  Most female religious writers simply ignored political or feminist topics. Even Margaret Fell Fox, one of the most forceful supporters of women’s being able to speak in Quaker meetings, argued in Women’s Speaking Justified … that they should never speak in a way that would usurp authority over men. For the large majority of women writing religious tracts during the seventeenth century, the question of women’s rights simply never arose. (Smith 1982, 70)