Sarah Blackborow

Sarah Blackborow (fl. 1650s – 1660s) was the author of tracts that strongly influenced Quaker thinking on social problems and the theological position of women. She was one of several prominent female activists in the early decades of the Society of Friends.

Little is known of Blackborow's personal life. She is stated to have been the wife of William Blackborow of Austin's parish in the City of London, to have come from a "prosperous family of London", to have been the organizer of the first Women's Meeting, and to have remained in touch with James Nayler after his condemnation by George Fox. Furthermore, "Sarah Blackborow, an educated matron, was the originator of a system to collect and distribute aid to prisoners in London jails."

Blackborow's importance to the history of social thinking and theology rests mainly on four tracts, which she published in London:

These have been quoted and catalogued down the centuries. Her writing has been described in modern times as "richly biblical and moving."

One concern of Blackborow's is that God speaks directly through Man, both male and female: "What I have seen and known, and heard and felt, that I declare unto you, and my witness is true; if I bore witness of my self, it were not true; but my witness stands in him [God]" (A Visit..., p. 7). She was among several women who actively propagated Quaker ideas in a period when this was quite unknown in England. As Mack sums up statistically (p. 171n), "Quaker women wrote 220 tracts of the 3853 published before 1700. Eighty-two of the 650 authors were women." Her emphasis on love in the same pamphlet was unusual among Quaker writers of the period: "Oh! love truth and its testimony, that into my mother's house you all may come, and into the chamber of her that conceived me, where you may embrace, and be embraced.... Love is his name, love is his nature, love is his life.... See the seed of the Woman and the seed of the Serpent... and... see birth each of these bring forth; the wombs they are conceived in, which it is that bears, and it is that is barren" (pp. 10–12).

Blackborow's interpretations of the writings of St Paul show deep study of them. She "accuses the priests of speaking without the 'Light', which means that they should be silent. Inverting the dominant reading, she cites St Paul in order to silence them: 'wherever they found either the Male or the Female out of the power, not learned of their Husband the Head, they were forbidden to Prayer or Prophesie.'"

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