Portrait of the Public Universal Friend by John L D Mathies,1816. Yates County NY History Cente.
Is it true an eminent trans Quaker was preaching in 18th century USA? Not quite, says Simon Webb
‘Many of the first people to attend the Friend’s preaching sessions did so out of curiosity. But lots of them stayed to become disciples.’
Is it true that an eminent trans Quaker was born in eighteenth-century USA? Can it be that a Friend who lived through the war of independence embraced an androgynous lifestyle, chose a genderless name and eschewed the use of the pronouns ‘she’ and ‘her’? Well, not exactly.
Jemima Wilkinson was born into a Quaker family in Rhode Island in 1752. She grew up to be a good-looking woman, graceful and athletic, with black, glossy hair and black eyes. According to David Hudson’s hostile 1821 biography, as a young girl Jemima was vain and idle, spending too much effort following the latest fashions. But in her mid-twenties, she went down with a serious illness, was confined to her bedroom, thought to be near death.
This was 1776, during the US war of independence, and we can lay the blame for Jemima’s sickness at the door of that conflict. As with the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, disease can follow on the heels of war, and it is likely that Jemima caught an infection that spread across Rhode Island after the warship Columbus docked at Providence that winter.
The so-called ‘Columbus fever’ looked set to kill Jemima Wilkinson, and a number of relatives, friends and neighbours kept a vigil at her bedside. But to everyone’s surprise, in the early hours of 11 October the patient sprang out of bed and delivered some startling news. The young woman previously known as Jemima Wilkinson had died in the night, and angels had engineered the re-use of her body by a genderless spiritual being called the Public Universal Friend. (At this point in the story, Paul B Moyer, in his sympathetic 2015 biography Universal Public Friend, begins to refer to the Friend as ‘he’. I will be using ‘they’ and ‘their’.)
Witnesses noticed that the feminine voice of the old Jemima had changed to a louder, more distinct and ‘masculine’ voice, which the Friend was soon using to great effect, preaching on Rhode Island and in nearby Massachusetts and Connecticut. As well as sounding more ‘masculine’ or androgynous, the Friend adopted less feminine-looking clothing, wearing loose, black clerical-looking robes and adopting one of the broad-brimmed hats for which Quaker men in the US had become famous. One imagines that many of the first people to attend the Friend’s preaching sessions did so out of curiosity. But lots of them, particularly women, stayed to become disciples.
The power of the Friend’s preaching came in part from their thorough knowledge of the Bible, and their ability to quote from it at length. The fact that they had memorised lengthy Bible passages gives the lie to Hudson’s assertions regarding Jemima Wilkinson’s youthful frivolity and idleness: serious reading is not an idle occupation. The Friend also managed to commit to memory key Quaker texts such as Robert Barclay’s An Apology for the True Christian Divinity (1678).
Even hostile witnesses to the Friend’s preaching acknowledged that they were not teaching anything startlingly new, let alone outlandish. In fact their theology, their language and even the clothes of their followers were distinctly Quakerly. Even the name ‘Public Universal Friend’ was reminiscent of the Quaker title ‘Public Friend’, as applied to Quaker preachers. The Friend’s followers, the Society of Universal Friends, used ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ in the plain Quaker fashion, abhorred slavery, maintained the equality of the sexes, and won the respect of the local first-nation’s people. The Friend, always an excellent rider, also had a humanitarian concern for the welfare of animals.
The Friend’s followers even held silent meetings, although David Hudson called these ‘mute meetings’ and scornfully asserted that nobody spoke at them because ‘it rarely ever happened’ that any of the Friend’s ‘tribe would venture to speak in her presence’.
The Friend’s ability to quote at length from the Bible was a skill she shared with George Fox, and the fact that their Society began to win followers in a time of war makes it similar to the early Quaker movement. By founding their group, the Universal Public Friend became one of the very few people identified as female at birth known to have founded a new sect or religion; they may also have been the first white person born on US soil to have founded such a group.
Moyer and others have compared the Universal Public Friend to Mother Ann Lee, an early leader of the Shaker sect. The Shakers broke off from the Quakers in the north-east of England, and held some of their first meetings at Bolton. Like the Universal Friend, Mother Lee embraced celibacy, which became an absolute requirement for Shakers.
Despite their various Quakerly characteristics, we cannot really claim the Universal Friends as a legitimate offshoot of the New England Quakers of the time. In fact the local Quaker Meeting had disowned Jemima Wilkinson some months before her transformation in the winter of 1776. By then she had stopped going to Meeting and had started attending with the New Light Baptists.
Like many US Quakers and members of other sects, the Universal Friends felt drawn to the simple life, and in 1788 they acquired land in the west of the state of New York. There they founded the town of Jerusalem (now in Yates County, New York) and suffered many privations as they worked hard to fight off predators, both animal and human, and to turn forest into farmland.
David Hudson’s ‘hatchet-job’ 1821 biography characterises life at this particular new Jerusalem as a succession of confidence-tricks played by the Universal Friend and her followers on their fellow-settlers, whom they hoodwinked and shamelessly exploited. According to Hudson, some of the locals who were not even attached to the Society were taken in, while others, including the first-nation’s people, found the Friend’s claims ‘ludicrous’.
Moyer characterises the words of many ‘contemporary detractors’ like David Hudson as ‘off the mark’. Hudson particularly disliked the Friend’s insistence on sexual equality, implying that it upset some kind of natural order in family homes, and made men feel humiliated and hen-pecked. Hudson also attempted to attribute the Friend’s adoption of celibacy to their bitter feelings about an early love affair that ended badly, leaving Jemima Wilkinson with an unwanted pregnancy.
The Public Universal Friend died on the first of July, 1819. The loss of their charismatic leader, and legal disputes over the ownership of the lands in New York state, contributed to the break-up of the Universal Friends, who had disappeared altogether by the 1860s. Like the poet Walt Whitman, who was born to a Quaker mother on Long Island in the year the Friend died, it is unlikely that some of the Friend’s lifestyle choices and uninhibited assertions could ever have been accepted by the starchy Quakers of nineteenth-century New England. Would Whitman and the Friend be happy to see modern Quakers extend a warm welcome to gay and trans communities? I’d like to think so.
