The Public Universal Friend
In this episode, host Denis Long is joined by professor Scott Larson as they discuss Public Universal Friend, a traveling non-binary Quaker minister, and the complexities of gender identity in early Quaker history.
Scott Larson is a Lecturer IV in the department of American Culture at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is a scholar of transgender history and culture, with a particular focus on early American culture and religion. His scholarship investigates the ways that radical religious experience in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world transformed gender, sexuality, disability, and racial formations in early America. His work has appeared in the Journal of Early American Studies and Transgender Studies Quarterly. He received an M.A. in Theology from Yale Divinity School and received his Ph.D. in American Studies from George Washington University.
Thank you for listening, and join us as we Meet Quaker History.
AUDIO TRANSCRIPTION
[Denis]: Hello everyone and welcome to this next installment of our Arch Street Meeting House’s podcast where we talk about untold stories in Quaker history that you may not have heard about in school or in any other sort of history medium that we feel are very significant especially to social justice movements, both today and throughout all of American history. Today I am joined by Scott Larson, who is a professor at the University of Michigan, right?
[Scott]: Correct.
[Denis] Okay, cool. I want to make sure I got that correct, and he is a professor of history, and we will be talking today specifically about a very unique individual in Quaker history by the name of the Public Universal Friend. First, I would like to give some time to Scott to introduce himself, go right ahead.
[Scott]: Thanks so much Denis, and thanks for inviting me to be part of the podcast. I am Scott Larson. I have a PhD in American Culture from George Washington University, and I teach in the American Culture Department at the University of Michigan. There I teach courses in early American cultural history, courses in religion and sexuality, and also, courses in transgender history.
[Denis]: Awesome. Wonderful. So, I guess to jump right in, this individual by the name of the Public Universal Friend is a very very interesting one because they kind of represent what I feel to be one of the earliest examples, at least in American history of gender identities that a lot of people who are not able to study these types of things may consider very new and recent ideas when it goes to show that no matter what context it is, it's in these types of gender identities have always really existed throughout history and so just kind of give some background information on the Public Universal Friend. First off, I would like to say that…and this is actually going to be a topic that will come up in our discussion later on, as it is a part of an article that Scott Larson wrote that the Public Universal Friend was born assigned female at birth if we're using modern terms to help create a better understanding for our modern audience, and was given the name Jemima Wilkinson. They died of “died of an intense fever’ in the year 1776, only to be supposedly reborn as a now genderless messenger of God by the name of Public Universal Friend. Scott, if you would like to say a little bit more about this event of a seemingly divine intervention, go right ahead.
[Scott]: It’s always hard to know where to start with the Public Universal Friend because one of the things that is the sort of overarching part of this story is a story of radical religious experience. And this is something that is maybe easy to think from a modern perspective that this was just something that people regularly claimed or believed in early America but in 1776, saying that you had died and were resurrected as a genderless spirit inhabited by the Spirit of God to give a message to people in the world was regarded as, I guess in a kind sense, an outsider point of view, so that was considered generally typical but it also was something that appealed to a surprising number of people. Over 200 people ended up not just following the Public Universal Friend, but actually moving with the Public Universal Friend to a place that is now upstate New York. They uprooted their lives, their families, and it's, it's always complicated when we're talking about religious belief, to know sort of what people quote-unquote really believed or how exactly they saw this person or this experience, but it is definitely the case that a lot of people went to see the Friend speak. The Friend became internationally famous and is written about in newspapers in London, and in the colonies that then became the United States, places like Philadelphia. People came to see the Friend speak for a variety of reasons, some partly, traveling preachers, especially ones with remarkable stories were entertainment.
[Denis]: Especially remarkable stories
[Scott]: Yeah, people who would read about the Friend in the newspaper about how the Friend was dressed in this combination of clothes. Some of these stories in the newspaper, as a historian, I want to say some of these stories are really farfetched. Some of the stories would claim that the Friend, you know, hardest men to pull their carriage which I doubt, historically happened. But people wanted to show up and see the Friend and I think one of the things that people today share with people in the 1770s, 1790s, and 1800s is a fascination with this story that's really remarkable, really outside of everyday experience but also kind of opening up a possibility to seeing something in the world that points beyond the existing experiences of the world, whether that's in a religious sense, whether that's in a sense of gender, or a sense of kind of performance that is something remarkable to see.
