Sybil Jones was an American Quaker preacher. She made missionary visits of Syria and Palestine, where tried to explain the Quaker principle of the equality of the sexes to Moslem women; though she realized that her doctrine could not be put in practice, she had unwavering faith in the value of making it heard.
Background
Sybil was born on February 28, 1808 at Brunswick, Maine, United States, the third of the nine children of Ephraim and Susanna (Dudley) Jones, and the seventh in descent, on her mother's side, from Thomas Dudley. Her parents and grandparents were members of the Society of Friends.
Education
Jones attended the Friends' Institute at Providence in 1824-25.
Career
After studies she taught for eight years in public schools.
Soon after her marriage Sybil Jones was acknowledged by the Friends' churches as a gospel minister. In 1840 she was liberated to attend meetings and to do religious work in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, thus beginning a career that was one of the principal factors in the great revival of her sect during the next four decades.
She visited the New England meetings in 1842, and in 1845 all the yearly meetings in Ohio, Indiana, Baltimore, and North Carolina. Her travels in the South aroused her solicitude for the spiritual welfare of the Negroes, and in 1850 she felt summoned, in spite of her frail health, to preach to the blacks of Liberia.
Accompanied by her husband, she sailed from Baltimore June 20, 1851, and returned to that port in December. She and her husband were kindly received by President Roberts at Monrovia, and she preached to many eager to hear her, but the chief effect of the mission was on her own inner life. A much more important mission was her visit to the meetings in Great Britain, Ireland, Norway, Germany, Switzerland, and France in 1852-54. She was in the South again in 1860. In 1867 and again in 1868 she and her husband visited Syria and Palestine, where their meeting with Theophilus Waldmeier was especially significant for his future work.
During her last years her strength failed gradually, and she died at her home on a farm near Augusta, Maine.
Achievements
Personality
Jones was a woman of deep religious sensibility, and there is abundant testimony to the extraordinary power that her simple, earnest preaching exercised over her hearers in the United States and in many countries of Europe.
Connections
On June 26, 1833, Jones married Eli Jones (1807 - 90), a Quaker preacher and teacher of China, Kennebec County, Maine, by whom she had three sons and two daughters. Richard Mott Jones (1843 - 1917), headmaster of the William Penn Charter School in Philadelphia, was their third child.