Excavating Gender, Embracing the Spirit
Genderlessness and Retroactive Queer Identification in the Life of the Public Universal Friend
“this is the coolest fucker ever and an insp[sic] to everyone that wants a cool new name,” read the tweet from Twitter user @CommanderSnacks.
The user was referring to Public Universal Friend, a genderless Quaker preacher living in eighteenth-century Rhode Island and New York. Quickly, the post went viral and Twitter was alive with a peculiar reckoning: it was suddenly possible to imagine the presence of gender fluidity and trans representation in a rigid colonial world. Amid the common stories of stoic, heterosexual, constitution-signing elites like George Washington, one could unearth the tale of a gender-defying, rule-breaking, society-crafting spiritual such as the Public Universal Friend.
“This is my new role model,” responded user @Bee_Kirby.
“I hope the Public Universal Friend is smiling upon us,” agreed @CommanderSnacks.
And yet, the virility of the ancient Public Universal Friend in the modern Twitterverse reveals more than just a fond remembrance of a quirky, queer historical character. If anything, the original post reminded us of the tenuous linkages between past to present that are often overshadowed by a perceived historical distance and foreignness. Put differently, it’s easy to imagine that the eighteenth-century reality did not include the queer icons we engage with in the mainstream today.
Even if we’re inclined to believe that the far-off past is some static, immutable, and fundamentally conservative reality, the Twitterverse is quick to point out that this is perhaps a product of “fictive editing,” which obscures the narratives of those like the Public Universal Friend. Uncovering the presence of a Public Universal Friend in the early American historiography insists that the past bore the same hallmarks of gendered diversity that we witness today — or so the Twitterverse argues.
And yet, this stance reveals as much about our past as it does our present: our desire to retroactively identify figures like the Friend reveals a presentist tendency to claim figures into categories constructed in the present — perhaps contrary to the desires and lived experiences of those we analyze. For as much as it is necessary to elevate and recognize the perspectives of those buried under a mainstream historical narrative, it is equally crucial for scholars and consumers of history alike to recognize the risk posed in retroactively identifying and “outing” individuals for identities they did not ascribe to themselves. Public Universal Friend, peculiar and intriguing as they were, is one such historical figure often given this treatment — to the detriment of the intricate gender performativity they crafted out of spiritual rebirth.
From Jemima Wilkinson to Awakened Convert
Historians say that little is known about Public Universal Friend’s early life. Indeed, the only comprehensive contemporary biography written about Wilkinson — published in 1821 by historian David Hudson — stated that the story of Wilkinson’s life was ultimately crafted by their peers: “The history of [Public Universal Friend] thus rests upon the testimony of a variety of witnesses” and not by the prophet’s hand alone. That the exact details of the Friend’s early life are subject to a “diversity of opinions” outside of their own raises a few questions about the early motivations and contexts which may have informed the Friend’s religious and gendered transformations. Despite these early ambiguities, historians have converged on a set of basic assumptions about the prophet’s early life.
Before identifying as the Public Universal Friend and founding a fringe religious sect in New York, the Public Universal Friend was born a biological female by the name of Jemima Wilkinson. Wilkinson was born on November 29, 1752 in Rhode Island to a fourth-generation American Quaker family. Sources note that Wilkinson was eighth of as many as 11 siblings, and the family dedicated much of their time to the Smithfield Meeting House, one of the oldest Quaker hubs in Rhode Island.
Details about Wilkinson’s childhood persona are much more debated than her familial ties. From David Husdon’s unreliable and utterly critical biography, he notes that the young Jemima was “a fine blooming girl… sprightly in her manners, comely in her person, and possessed no ordinary share of beauty.” Sources note she was a devoted Quaker and avid reader who could memorize and recite entire sections of the Bible in her early youth. Yet, as Wilkinson grew older, Hudson was quick to point out her deviousness and “cunning” personality, attributing her later life gendered disobedience to the premature death of Wilkinson’s mother. Without the guiding force of a motherly figure, Jemima allegedly “grew up in idleness and disobedience… extremely troublesome and altogether useless at home,” and was a flunkee of seamstress school — qualities entirely unbecoming of a woman in early American society.
