Public Universal Friend Mentioned
"When the founding fathers said, all men are created equal, they had a very specific group of people in mind. But did you know there were people who challenged the founders from the jump? One of the most radical among them was a gender nonconforming preacher known as Puff. After suffering a severe illness in 1776, Jemima Wilkinson claimed to have died and been reanimated as a new non-binary person named the Public Universal Friend. Puff adopted androgynous outfits while preaching about their spiritual awakening to the public. But religious leaders were furious. Puff was banned from the community, mocked, and accused of blasphemy. But followers of Puff's teachings kept coming. At a time when strict religious, racial, and gender rules still limited the freedom of much of the population, Puff encouraged their followers to question those traditional values. They managed to convince at least one plantation owner to emancipate all of his enslaved multiple divorces were filed in Rhode Island and Connecticut specifically because women abandoned their husbands to go join Puff's Society of Universal Friends. By the time they arrived in Philadelphia to preach in 1782, mostly male crowds were so angry they threw bricks and sticks at them. But it wasn't so much about Puff being a homewrecker as it was about Puff forcing the revolution to live up to its principles. In leading a young, radical, multiracial group that spoke in favor of progressive principles, Puff and the Universal Friends challenged revolutionary men's intentions of continuing white male power, racial and gender discrimination, and land expansion. Long before women's suffrage or anti-slavery or land rights movements existed in an official sense, people like Puff were fighting to ensure those seeds were planted in our young republic. Their actions remind us that the ideas promised by the revolution were not achieved for everyone during the revolution. But Puff's ideas continued to grow for centuries, and activists still nurture them today."
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Public Universal Friend Mentioned