[Denis]: Absolutely, yeah. There were a few written accounts from various publications that I found on the Public Universal Friend who refer to them as their former name, and most of the time in these in these accounts they would often talk about how they wore their hair down like men and spoken this masculine tone when they were preaching, yet still refer to them using she/her pronouns, but also talked about how some of their followers would either use he/him pronouns or just only call them strictly the Friend, as opposed to using singular they pronouns. So very, very blurred lines of gender going on there and there was one account that stuck out to me, purely because it had this quote from one of the Friend’s followers that, when asked about Jemima Wilkinson said that there was no such person as Jemima Wilkinson, end quote. So, I find that very very interesting because it has a lot of correlation between our modern ideas of when it comes to dead names for gender, gender non-conforming people (that is the phrase used, for those unaware), the phrase used for a person of a transgender identities former name if they choose to abandon that for a new one because it is representative of who they formerly were and want to move past it strictly for reasons for comfortability reasons and such. So, it's very interesting to see that we are seeing that it may not be for the exact same reasons or caused by the same exact things that we see today but it's interesting to see these correlations between all of it.
[Scott]: Yeah and I think that one of the things we see in the story of the Friend again that suggested, you know, people today may share more with people of 250 years ago than we'd like to admit in terms of not quite knowing how to talk about gender, being fascinated by gender difference, wanting to know what is really underneath a person's clothes, trying to decipher a voice that sounds unfamiliar and trying to debate like how do you use names and pronouns when they don't accord with how a person is being in the world at this moment, so how do you refer to a person's past. Now, with the Friend, it is also about a really remarkable religious claim that this person is, first of all, not even a person anymore, but a spirit inhabiting a tabernacle of flesh that has been left behind by the dead Jemima Wilkinson is now only this, this spirit of God sent to humans. And that is certainly something different than most forms of trans, non-binary, gender non-conforming, identity. So, I just want to say that there is a lot of variety in trans and gender non-conforming experience, but it is not as typical that people claim that they have died and been resurrected.
[Denis]: Absolutely.
[Scott]: But there's still this sense, I think it's really important for us to understand that the Friend is making a claim that after death, this spirit is outside of gender. And so, it's not just that the case that the Friend is making a religious claim that therefore has nothing to do with gender, the Friend is making a religious claim that is deeply involved with gender and actually has a suggestion about the nature of the afterlife within this sort of realm of belief and practice that the soul, and this spirit are outside of gender beyond gender. And it suggests, and it's drawing this from a biblical passage, Galatians 3:28, insisting that after death, the worldly categories that divide people into categories like master and slave, Jew and Greek, and also male and female are no longer things that exist after death. In this case it's in heaven or in this, you know, sort of Christian afterlife. But this suggests a practice of, sort of, and we would call this theologically, a proleptic practice, a practice of living in the present, a future state, but saying that that future state does not have this kind of gender binary. And also, that gender binary is not something eternal, or spiritual, but it is located in the world and in the history of the world. You know, in certain ways, it is interpreting that biblical passage, in a sense that you might hear a classroom that gender is a social construct, and that is one of the suggestions that's going on in the way that the Friend and the Friend’s followers are engaged with gender. So, again, I think I keep coming back to this, the sense that there is maybe more in common with us and the people who are going to see the Friend than we would automatically think of.
[Denis]: That I think it's good that you're going back to that sentiment pretty often because I feel like that's kind of what I was expecting the general theme of this installment to be because you know as I was researching this individual, I too saw those different connections and such. And another interesting thing too is that, even despite these connections, the causation for the Public Universal Friend to embrace a fully non-conforming gender identity is not really of the same type of circumstances that we see in most gender non-conforming people today, whether it be gender dysphoria or a feeling of just general isolation, by, by social constructs. This is a fully spiritual and religious type of situation and, you know, maybe some people nowadays might have the same situation but it's not really something you hear that often, because most of the time, you don't really find, say a non-binary person and they end up becoming this televangelist, instead you see most of the time gender non-conforming, who were in specifically strictly religious households end up being condemned by their religious families. Of course, there are religious families that are accepting of their children and kind of use their religion to express their love and such, but when it comes to, I feel like more often than not, I would say unfortunately more often than not is a case where there is at least a little bit of misunderstanding between family members. And so, I feel like this could be a pretty good transition into one of the biggest themes of your article that we talked about which, by the way, I used in a project like two semesters ago. I was talking about just gender non-conforming controversies in American history and the influences about on the people themselves, and when we booked this interview I was like, Oh Scott Larson, the name sounds familiar, and then I went back to that project I saw the article I was like, Oh, okay. Awesome. Cool. Perfect. Awesome. So, the article to me was very very fascinating because I feel like it brings a great point of how in a historical study, do you approach this type of thing, because you want to always, in any historical study, you always want to be sure to avoid anachronisms, or avoid…actually that's probably just the right term and in general, but for those who are not familiar with the term it is basically using modern terminologies, or modern or basing past situations off your own moderate ideals instead of strictly focusing in on just the past. So, how do you feel, feel free to just express some of the points that you make in the article this way people can understand what we're talking about.