Contemporary onlookers thus paint the young Jemima as a woman who stood entirely at odds with the gendered expectations of the period. At a time when women were expected to fit a “republican motherhood” mold — to preside over the domestic sphere as moralistic educators and virtuous mothers for her children, the next generation of the republic — this image of Jemima Wilkinson rejected maternalistic responsibility in favor of societal and interpersonal subversion. Where Wilkinson’s female peers had begun to get married and have children, the 23-year-old Jemima, “extremely gay and listless,” spent their early adulthood unmarried yet entirely devoted to religious study.
By 1770, Jemima abandoned Quakerism in favor of one of the many sects formed as part of the First Great Awakening: The New Light Baptists. Jemima’s religious transgression — matched with her sister’s simultaneous illegitimate pregnancy — cast the Wilkinson family into shame with their local community of Friends, leading to their eventual banishment from the religion. And though Wilkinson never fully joined the New Light Baptists in any official capacity, the shift away from Quakerism was an important one, since historians attribute her religious fanaticism to joining this sect, and her involvement shaped the tenor of the new sect Wilkinson would form just a few years later.
Feverish Visitation: Religious awakening and the creation of a new type of “Friend”
Wilkinson’s departure from Quakerism and subsequent exile from her Rhode Island community seemed to create the perfect storm for her ailment and religious awakening in 1776. Religiously, her expulsion from Quakerism and involvement in New Light separatism demonstrated to her that intermediary arbiters of religion were wholly unnecessary: Wilkinson held that God communicated His will directly to human spirits. Socially, her community’s collective disdain allowed Wilkinson to become a religious recluse in the fall of 1776, trading time spent in meetinghouses with her old society of Friends for time spent alone with her Bible. Underlying her religious and social departure, Jemima experienced a significant amount of emotional distress.
Amid all the upheaval in her life, Jemima Wilkinson caught the “Fatal Fever — otherwise known as the Columbus fever,” which had spread rapidly throughout Rhode Island. Historians remain divided on the details of Wilkinson’s illness. While Hudson’s unfriendly biography paints Jemima’s ailment as a performance of self-induced fallacy and mental illness, contemporaries present at her sickbed gave varying stories of her “death”, in which Wilkinson oscillated between being comatose or cataleptic. Wilkinson’s own accounts of her sickness paint an image of a mentally and physically ill person, plagued by a racing fever and troubling hallucinations.
Those hallucinations were central to the transformation from disobedient Quaker woman to genderless prophet and religious sectarian. In the height of her sickness, Wilkinson recounted an incredible visitation from God: “Archangels descending… Bringing a sealed Pardon from the living God; and putting their trumpets to their mouth, proclaimed saying, Room, Room, Room.” The female shell of Jemima Wilkinson had “droppt the dying flesh & yielded up the Ghost. And according to the declaration of the Angels, the Spirit took full possession of the Body it now animates.”
Claiming to have risen from the dead, the person of Jemima Wilkinson was no more, replaced instead by the genderless “Public Universal Friend.” Wilkinson’s body became a mortal vessel for the spirit of God to touch down on Earth and spread his gospel truth. The Public Universal Friend had found their place in the world, and they were determined to spread their religious truth as far as they could.
Excavating the Mind and the Land: Formation of the Society of Friends at Jerusalem
For the next two years, the Public Universal Friend remained in Cumberland where they spoke with visitors, preached at passerby, and planned the formation of a new religious sect. Central to the Friend’s new religion was a prophecy that predicted an impending apocalypse — a premonition that gave urgency to the Friend’s religious mission and encouraged Christ’s followers to repent. Perhaps most crucially, the prophecy required the Friend to serve as a traveling minister: a “Messenger of Peace going from City to City and from Village to Village proclaiming the News of Salvation to all that would Repent and believe the Gospel.”
