Jemima Wilkinson was born in Rhode Island, that colonial hotbed of difficult women, in 1752. In 1776, a year best remembered for other crises, Wilkinson took to her bed with a high fever, in a medical crisis so intense that her family nearly despaired of the vigorous young woman’s life. And in a way, they did lose Jemima. The figure that rose from the sweaty bedsheets when the fever broke was, by their own account, a reborn entity using the physical form of the recovering girl. Announcing a new, genderless identity as the Public Universal Friend, they began a career as a preacher, building on the Quakerism of their youth to evangelize a new denomination, the Society of Universal Friends, to the people of the fledgling United States. That ministry would last until the Friend’s death in 1819.

From blog via This RSS Feed.