Sophia Wigington Hume was a preacher and writer associated with the Religious Society of Friends, or Quakers. Her writings address common Quaker concerns and indicate an exemplary facility with leading scholarship in Quaker and wider Protestant intellectual traditions. Particularly noteworthy is her extensive expression of various defenses of women's involvement in public religious leadership. This activism was tempered by her private reservations about her own fitness for such a role and about the general appropriateness of it. In her most extensive works, An Exhortation to the Inhabitants of the Province of South-Carolina, to Bring their Deeds to the Light of Christ, in their Own Consciences (1748), and An Epistle to the Inhabitants of South Carolina, Containing Sundry Observations Proper to be Considered by Every Professor of Christianity in General (1754), she aimed to present a defense of Quaker principles, to call all Christians to a renewed commitment to their historic...