As the Friend moved from Rhode Island through the Narragansett Bay region and up to Philadelphia, they gradually gathered a small but close-knit group of followers. This group became the “Society of Universal Friends,” a new sect founded by the Friend. By 1787, a little under a decade after the Friend’s transformation, the prophet was a local spectacle. Sometimes people gathered peacefully — if not warily — to watch the Friend preach in visiting sermons, while others attacked the Friend with “stones & brickbats” and attacked their meetinghouse in a mob. Contemporaries attacked the Friend’s gospel, and even Hudson’s biography characterizes them as a fraud, full of “enthusiasm, delusion and imposture.”
Being a new prophet at the height of the Revolutionary War and the edge of the First Great Awakening thus put the Friend in an unpopular and controversial position within the colonies. And yet, the Friend felt so dedicated to the gospel they felt had been given to them by God that no amount of public ridicule would stop their traveling pursuit toward salvation: “Naked swords shook over the Friend’s head,” one early account wrote of the Friend. “No storms or severity of weather could hinder the Friend’s journey to speak unto Souls like the unwearied Sun, Determin’d its faithful race to run, spreading heavenly benediction far abroad that wandering sinners might return to God.”
Such dedication led the Friend to found a new settlement in western New York, on a six-million-acre expanse of land called “Jerusalem”. At its peak, Jerusalem was home to more than 260 dedicated followers who, just like their leader, had abandoned the “wickedness” of the world to repent.
Performing Gender and Spirituality: Theological lessons in the Friend’s agendered passing
While the Public Universal Friend’s religious beliefs stood at odds with the most mainstream of Quaker beliefs in the areas they preached, it is perhaps their gendered recreation that garnered them such controversy in the early American social landscape. For even as the Friend eschewed Quaker religious norms, they too abandoned a gendered identity as either male or female, instead choosing to go simply by “Public Universal Friend,” a prophet that was “Neither Male nor Female.”
Within the highly gendered world of early America, such a decision was not made without backlash. One’s position in society was almost entirely decided based on their gender: women could be homemakers and mothers, men could participate in politics and till the fields. Added to this dimension was the sheer fact that the Friend was a religious figure who claimed the authority to speak to mixed-gender audiences. While Quakerism had allowed a certain amount of liberties for women interested in ministry, the Friend’s rejection of both gender and women’s expectations went even further than the more liberal, Quakerish view on womanhood.
In the Public Universal Friend’s rejection of gender, they relied on two central types of performance, which historian Scott Larson notes in his works on the Friend: the Friend engaged in a physical performance of genderlessness and reinforced their agendered physicality with their prophetic status.
On physical performance:
Historians and contemporaries alike note that the Public Universal Friend had evacuated their mortal body, only for it to be filled with a spirit that transcended both gender and humanity. Leaving the “tabernacle of the flesh” behind, the Friend turned to an agendered physical dress to demonstrate their worldly transcendence to their mortal peers and followers.
Only a handful of images of the Friend exist for us to view in the present, yet they are all are crucial for understanding how the Friend performed genderlessness through deliberate costuming. In this image alone, the contrast of traditional femininity with masculinity is striking: the Friend’s feminine ringlets of “chestnut dark hair” are slicked back in a subtly masculine staying. A cravat is wrapped around their neck as the prophet’s body is adorned with heavy black priest’s robes.
While the visual source base for the Friend remains thin, contemporary accounts confirm the Friend’s tendency to mix feminine, masculine, and priestly dress all at once. Writing in his diary after meeting the Friend, Yale College president Ezra Stiles remarked the Friend wore a “light cloth Cloke with a Cape like a Man’s,” which covered a woman’s “Purple Gown.” The Friend would often wear a man’s beaver hat over their brown ringlets of hair, and some even speculated that under the Friend’s heavy, masculine robe were mysterious and erotic undergarments — further drawing out the juxtaposition between manly outer garments and a secret femininity hidden underneath.
Ultimately, many of the Friend’s contemporaries reinforced the notion that the combination of traditionally masculine and feminine clothing confirmed the prophet’s agender identity: “Her apparel is very expensive; and the form of it conveys the same idea, as her external appearance, of being neither man or woman.”
On divine performance:
Performed genderlessness meant more than just donning mixed types of clothing in this period. Even if the Friend’s wardrobe outwardly emphasized gender ambiguity and a rejection of the fictive boundaries of sex, Public Universal Friend’s performance imbued serious religious and social meaning in a period when gender, economy, and spirituality were intimately linked.
