Universal Friends

Jemima Wilkinson (29 November 1752 - July 1, 1819) was a charismatic American Quaker and evangelist. Based in Rhode Island, following a severe illness, she claimed a role as a religious prophet. She preached the Ten Commandments and total sexual abstinence to followers forming what she called the "Society of Universal Friends." Wilkinson had grown up in a Quaker family; their religion was historically called the Society of Friends.

Wilkinson preached and traveled in New England, where she was generally rejected by traditional Quakers. She settled for a time in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the temporary national capital and a city with a sizable Quaker community. There she attracted followers. In 1790 she and followers moved to western New York, to settle on land newly purchased from the dispossessed Seneca people. Most of the Seneca and other Iroquois peoples had been forced out of the state, having been allies of the British during the American Revolutionary War. Wilkinson and her followers founded Jerusalem, New York, since renamed as Penn Yan. It is located at the north end of Keuka Lake in the Finger Lakes region.

Born in 1752 in Cumberland, Rhode Island, Jemima Wilkinson was the daughter of Amy (née Whipple) and Jeremiah Wilkinson. Her father was a cousin of the politician Stephen Hopkins. The family attended traditional worship with other Quakers at the Smithfield Meeting House. As a young person in the mid-1770s, Wilkinson also attended meetings with New Light Baptists, who were part of the Great Awakening, a religious revival ultimately reaching from New England into the South.

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