The Woman They Called Mother

In a plain wooden room outside Albany, two lines of worshippers face each other across a bare floor, men along one wall, women along the other. The benches have been pushed back. A woman in a coarse working dress lifts her voice, and the two lines begin to tremble and turn.

It is 1776.

She does not just survive the mills of Manchester. She works the textile factories from childhood, marries a blacksmith’s apprentice, buries four children in infancy, and turns that grief into a conviction that the road to God runs through a celibate and common life.

She does not just join a band of dissenters. She rises among the trembling worshippers the neighbors call Shaking Quakers, is jailed in 1770 for breaking the sabbath, and comes out of the cell with visions her followers take as proof that she is meant to lead them.

She does not just preach in England. She gathers eight followers, sails for New York in 1774, and by 1776 has raised the first American community of her faith on cleared land at Niskayuna, near Albany.

She does not just ask for the freedom to worship. She refuses the oath of allegiance, refuses to bless the Patriot cause, refuses to let her people carry arms, and in 1780 is arrested on suspicion of treason in the middle of a war that has no patience for her gospel.

Her Spark of Liberty was the right to answer to God before the state.

She taught celibacy, common property, and the equal standing of women and men before God, and she would not trade any of it for safety. The country around her read her refusal to fight as disloyalty, and she paid for it in jail cells and before hostile crowds to the end of her life.

Now, “Where History Comes to Life.”

Born in Manchester, England, on or about February 29, 1736, the daughter of a blacksmith, she never learned to read or write and worked in the textile mills and the city infirmary. She married Abraham Standerin in 1762 and bore four children, none of whom survived childhood. Around 1768 she joined the Wardley circle of Shaking Quakers, and after a 1770 imprisonment her followers knew her as Mother. In 1774 she led eight believers across the Atlantic and founded the first American Shaker community at Niskayuna, later Watervliet, near Albany. She is often said to have taught that Christ had appeared a second time in her, in female form, though much of that doctrine was shaped by her followers after her death. Worn down by years of preaching tours through New England and by the violence of hostile crowds, she died at Watervliet on September 8, 1784, about forty-eight years old. By the next century the movement she planted numbered thousands of believers in nineteen communities.

Her name was Ann Lee.

Now We Know Em
by Christopher B. Gordon

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