A woman protestor arrived at a religious event attended by dignitaries—completely naked. She yelled “Resurrection, I am ready for thee!” before security guards removed her from the premises. This sounds like a modern-day incident, but it took place in London in 1652. As Jean-Pierre Cavaillé explains, this was a powerful political act.
“The huge scandal of a woman appearing naked in public was indeed exacerbated and taken to extremes,” he writes, “since all those who witnessed the event understood perfectly well that this was neither a madwoman nor a whore, but a woman who had chosen to deliver a revolutionary religious and political message in the form of a scandalous action.”
England in 1652 was still reeling from a bloody civil war, and ruled by Oliver Cromwell, who was among those who witnessed the nude protest. Indeed, he may have been the intended viewer. Faith and politics were inseparable in early modern Europe, and Quakerism was one of a number of new religious groups that were emerging in Britain.
“The Whitehall happening was just one of the first in a long series of prophetic and protest displays by both men and women who went naked in public places (sacred and profane),” Cavaillé writes, “and it was prolonged in New England, accompanying the emergence and development of the Quaker movement.”
Nudity was perceived as having particular meanings—either demonstrating prelapsarian innocence or uncivilized barbarism. Differing religious sects had their own attitudes towards clothing and other groups’ use of it. But the Quakers were saying something different when they used their own bodies as a symbol of protest.
“In fact, the nakedness of Quakers, men and women, was not designed (or only in a very marginal and contradictory way) to demonstrate a state of innocence and moral perfection before God,” Cavaillé writes. Rather, it was
intended to denounce the entirely negative spiritual “nakedness” of those before whom they were demonstrating, and as an anticipation of what God had in store for the latter: that is, stripping them bare of all their earthly powers, belongings and social prerogatives.