[Scott]: Yeah, so I think there's a real challenge in thinking about transgender history before the emergence of the term transgender, and there's two challenges. One is the real history of this term, is that the term itself transgender emerges in the 1990s, really into more common usage, but in the 20th century, conversations about terminology relating to people who come to have terminology for identifying themselves in ways that are different in gender terms, different than the genders that they are assigned when they're born. And while that terminology is relatively short, there is a very long history of people engaging in what could be called transing practices of crossing gender boundaries, identifying in varied or multiple ways, engaging in gender non-conformity or in non-binary ways. Now, one of the things that often gets assumed when you say well, this that's anachronistic to apply the term transgender, and I don't necessarily disagree with that in my article I don't argue that the friend is transgender, I do argue that the friend is part of transgender history. And I think one of the things that gets assumed when people say well this is presentism or this is anachronism, is that people who are gender non-conforming or gender variation or sexual minorities or sexual non-conformity, simply didn't exist in the past, and that is untrue. We have a broad array of evidence around the Friend but also other people, that people did engage in gender and sexual non-conformity, but also the people in the past talked about it, they debated it, they tried to figure out how gender was working and where and if it mattered. And the other thing is that one of the conversations is going on as the Friend is claiming to be a resurrected genderless spirit, is really a panic in early colonial America but also in London and areas around the Atlantic about how gender distinctions were going to be destroyed forever. One of the themes I hit my transgender history classes that there is a regular fear that suddenly gender doesn't mean what it quote has always meant, that gender is going away, that gender is under attack, that men and women aren't going to exist anymore because of gender change, and that happened in early America around a series of things. One is a history of religious transformation where people like Quakers not exclusively, but Quakers and some Evangelical people are arguing that men and women are spiritually equal. And this is something that prompts a lot of anti-Quaker sentiment, some of which is pornographically offensive about how Quakers, you know, because Quakers don't have the spiritual hierarchy of men over women that Quaker marriages aren't valid; Quakers having sex with other Quakers is essentially like same-sex sexuality because same-sex sexuality is seen as like if you are having sex between people who are equal, that is homosexuality, and they're like what's next; Quakers are just gonna be having sex with animals, there's a lot of talk about….
[Denis]: Similar to the slippery slopes we see today.
[Scott]: Yeah. Quakers are involved in bestiality and the reason they say that this is happening is because Quakers, and I want to say not all Quakers all agreed that spiritual equality is a principle; there were definitely, there's a variety of Quaker theologies and beliefs in the 1700s, today, but the principle of spiritual equality was something that was seen as an assault on gender and that assault on gender was coming from Quakers, from Evangelical Christians, from people who were making the argument that God speaks directly to individual people without distinction. And so, one of the things I want to push here is that the history we've told about the way in which Christianity, or broadly Evangelical Christianity specifically is always opposed to gender difference, opposed to gender equality, opposed to gender transformation, or opposed transing gender is simply not the case. There's a much richer relationship where Christianity was seen as a cause of the destruction of gender differences, but also enlightenment politics. The idea that people would participate in representative government raised a question of how women participated in representative government, and whether women's engagement in politics with, whether women's education, whether women's ownership of property was making women, not women anymore.
[Denis]: Also, Wollstonecraft comes to mind as we're talking about this, because I just wanted to mention her.
[Scott]: Yeah, so exactly Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Wollstonecraft is accused of being unsexed, of taking women's womanhood from them. So, some of the arguments we hear against Mary Wollstonecraft will be repeated with Women's Suffrage Movements in the 1840s, in the 1920s, in the 1960s, and 70s. The arguments we hear today about how trans people and feminists are destroying gender are very old arguments, and we've heard them a lot. So, I don't know if that makes you feel better or worse, but I will say it makes me as a historian, I feel like I have a lot of company in the past with people who wrestled with trying to understand gender in new ways. We are not the first people doing this.
