In the past cou­ple of of months I’ve noticed var­i­ous Friends using this image of Mar­garet Fox as a stand-in for Mar­garet Fell, the so-called “moth­er” of Quak­erism who lat­er mar­ried George Fox. Unfor­tu­nate­ly it’s a few cen­turies late. This pic­ture is Mar­garet Fox of Hydesville, N.Y. It’s from an 1885 book called The Miss­ing Link in Mod­ern Spir­i­tu­al­ism, in which she and her fam­i­ly describe their haunt­ed house. Their three daugh­ters, Mar­garet­ta, Kate, and Leah, became known as the Fox Sis­ters, and became the most famous trio in nineteenth-century Spir­i­tu­al­ism. In lat­er years Mar­garet­ta admit­ted the haunt­ings were hoax­es, alas.

There is a Quak­er con­nec­tion, as the sis­ters helped con­vince lead­ing rad­i­cal Hick­sites Amy and Isaac Post to adopt Spir­i­tu­al­ism and start com­muning with the dead. Issac lat­er wrote “spir­it writ­ings” under the bylines of peo­ple like George Fox and Ben­jamin Franklin.¹ It would be super easy to make fun of the Posts but they also opened their home as an Under­ground Rail­road stop and were per­son­al friends of William Lloyd Gar­ri­son, Susan B. Antho­ny, Sojourn­er Truth, and Fred­er­ick Dou­glass (who they helped escape to Cana­da after he was impli­cat­ed in the John Brown raid at Harper’s Fer­ry). They were lead­ing fig­ures in what became known as the Pro­gres­sive Friends move­ment, whose ener­gy is still pal­pa­ble in Lib­er­al Quak­er circles.

The inter­net being what it is, there are plen­ty of web­sites that have tak­en this out of con­text and pre­sent­ed it as Mar­garet Fell Fox. Unfor­tu­nate­ly there are no con­tem­po­rary images of Mar­garet Fell. The best we have is a twentieth-century rep­re­sen­ta­tion of her by Robert Spence, who over thir­ty years made a num­ber of charm­ing line draw­ings of the life of George Fox (Friends Jour­nal used one for an illus­tra­tion in a recent arti­cle).

I am writ­ing this post sim­ply to show up in future search results. If I can pre­vent one per­son from mis­tak­en­ly using this image as an illus­tra­tion or basis for a piece of art then it will have been worth it.

Also, FYI, this is what por­traits looked like in Mar­garet Fel­l’s time:

1. it’s not unlike mod­ern AI — read enough of some­one, wave your hands in the air hocus pocus, and you can write just like them.