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In 1771, John Wesley received a remarkable letter from devout Methodist convert Mary Bosanquet (1739-1815). With her friends Sarah Crosby (1729-1804) and Sarah Ryan (1724-1768), Bosanquet had been running an orphanage and leading the small-group Methodist gatherings for spiritual growth that Wesley termed "class meetings." Crosby had in fact been speaking to groups sometimes numbering in the hundreds—though Wesley would not let her call her spiritual testimony "preaching." Bosanquet too had been leading class meetings, and been criticized for doing it.

She met the criticism head-on in her letter to Wesley: "Several object to this, saying 'A woman ought not to teach or take authority over a man.'" This might mean, Bosanquet allowed, that a woman should not take authority over her husband. But it emphatically did not mean that "she shall not entreat sinners to come to Jesus, nor say, come and I will tell you what God has done for my soul." Not every woman was called to be a preacher, no more than every man; but "some have an extraordinary call to it, and woe be to them if they obey it not."

That very month, June 1771, Wesley endorsed Bosanquet's friend Crosby as a lay preacher, using the phrase "extraordinary call." He gave his stamp of approval to Bosanquet as well. Both women became tireless evangelists, and some 41 women eventually became lay preachers in "Mr. Wesley's Methodism."

In 1781 Bosanquet married Wesley's intended successor John Fletcher. After Fletcher's death in 1785, Mary continued to hold preaching meetings and care for her late husband's Anglican parish, even appointing one of his successors. Despite the resolution passed in the Methodist Conference in 1803 (after Wesley's death) that women would not be allowed to preach, Bosanquet/Fletcher continued to preach five sermons a week until she died in her late 70s.

These were among the first women to find in Methodism a liberating power to preach the gospel, but they were not the last. A qualified openness to women as spiritual leaders carried over into American Methodism—brought to the colonies in the 1760s and a lay-led movement until Wesley ordained the first American preachers at the Methodist Episcopal Church's founding in 1784.

Barbara Heck, an early Irish Methodist émigré who encouraged her cousin Philip Embury to continue in America the lay preaching he had begun in England, earned from one Methodist historian the title "foundress" of American Methodism. As the story is sometimes told, Heck discovered a group of her fellow Irish immigrants playing cards. She swept the cards into the fire and marched to Philip's house, where she urged him to take up preaching again lest their friends and relatives "all go to hell!" Philip protested that he had neither a congregation nor a preaching house. "Preach in your own house and to your own company," said Barbara, and Methodism was born in New York.

In the 1800s, white and African-American women—including United Brethren prison chaplain Lydia Sexton (1799-1894) and African Methodist Episcopal evangelist Jarena Lee (b. 1783)—began to seek licensing to preach within the Methodist denominations.

Not all women preachers found this sanction necessary. For example, Phoebe Palmer never sought a license, though her ministry received tacit approval from the Methodist bishop and other clergy who attended her Tuesday Meetings.

Those who did obtain the church's imprimatur often stated that they would have continued without it. Maggie Newton Van Cott (1830-1914), the first woman licensed to preach in the Methodist Episcopal Church, began by obtaining an exhorter's license (exhorting differed from preaching in that the speaker did not "take a text" from the Bible to expound). When a critic protested that this license did not allow her to preach sermons, she replied, "Don't it? Well, God allows it. I received my commission from Him, brother."

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