Jemima wilkinson biography
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Life Story: The Public Universal Friend
The Public Universal Friend
The Publick Universal Friend. Courtesy of Yates County History Center.
Note: Out of respect for the subject of this profile, we use the pronouns “they/them/their” and their preferred name of the Public Universal Friend (“the Friend”) throughout the life story.
The Public Universal Friend was born in Rhode Island on November 29, 1752. They were identified as female at birth and named Jemima Wilkinson. The Friend was the eighth child of twelve. They were only eight years old when their mother died. The Friend’s father never remarried and raised his children on his own.
Growing up, the Friend attended the local Quaker meeting. When they were in their early twenties, a religious group called the New-Light Baptists visited their town. The New-Light Baptists were an intensely religious group whose leaders made impassioned speeches and encouraged a radical approach to worshipping God. They were part of a larger religious movement that historians now call the First Great Awakening, a movement in which religious enthusiasm spiked and people came up with new ways of worshipping. The Friend was drawn to the intensity of their meetings.
A few years later, in 1776, the Friend fell ill with a co
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THE REBORN Jemima Wilkinson & Publick Universal Friend
Jemima Wilkinson, born in 1752, was a devout Quaker and skilled medical practitioner in colonial Rhode Island. When a typhus outbreak in 1776 left her feverish and near death, she experienced a series of dramatic religious visions. When the fever finally cleared, the person who rose from Wilkinson’s sickbed declared that Jemima Wilkinson was gone (dead?) and had been replaced by Publick Universal Friend, a genderless evangelist who would become a wildly influential and popular preacher throughout New England. Publick Universal Friend would launch a completely unique (and distinctly American) religious movement, and Friend’s teachings and social influence would permanently shift American views on religion, slavery, race, gender and colonialism. Yet somehow Wilkinson and Friend were nearly forgotten to history until our guest Michael Bronski “reintroduced” the world to this fascinating enigma of a story.
Several of Friend’s possessions are housed at the Yates County Historical Museum and Friend’s final home still stands nearby in Jerusalem, New York.
A full transcript of this episode is available here.
Michael Bronski is an independent scholar, journalist, writer and long time a
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Jemima Wilkinson: the Important American-Born Bride to Perform a Scrupulous Movement
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