Elizabeth Hooton

Elizabeth Hooton (née Carrier) (1600 – January 8, 1672) was an English Dissenter and one of the earliest preachers in the Religious Society of Friends, also known as the Quakers. She was born in Nottingham, England. She was beaten and imprisoned for propagating her beliefs; she was the first woman to become a Quaker minister. She is considered one of the Valiant Sixty, a group of celebrated Friends preachers. Her surname is sometimes spelled Hooten.

Introduction to George Fox Hooton was among the first, perhaps the very first, to be convinced by the teachings of George Fox. Some sources indicate, however, that Fox actually clarified some of his beliefs from Hooton's mentoring of him. She was a middle-aged, married woman when she met Fox in 1647 at her home in Skegby, Sutton in Ashfield, Nottinghamshire, and was already a Nonconformist - specifically, a Baptist.

Ministry and persecution

She believed that God called her to preach, which led her to leave her family, because her husband was not at first sympathetic to Quaker ideas. Like other early Quakers she was imprisoned and beaten for her outspoken preaching, which went against the established church.

In 1651, she was imprisoned in Derby for reproving a priest; the following year she was put in prison at York Castle for preaching to a congregation at the end of the service. She was then put on horseback, brought out into the wilderness, and left to die.

Final journey Hooton embarked on her final voyage in 1670, joining George Fox on a trip to the West Indies and the American continent.

Hooton is memorialized in a panel of the Quaker Tapestry (panel B2), along with Mary Fisher, as an example of the Publishers of Truth, who were the earliest proponents of Quakerism.