From the late seventeenth century, we can trace two main strands of Behmenist thought on gender. Some Behmenists adopted a relatively conservative stance with regard to women; these will be the subject of the following chapter. Others among Boehme's disciples, however, were more willing to develop their mentor's theological principles in a direction which can be loosely termed ‘feminist’. Jane Lead belongs to this group, perhaps, more by virtue of being the leading light of the Philadelphian Society than on account of any particularly feminist quality of her thought. It was her associate, Richard Roach, who was to translate Behmenist sophiology into the theory of women's special eshatological role and spiritual status in the Last Days. After Roach, we can trace this theory in the theology of the American Shakers, and it may underlie such late eighteenth-century movements as the Buchanites and Southcottians.

Jane Lead, née Ward, was born in Norfolk in 1624. She experienced her first religious crisis at the age of fifteen. Three years later, she moved to London, where she came under the influence of Tobias Crisp's sermons. Here she married a relative, William Lead; the couple were to have four daughters, only two surviving beyond infancy. Lead was left destitute after her husband's death in 1670, and this crisis in her external circumstances coincided with her emergence as the leading Behmenist prophetess. In April of that year she had a series of visions of the Virgin Wisdom, who called her to live a virginal life.