting feeling the same trembling, the same
00:36:54.940inner nudge, and open her mouth to speak truth to the room, there is no going back to pretending
00:37:00.020women are naturally unfit for that kind of work. You can suppress it, punish it, bury it, that you
00:37:06.220cannot honestly claim it never happened. The record is there. The tracks are there. The letters
00:37:11.500are there. The stories of women like Mary, Elizabeth, Dorothy, and Margaret, and countless
00:37:16.640unnamed friends are there, whispering from the archives. And the pattern they trace is painfully
00:37:22.460familiar. A woman says, I have something to say that matters. The men in charge say, that's not
00:37:28.600your place. She says, my authority doesn't come from you. They say, then we'll make you suffer
00:37:34.360until you stop. Sometimes it's whips and gallows. Sometimes it's church discipline and social
00:37:39.760ostracism. Sometimes it's online harassment, smear campaigns, and loss of livelihood.
00:37:45.360The tools change. The impulse doesn't. We still live in a world where many denominations treat
00:37:50.320women in pulpits as a current controversy. I personally was raised in the Southern Baptist
00:37:55.260Church, where women have long been banned from serving as pastors. In many churches,
00:37:59.880women who try to address abuse within religious institutions are labeled as divisive,
00:38:04.360rebellious and unsubmissive. The idea that someone other than a straight cis man could
00:38:09.800be the authoritative voice of God in a community triggers an almost reflexive panic. It's
00:38:15.120the same nervous question echoing down the centuries. If we let her speak, what else
00:38:19.800might people start questioning? Quaker women answered that question long ago by refusing
00:38:24.820to wait for permission. They spoke, and then they built. They spoke, and then they took
00:38:29.480minutes at meetings. They spoke, and then they crossed oceans, walked into hostile towns, and
00:38:34.860wrote from prison. They spoke, and then they raised daughters who watched them do it. They did not ask
00:38:40.180for a new role. They lived as though the role had always been theirs. Mary Dyer climbs the gallows
00:38:46.240ladder in Boston. Margaret Fell dips her pen and ink in England. An unnamed woman somewhere in
00:38:51.640between stands up in a quiet meeting and feels her heart pound as she says the first words that
00:38:56.200have been burning inside her for months. None of them know what the 21st century will look like,
00:39:01.220or what fights we'll still be having. They just know that in that moment, being obedient to God
00:39:06.660looks less like submission to men and more like stubborn, public courage. And that is what
00:39:11.780terrified men in charge. They called it heresy, sedition, madness. History has another word for it.
00:39:18.340Resistance. I'm Professor Meredith, and this has been Bitchy History. If this episode made you
00:39:23.480think about who gets to speak in your own communities and who gets punished for it,
00:39:27.760share it with someone. Subscribe on Substack, leave a review, and maybe take a moment to
00:39:31.880remember that somewhere, right now, another woman is standing up to say,
00:39:36.140actually, I can speak just as well as you can. The least we can do is listen.