an English Quaker writer and itinerant preacher who "addressed pugnacious pamphlets to those who persecuted religious dissenters, worshipped in the Anglican church, or refused to help the poor." She became a Quaker in 1654. Her subsequent preaching took her to Ireland and Scotland, Newfoundland, the Netherlands, Barbados, Alexandria and France. Quaker writing made up a high proportion of the work produced by women such as Biddle and Dorothy White in the mid-17th century. It is thought that about one-third of the Quakers arrested for disrupting church services were women. However, cultivation of a specifically "female" tone or subject-matter would have run up against the Quaker desire to merge the self into God.
