The story of Public Universal Friend
How a Quaker preacher challenged the notions of gender in the 1700's.
Long before the idea of a non-binary gender, long before gender dysphoria was identified, and love before Conservatives railed against anyone who didn’t fit inside their rigidly controlled box of “man” and “woman”, there existed a genderless Quaker preacher known as the Public Universal Friend.
The “Friend” or “P. U. F.” as they were known, was assigned female at birth in the year 1752 and given the name Jemima Wilkinson. As a teen and into early adulthood, Jemima Wilkinson was just an average Quaker woman who regularly attended meetings put on by the local Quaker group. When in their early 20’s, Jemima attended revivals put on by a traveling group of Baptists who preached a radical approach to worship as part of a period known as the First Great Awakening.
However in 1776 Jemima experienced a serious illness which had spread throughout their community and the they fell into a deep coma. Upon recovery from this illness, they announced that Jemima Wilkinson had died and their body had been reanimated by a genderless spirit called the Public Universal Friend.
As the Public Universal Friend, they devoted their entire life to serving God as this genderless spirit. They refused to answer to the name “Jemima” or the use of feminine pronouns, choosing only to respond to the name “Friend”. They dressed in a combination of male and female clothing, including masculine vests, shirts, and neckties combined with skirts. They cut their hair short on top and let the back grow out into ringlets.
Shortly after their rebirth into the Public Universal Friend they began to preach about their spiritual transformation and were immediately rejected and dismissed by their Quaker. Undeterred they began traveling across New England and down the Atlantic coast, attracting followers and building a community that became known as the Universal Friends.
In 1784, the Friend began to publish advice for their followers, guidelines that they wanted their followers to live by. They encouraged the Universal Friends to honor God’s teachings, treat others as they wished to be treated, and pursue a righteous and peaceful life. The Friend’s teachings were not radically different from those of other leaders of the First Great Awakening, but their non-gendered identity and their insistence that they had a direct connection to God through their rebirth made them unique at the time.
Women played an important role in the First Great Awakening. They were the primary audiences of religious meetings and were sometimes invited to preach. But the Friend’s refusal to adhere to traditional gender roles made them an outsider with both men and women religious leaders. Their story attracted a lot of attention. Large crowds would come out to hear the Friend’s sermons. Some attendees were supporters who sought religious salvation. Others simply wanted to see the so-called spiritual being who was neither male nor female. And others were critics who accused the Friend of being a dangerous fanatic who threatened the world with their lies, unholy thoughts, and sexual immorality.
Many of the Universal Friends believed that the Friend was a savior like Jesus, which led to tension with other religious groups. In the 1790s, the Friend and the Universal Friends established the town of Jerusalem in New York. They hoped the town would be a safe place to practice their faith and fulfill God’s will, away from the curiosity and critique of the general population. But this plan ultimately failed. Few new followers moved there, and many chose to leave the community because of disputes over land ownership and religious beliefs.
After the Friend’s death in 1819 many historians attempted to determine the “truth” of the Friend’s spiritual awakening and subsequent rejection of traditional gender norms. Nineteenth century historians concluded that they were perpetuating a “hoax” used their use of both male and female clothing as “proof” that they were mentally unstable, a charge that sounds so familiar today.
However within the last decade scholars and historians have been willing to examine the story of the Public Universal Friend and how they fit within larger discussions of gender identity and the rejection of traditional binary gender definitions in our society.
I believe that the Public Universal Friend represents one of the many historical examples of someone who is able to reject traditional notions of a binary gender despite intense societal pressure to conform.