Focusing on the formative period of Quakerism in seventeenth-century England and the role of one vigorous and authoritative woman, this study offers new insights into the religious, social, and family life of Margaret Fell. The book probes Fell's pivotal role, in close relation to George Fox, in the architecture of the early Quaker church order. It investigates Fell's role in the development of the Quaker women's meetings, a unique seventeenth-century Quaker institution.

It also offers a fresh historical perspective of this socially prominent sectarian woman in terms of her family relationships, the household economic unit, the neighbourhood network, and the wider sectarian religious community that extended far beyond her home, Swarthmoor Hall in rural north-west Lancashire.

The author marshals evidence to argue that it was in keeping with Margaret Fell's social status, permanence of place, personality, and skills learned in the domestic sphere, that she was a co-leader, along with George Fox, in the first fifty years of Quakerism.