Ann Lee, From English Mill to American Foundress

Before she was Mother Ann to a community of American converts, Ann Lee was a mill worker in Manchester who had buried all four of her children in infancy and endured a marriage she found deeply unhappy. She found her way to the Wardleys' Shaking Quakers, a small sect whose worship broke into trembling, dancing and shouted testimony, and whose members watched for Christ's return. Lee's own turn toward leadership came out of suffering rather than ambition: jailed more than once for disturbing the peace with the group's ecstatic worship, she described a series of visions in prison that convinced her the root of humanity's fall lay in sexual union itself, and that she had been given a special calling to lead a people who would live otherwise. Returning to her followers, she was accepted as their spiritual mother. In 1774, with resources scraped together and a handful of followers willing to cross the Atlantic on the strength of her conviction, she sailed for New York and settled a small community near Albany. What grew from that settlement, the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing, organized celibate, property-sharing households around confession, labor and worship, and outlived Lee herself by more than a century, spreading across New England and beyond even as the world it withdrew from kept changing around it.