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Chapter6 Women ofRevelation: Jemima Wilkinson and Joanna Southcott While Richard Brothers languished in a private asylum and Nimrod Hughes was still a twinkle in the eye ofAmerica's neophyte urban press, an unlettered seamstress from England's provincial southwest was beginning her remarkable rise to fame as the revolutionary era's premier prophet. Alone among her peers, Joanna Southcott has been the recipient ofserious scholarlyas well as popular interest in the nearly two centuries since her death; alone among her peers, she continues to be a living presence in the contemporary world of Anglo-American millenarianism, as offshoots of her enormous following dispersed throughout the English-speaking world in the 1830s and 1840s, spawning numerous local societies who today trace their lineage back to the Devonshire prophetess in a series ofgenerational and theological "dispensations:' While Southcott has garnered the lion's share of historical attention, much ofit negative, her popularity in fact was built on the backs ofhundreds of obscure men and women who kept the flame of millennia! hope alive in the inhospitable climate of the late eighteenth century. We can trace a direct line of connection from Richard Brothers to Southcott through figures like Nathaniel Brassey Halhed and the engraver William Sharp, but even more important in creating a mass audience for Southcott's millenarian message were her fellow "women of revelation" who embodied in their very persons the biblical promise of violent regeneration. Women like the Philadelphian Jane Lead (whom we encountered in Chapter 3), the renegade French Prophets Hannah Wharton and Mary Plewitt, the Shaker Ann Lee, along with a host of lesser lights like Mary Mercin, Sarah Flaxmer, Elspeth Buchan, and Dorothy Gott, constituted a distinct female tradition of British millenarianism whose roots lay in the radical sectarian challenges of the 1640s. The female prophets ofthe Civil War era were true women warriors, fearlessly attacking the very foundations of the British ecclesiastical and civil order with bold gestures of contempt.1 Revo1 Phyllis Mack, "Women as Prophets During the English Civil War:' Feminist Studies 8 (Spring 1992), pp.19-45; Keith Thomas, "Women and the Civil War Sects:' Past and Present13 (1958), pp. 46-62. Women ofRevelation 217 lutionary-era female prophets were a remarkably tame group by the standards of the seventeenth century, but they did not entirely repudiate the aggressive iconoclasm of their forebears. Women had a unique role to play in the apocalyptic script, foreshadowed by the ancient Hebrew prophetesses, and Southcott, like her predecessors, was determined to carry out this mission . "Is it a new thing for a Woman to deliver her people?" she demanded. "Did not Esther do it? Did not Judith do it?"2 The women of revelation faced a new set of political and cultural barriers , however, that their Civil War counterparts were spared. The "patrician hegemony" of church and state, so vulnerable in the 1640s, had been secured by a hundred years' offensive against the forces of disorder (dissenters, republicans , infidels), a campaign that blended appeasement and repression in a disarming mix.3 Men and women were freer to express their opinions and air their discontents in the eighteenth century than they had been before 1688, even to congregate in dissenting societies and petition for collective redress , but in an important sense their opinions mattered less. Firebrands, whether religious fanatics or political radicals, were (for the most part) no longer imprisoned or punished for blasphemy or sedition, but neither did they inspire revolutionary movements on the same scale as the Levellers, Diggers, and Commonwealth men. The government had learned an important lesson: it was better to laugh at than to hang heretics, to provide just enough latitude for malcontents to harangue themselves into cultural oblivion . By providing commoners relatively unfettered access to the world of cheap print and easing the restrictions on heterodox religious worship, England 's governing elite achieved what Parliament had been unable to do without bloodshed 150 years before-quiet the voices of anger and despair before they exploded in violence. It was a remarkable achievement, given the depth of popular grievance, and one that would ensure the security and power of the propertied classes well into the nineteenth century.4 Religious dissenters were partially complicit in this extralegal disarming of the "mob;' and the radical wing of Protestant dissent-including millenarians-paid a high price for their acquiescence. What women prophets faced in the late eighteenth century was a formidable alliance ofwriters, critics, and politicians 2 Joanna Southcott, A Warning to the World...

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