Fisher, Mary

Mary Fisher (later Bayly, Cross) (c. 1623–1698) was an itinerant preacher considered part of the “Valiant Sixty,” a group of early members of the Religious Society of Friends, or Quakers. As a preacher Fisher traveled around England and to the West Indies, North America, and the Mediterranean. Her corpus consists mostly of letters in manuscript, and she is written about in the historical record as a leading figure in the early Quaker movement who faced repeated persecution because of her public preaching and missionary work. Her status as a Quaker enslaver in colonial South Carolina at the end of her life points to the complex intermingling of emerging racial ideologies and religion as well as to early Quaker complicity and white women’s investment in slavery.