ship. She made it a haven for those persecuted and suffering for their Quaker beliefs and the center of early efforts to provide encouragement and organized support for travelling ministers. She helped establish the Kendal Fund (1654) to provide early Quaker missionaries with basic necessities. The fund was later expanded to include financial aid to prisoners (who were being charged for their beds), the printing of books, and aid to meetings in their hospitality to visiting Friends. In 1669, eleven years after Thomas Fell's death, Margaret Fell and George Fox married, and together they devoted themselves to the nurture of her children and the organization of the Society of Friends.

In October 1668, after the end of Margaret Fell's imprisonment in Lancaster for holding meetings for worship in her house, the Swarthmoor women's monthly meeting met for the first time. Separate monthly, quarterly, and yearly meetings for women eventually came into being throughout the Society. The practice, encouraged by George Fox and other men Friends, lasted into the twentieth century and was a means for women's social education as well as a considered and careful way for Friends to listen to God's leadings.

Margaret and her daughters wrote detailed instructions for conducting business meetings. They also organized Friends' marriage procedure: while family and community approval and support were considered vital to marriage, the partners gave themselves to one another; the woman was not "given" by her father, as though a possession of which he had the right to dispose.

THE SPREAD OF THE MOVEMENT

Following his leading on the importance of "gospel order" for the emerging community, George Fox as early as 1652 began to encourage his followers to set up their own worship meetings. Soon monthly meetings for business were established. In 1656 he organized men's quarterly meetings. What is now Britain Yearly Meeting began to meet regularly in 1668. The Meeting for Sufferings was established to aid the victims of persecution and soon became the general executive body of Friends in Britain.

Fox and his early followers variously called themselves Children of the Light, First Publishers of Truth, and Friends of Truth. Because of their religious enthusiasm, they were later called Quakers, a name that Fox himself disliked. Their movement for renewal of the community of Christ spread with great rapidity in England and from there to the other parts of Europe and to the American colonies. Authorities often reacted harshly, partly because of Friends' uncompromising attitudes and their refusal to follow the customary patterns of social life. Because they refused to take oaths at a time when oaths were a test of loyalty to the Commonwealth and later to the monarchy, and also because they refused to attend or pay tithes to the Church