Assuming the identity of the “Public Universal Friend” indicated first and foremost a departure from humanity and an excavation of gender which pulled the Public Universal Friend out of the implied duties of gender or class. In this vein, one can look to other genderless folx in early America — such as Thomas/Thomasine Hall — and find a similar exclusion from mainstream social and economic categories: the Friend and Hall both could not easily be fit within the mold of domestic, maternal femininity or the political, working masculine opposite. A visible and intentional rejection of gender and embrace of ambiguity thus placed these figures on the fringes of early America’s highly gendered moral and political economy.
But gender subversion ultimately was not the Friend’s ultimate goal.
Rather, genderless performance was one of the tools and byproducts of the Public Universal Friend’s theological challenge to mainstream Quakerism. When the Friend had “died” and been resurrected by prophetic visions from God, they firmly believed that their mortal body represented little more than a human vessel for the amorphous, agendered, all-encompassing spirit of God. This association meant that the Friend had to shed all connections with their past as “Jemima Wilkinson”, a woman. Evacuating the physical body of Jemima in favor of the genderless Public Universal Friend served the purpose of reiterating the celestial nature of the spirit now inhabiting Wilkinson’s old body. The Friend was not considered a human being — as such, gender could not and did not apply to them.
The Friend’s followers and community members reinforced the prophet’s otherworldly spirituality by calling them “Blessed Friend of All Mankind,” further juxtaposing the Friend’s agendered spirituality with the gendered “mankind” of the mortal followers, such as they were. Religious historian Catherine Brekus notes that followers’ avoidance of referring to the Friend with gendered language created, in turn, a “tortuous syntax” of gender avoidance. Echoing the works of famed gender studies academic Judith Butler, Brekus and other historians note that this tortuous syntax served as a “means for subject formation,” creating for the Friend a genderless, spiritual subject that was reinforced every time the followers chose to call the prophet “Friend” instead of “Jemima”.
In effect, this language reiterated the spiritual divide between prophet and follower, further erecting, as Larson argues, “the boundaries of communal life and belief.” Recreating a new grammar of genderlessness around the Public Universal Friend reinforced the notion that the Friend was an untouchable prophet — an “indescribable being” — that had transcended gender upon their death and rebirth.
And within the community the Friend built, this distinction was clear: the followers may themselves believe in the Biblical tenets of the Friend’s new religion, but the followers’ mortal status meant they had no need to reject their gender and perform genderlessness like the Friend. Only the select few who also claimed prophetic status would imitate the Friend’s genderlessness via dress and name. Even if the society allowed for more gender freedom — and autonomy for women, in particular — than the more mainstream religious sects populating New England, it was ultimately a society that believed in the mortal separation of gendered men and women.
The Friend may have been a genderless “tabernacle of the flesh,” but this recreation was seen purely as a byproduct of the Friend’s spiritual, theological reawakening by God. In no way did the Friend’s followers believe that genderlessness was a method of rebellious liberation from masculine or feminine bounds in mainstream society, nor was it perceived as a fulfillment of individual desire. The Friend’s religious teachings reinforce this point, as the prophet sermonized by re-reading sections of the Bible that emphasized the natural masculine and feminine responsibilities befitting a society divided by gender.
Indeed, the recreation of the Public Universal Friend’s body and spirit as absolutely distinct from the firm categories of male and female perhaps served the purpose of reiterating those gendered categories in the first place. The Friend, as much as they were a prophet, was also a foil onto which followers could reflect on the necessity of their own mortal gender adherence. If the making the prophet genderless indicated its spirituality and chosenness by God, being gendered indicated the opposite: the imperfections of humanity which demanded constant repentance and humility.
Public Universal Friend and the utility of retroactive gender categories
So… where do we go from here?
The Public Universal Friend was genderless and thought of themself as such.
Gender was important to their identity insofar as their religious belief was crucial to their creation of the self.
Genderlessness was a vessel for otherworldly signaling.