[Denis]: I feel like that's a great explanation, especially for those that may be listening and aren't as familiar with, you know historiography and such and the general means of studying these types of things. When it comes to feeling better or worse about it, I probably have a better understanding. But of course, you know it shows that even though the main theme of this is that these types of identities have existed for so, so long, same have the arguments like you said. And it's unfortunate to see but unfortunately that is kind of the reality of many people, you know like you said, there is plenty people that back then who saw these types of things as the destruction of gender and the constructs that they knew were solidly toppling down. We see the exact same thing today, and you know people take a lot of stock in this because they have the sense of stability from it, whereas they don't understand that in order for everyone to have stability this type of thing needs to be accepted as a, as a construct that should be, you know, either reformed or dismantled in some sort of way. This way, those who have been oppressed can actually feel comfortable within the society. And so, while those are mainly… while we see more of that in in in later history post Public Universal Friend or even beforehand, that does not seem to be the case with the Public Universal Friend and I feel like you do you bring up a good point about how Christianity being blamed for these types of things can be used in the example of the Public Universal Friend because Christianity had been the root of this divine ungendering of the Public Universal Friend.
[Scott]: Yeah, one of the things that's complicated about the case of the Friend, is the way that the Friend is engaged in genderless-ness. Being an embodied spirit that is neither male nor female, was about expressing and enacting, probably an act during more than expressing, a divine presence. And so, one of the questions that often gets asked about the Friend is well, you know like, what did how did they really identify personally, and I will just say they didn't even identify as a person. (24:15)
[Denis]: Exactly.
[Scott]: But I will say people at the time, also looked for sort of what are the causes of this like what, and you know what has caused this person to dress in a combination of men and women's clothing, to embark on a career of being a public itinerant minister to really engage in some very dramatic forms of book preaching, and community leadership. It's hard to tell which accounts are thoroughly true but it is the case that the Friend's house became a place that people regularly visited, especially Europeans and travelers from France, love to go on a trip to the United States and they're like, what are the things we need to see in the United States? We need to go to Philadelphia and see some presidents, we need to go to New York State and see the Public Universal Friend, we definitely have to visit Ohio and Kentucky, like, there was a an itinerary that was undertaken by a lot of international travelers, a lot of them French travelers, and they were both writing for an audience of people who wanted an account of the, you know, wild things they saw in North America, with these Americans on their frontier. So, certainly, many of these are embellished but it's also the case that this was a settlement that had great food, that had a robust communal spiritual life, that also had controversy, which we know because there is significant legal records of deeds, people in the community suing each other and fighting with each other, which is, again, if we're talking about sort of the things that that happened in the past that have resonances in the present, people living together is always a challenge.
[Denis]: Exactly.
[Scott]: But I will say that even though people in the past and in the present are really often focused on the Friend's internal sense of self. That is not something we have a lot of access to, but I would also argue that it's not terribly useful. And part of that is pushing against the idea that the ways we understand gender, gender identity, and terms like transgender or non-binary and also groupings of identities like LGBTQIA are also historically specific in our moment, and they address a complex, but also limited sets of ways we can think about gender and or sexuality, and the ways in which they are aren't part of each other. And so, we often are very focused on understanding transgender as primarily a set of identities, and are prepared to discount the performances of transing if we don't believe that they have a foundation in personal identity. But in the past, you started by talking about anachronism, and avoiding presentism, we have to understand the ways that in the 18th century, a great deal of interest was not focused exactly on people's identity, or how they understood themselves, but was very much focused on what they did and how they behaved in public, which is one of the reasons that the idea that voting or getting an education or owning property would make women not women anymore. They were really arguing that this was going to change some sort of body morphology or, I mean some people did, but in general the sense was that women cease to be women when they stopped doing woman things, and that list of woman things was very narrow and one of the things we might think about is the way in which feminist movements, stretching all the way back to the 18th century have been argued, have been and I'm going to be you know, sort of, maybe inflammatory here, transgender movements. That they are movements that seek to redefine what woman is in ways that actually are routinely accused of destroying womanhood, destroying femininity, destroying the gender binary. And we have to take seriously the concerns that having women do different things and have different kinds of life is a fundamental transformation of genders and gender possibilities.
