  In To the Priests and People of England (1655), the Quaker women Priscilla Cotton and Mary Cole also argue in favor of the spiritual equality of men and women. In this work, written during a period of imprisonment in Exeter gaol, Cotton and Cole explicitly address the Pauline injunctions to “Let your women keep silence in the churches” and “Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection”. They reinterpret these texts to make them consistent with other passages that imply that it is permissible for women to speak or prophesy. Cotton and Cole say