As a Quaker (Society of Friends), Elizabeth Gurney accepted the Holy Spirit would speak to her through another person. Her friend Deborah Darby told her one Sunday, “You are born to be a light to the blind, speech to the dumb, and feet to the lame.”
Earlier that year Elizabeth had converted to Christianity, weeping in her carriage on her way home. Later she wrote in her diary, “I think my feelings were the most exalted I remember . . . suddenly my mind felt clothed with light, as with a garment, and I felt silenced before God; I cried with the heavenly feeling of humility and repentance.”
Yet she felt no compelling purpose to her life. She started a Sunday School with one boy and it soon grew to 80 children. She read the scriptures to the poor and gave them food and clothes. Still, she felt unguided.
Then banker Joseph Fry asked her to marry him. Since Elizabeth got nothing specific from God otherwise, she married Mr. Fry and bore him ten children.
After her tenth child was born, in 1817, her brother-in-law, a Parliament member, suggested Elizabeth check out Newgate Prison for women. The English prisons were overcrowded, and crime increased. Reform of some type needed to be offered.
Elizabeth found hundreds of drunken, rag-clad women in four rooms built for only half that number. Innocent people awaited trial with the hardened criminals. The women’s children looked like dirty animals and had no where else to go. Babies born in prison lived naked.
Lice inhabited the inmates’ clothes and hair. Bathing utensils were scarce. A day’s food was one small bread loaf per person. No discipline existed. The bullies ran the wards. No medicines existed either. The sick women were dumped on dirty straw. Most died of “prison fever” or typhus.
Elizabeth was challenged, not frightened, by the prisoners and their conditions. She felt God commanded her to care for them. She started with appealing to the women through their babies. They must desire better for their children and themselves. She offered to help them. She gathered supplies and organized classes for knitting and sewing. She started a school for the women with the best-educated prisoner as the instructor.
Elizabeth read the Bible aloud, hoping the Gospel would convert them. A few did and lived in peace.
The warden, under Mrs. Fry’s influence, appointed women guards instead of men. Mrs. Fry enforced the rules, on which the prisoners themselves voted. They elected their own leaders to keep order among themselves.
The transformation of the women’s prison was so extraordinary that world leaders came to see and consulted her on her ways of deployment.
Elizabeth went on to reform the women’s conditions enroute to the Australian prisons. If the women lived to reach Australia, they had no profession to survive on, and most resorted to prostitution. She and her helpers inspected the ships before they sailed to ensure the women possessed cloth and needles and thread to sew on the long voyage. The night before transportation the women usually rioted. Elizabeth began to read from the Bible on those evenings and brought peace in action and in mind. Because of Elizabeth’s efforts, women’s transport to Australia (because of its inhumane condition) was outlawed soon after her death.
Elizabeth Fry suffered from depression and took sedatives and stimulants to carry out her tasks. When her husband went bankrupt, she was humiliated. The theology of that day said God prospered those who obeyed him. She died at 65 and had become the voice of prisoners who could not speak for themselves.
Praise the Lord