[Denis]: Absolutely. I feel like that's a great point, it shows that just as how the social constructs that bring down LGBTQ plus people are actually fluid, so is the community in and of itself both currently and in its past history. You know it's an ever changing, I guess, flow of things that you can really look at from any type of perspective. And as we see here you can look through this in a Christian perspective and as you said to you can look at it through a feminist perspective, there's so many different perspectives that you can look in through, and I feel like, you know, as hard as it is especially for a someone who is not an historian to, to really you know, study and to kind of look through all this, it's still important to at least have the idea in the back of your mind that you can look at this in any length, in any angle, any angle is a valid angle, you know, sure, some may be a little more out of left field feel than others, but you can you can try and make a make some kind of an argument out of, really a lot of things. There are a few questions that I emailed to you and we've definitely touched on the first two of them. The first one of them being Is there a benefit or detriment to using modern terminology for the Public Universal Friend, which we definitely addressed in talking about anachronisms and presenteeism and so, I feel like we definitely covered that one very well. The second one being, how does the Public Universal Friend’s identity and following align with Quaker beliefs? We touched on that a little bit, but if you want to expand on that, please feel free to go right ahead.
[Scott]: I will saw again, I want to reiterate that Quaker beliefs are widespread and I certainly don't want to represent all of them in this, but…
[Denis]: I think I can confirm that by saying my current senior seminar paper is on the many many multitudes of schisms and ideologies involving the Abolitionist Movement during the antebellum so I can confirm ideologies among Quakers are in no way, in no way uniform. Some are, some are, but it's really all of interpretation when it when it comes to a lot of Quaker ideology, so continue, I just wanted to mention that.
[Scott]: Yeah and so one of the...there's a few complicated things about the relationship between the Public Universal Friend and Quakerism. First of all, the terminology that the Friend and the Friends movements used come directly from Quaker practices in 18th century. So the Friend’s name, Friend, I think, is very reliably linked to the name given to public friends, rather than preacher or minister in accordance with the idea that God speaks to individuals directly that it is not mediated through special people in the world.
[Denis]: And also that there's a sense of equality to. Sorry to interrupt you, but there's that sense of equality among all them like, what was the term they used? Spiritual equality, that's what it was. There is that spiritual equality that shows that they are all simply friends in the eyes of God, continue I just want to… it came to my head, I want to make sure I said it.
[Scott]: Yeah, so, so the some of the language and terminology, the practices of how the community gathered around the Public Universal Friend drew on Quaker practices, practices of sitting in silence or waiting on the Lord. And this is also, I will say, a very distinctive manifestation of some of those practices because also the Friend did hold a leadership position, there was both some principles of equality but there was also in practice some forms of hierarchy, but it was also the case that women in the community of the Public Universal Friend held esteemed roles in the community, acted in ways of engaging in spiritual leadership, and community leadership, in holding some property and determining who, who, how certain tasks or property was divided, so there was definitely a wider set of opportunities or places for women to enact their place in the community and part of that comes from a principle of spiritual equality. The other thing that I think is really significant in thinking about the practice of Quaker living, I want to say, amongst the society of the Public Universal Friend is balancing or the principle of the divine light or the inner light where God speaks directly to individuals with community practice conversation about our, is what has been received in fact the divine light or is it to use another 18th century word enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is was a term used in the 18th century to, to denote a range of sort of bad religious ideas but also being sort of taken over by a kind of divine inspiration or inspiration from outside of the world and so I have a lot of valances for everything from suggestion of mental illness, or, or what people might diagnose now as schizophrenia, which one of the things I know I'm interrupting myself but one of the most frustrating things I experienced when I talk about the Friend is not just people trying to identify and say oh the Friend is, you know, this identity or is that identity but also the imputation or diagnosis of mental illness on religious figures in the past. Happens almost every time I talked about the Friend and people will say oh well clearly that is this mental illness, and all I want to say is, refrain from diagnosing people in the past with mental illnesses. There's a lot of really excellent work in disability studies that thinks about why that is a problem, but Quaker people were often associated with mental illness and madness. This is also true of Evangelical Christians people like George Whitfield goes around and preach and people associate him with with mental illness and madness. But this is one of the things that Quakers are very worried about, and they are… have a principle of bringing inspiration into a community conversation, and in the conversation with Scripture. And so, when the Friend is talking about, you know, you know, in Christ Jesus there is no more male or female. This is a Quaker practice of connecting the inner light, and this radical religious experience to confirmation from scriptural texts.