Such a revelation might seem strange in the more secular world we live in today. Yet, Public Universal Friend’s tale of gendered subversion fits within the context of early American gender norms. More importantly, the Friend’s story has crucial implications for the historical and colloquial study of retroactive transgender identification and gendered categorization.
Thinking back to the fact that the Public Universal Friend went viral on the basis of their “transgender” identity seems somewhat ill-fitting now — and there’s a reason for that. Applying such a modern category is a practiced anachronism on the eighteenth-century prophet, whose identity shed light not on the psychological or biopolitical gender fluidity, but on the theological necessity of gender as a performance of spirituality.
Larson notes that colloquial understandings of transgender have modern-day connotations of politics and culture that the Friend simply would not have encountered in their eighteenth-century world. Put differently, “transgender” as we understand it today is a distinctly modern category that was recreated in the context of massive shifts in culture and in the academic study of gender.
Indeed, many gender theorists note that the category of “transgender” came to prominence in the second half of the twentieth century as various social movements ushered in a new era of scholarship on gender, sexuality, and identity. The works of Judith Butler divorced gender from sex, and the boundaries of “transgender” continue to change and transform under the light of new political, social, and intellectual influences. As many gender scholars like Jen Manion have argued, believing in gender — and, by extension, transgender and gender-fluid — identities as fundamentally mutable, unstable categories demands that we expand and contextualize the definitions of these categories, rather than retroactively attach fixed and presentist notions of them when we encounter historical figures like the Friend.
Similarly, the common notion that figures like Public Universal Friend or Thomas/Thomasine Hall indicated a certain progressive or liberal bent in the early American landscape is in itself a type of retroactive editing that denies the lived reality of genderless folx moving within a brutally conservative world. Even as the Friend rejected gender for themself and allowed female involvement in their ministry, the Society’s theological purpose was not to “diversify” or challenge the gendered norms of early American society — it was a choice done to reinforce spirituality and “beyondness” in a prophet’s body and, consequently, to reiterate the necessity for rigid gender categories in mortal, sinful followers. It was religious conservatism achieved by gendered subversion.
Denying the Public Universal Friend the status of “transgender” is not to downplay their genderlessness or genderfluid identity. Nor do I intend to recreate the arguments of scornful contemporaries who referred to the Friend as a woman, a “prophetess”, or worse, still as “Jemima”. Even as I write this article, I use gender-neutral pronouns befitting of the Friend’s post-revival genderlessness and, more often than not, refer to them as the “Friend” — practices that many would follow when referring to genderqueer folx in the present.
Yet, I maintain that the retroactive essentialization and categorization of the Public Universal Friend as transgender reflects a misunderstanding of both “transgender” — as a fluid and modern category — and the Friend themself — a spiritual being who transcended human categorizations of gender. Moreover, this study begs the question of how both scholars and everyday people should consider the retroactive categorization of queer folx and figures in the American historiography.
Not only does this categorization toe the dangerous line of retroactively outing historical figures who perhaps did not, would not, or could not conceive of themselves in a particular identity in their lifetime, such a practice reads a modern queer theory into a period that could not accept or understand the political implications such a theory entails. Put differently, retroactive categorization reveals a presentist tendency to try to fit the past neatly into sociocultural molds we’ve created in modern iterations of society.
Indeed, the Public Universal Friend was only considered genderless after death, after assuming an identity and spirituality wholly removed from the mortal world. In the Friend’s Jerusalem community, genderlessness was not a personal goal nor liberation from a harshly gendered reality; instead, gender underlined the tenets of the Society’s theology while maintaining the centrality of religion and spirituality in the prophet’s reborn identity.
In thinking about the legacies of a character such as the Public Universal Friend, I empathize that the subversive nature of the prophet’s gender performance makes for a fun and enticing historical study for modern readers. And, similarly, I think the tendency to read transgenderism and essentialize queer identities into historical figures reveals a modern desire to try to relate to figures that feel worlds away from our present reality.
And yet, it would do both scholars and avid fans of the Friend well to tread carefully, thoughtfully, and with historical sympathy when considering just where the Friend fits into the centuries-old landscape of queer identity and religious performance.
Contact Liz Lindqwister at liz ‘at’ stanforddaily.com.