[Denis]: Yeah, it has that feel to it where it is just a full embrace of spiritual practice and spirituality as a whole. To move on to the last question because I know we're, not running out of time but I know this discussion has been very, very thorough and I've really really enjoyed it, to move on to the last question. I would like to ask you, we also, we kind of touched on this a little bit, but I feel like this would be a very good question to end it on is the Friend important to not just Quaker history but LGBTQ plus history as a whole and why or why not?
[Scott]: I think, I mean, I, I will acknowledge that I have some bias here thinking that the Friend is important to both Quaker history, Queer…
[Denis]: I have a bias to I'm not gonna lie.
[Scott]: …history. In American history and the history of religion, really very broadly. I think that there's a number of different ways that this can be interpreted, so, I will say, you know, on a personal level, I never imagined that I would become a historian, I, I wanted to study queer theory and theology and neither of those things are terribly historical in orientation. They're actually meant to a certain extent, deeply ahistorical or anti-historical.
[Denis]: and very literary too.
[Scott]: Yes, absolutely. And I read this case about the Public Universal Friend in the work of Susan Juster and Catherine Brekus, and those were interpretations that I disagreed with, but they made me see a tremendously different world in terms of early American religious history than I ever thought existed. And I think that sometimes our imaginations about the past are very limited based on the stories we tell ourselves in the present, and the Friend captures people's imaginations, captured people's imaginations in the 18th century, and in the present, and history, we often think is something that is not about imagination, but we have to be able to encounter worlds different from our own, ask questions about them, be curious about them, be excited about a world that is different than what we already thought it was because that is the basis of doing good historical work, of doing good critical work in the present, and also of seeing a world where people who experience gender or sexuality or religion differently, or mental capacity, or also like engaged in differences around sensation or processing, have a place in the world and have had a place in the world for a very long time. And it is really vital to see this kind of history much more richly because it challenges us to dissenter what we think we know about the world and ask us to broaden what might be possible. So that's a pretty aspirational piece, but I will say, on, on a very basic level, it shows us the people in early America we're talking in very complex ways about gender, about sexuality, and about its relationship to religion, these things have a lot more overlap than we think they do, and the story of religion and gender and sexuality in America is a lot closer than we often think it is.
[Denis]: Absolutely, I feel like ending it on that aspirational and inspirational note, I think is good because I even in the past two installments of this, this has kind of been the general feel, I guess that these untold stories have stirred, you know. In our first installment we talked about Benjamin lay, a very fervent abolitionist and activist in many other regards and we talked about Alice Paul in our second installment, you know, massive women's rights figure and now talking about the Public Universal Friend, while not an activist in any sort of sense, definitely represents some sort of social change that we can absolutely associate with today, and I feel like that's a great spot to leave it off there. So,…
[Scott]: Thank you so much for having me.
[Denis]: Thanks Scott for joining me today, as well as our listeners for tuning in. For more information about today's topic and resources, please visit historicASMh.org/podcast. Arch Street Meeting House is dedicated to preserving and maintaining the historic Meeting House and Burial Grounds and expanding public understanding of the impact and continued relevance of Quakers. If you enjoyed this episode and would like to continue to support Arch Street Meeting House, please consider making a financial gift at historicASMH.org/donate. Join us next time as we explore untold stories in Quaker history. Thank you so much!
WORKS CITED
“Account of Jemimah Wilkinson, Styled the Universal Friend, Also of Her Doctrines and Followers. Philadelphia, Feb. 14, 1787.” 1787. American Museum: Or Repository & Modern Fugitive Pieces Etc. Prose & Poetical 1 (2): 150–54.
“Further Account of Jemimah Wilkinson.” 1787. American Museum, or, Repository of Ancient & Modern Fugitive Pieces, &c. Prose & Poetical (Philadelphia, PA - 1787-1788) 1 (5): 389–92.
Larson, Scott. ""Indescribable Being": Theological Performances of Genderlessness in the Society of the Publick Universal Friend, 1776–1819." Early American Studies 12, no. 3 (2014): 576-600.
Moyer, Paul Benjamin, and William Blake. The Public Universal Friend: Jemima Wilkinson and Religious Enthusiasm in Revolutionary America. Ithaca, New York; Cornell University Press, 2015.