Ann Lee (1736–1784) was the charismatic leader of the Shakers, a utopian religious group founded in upstate New York that was best known for its raucous church services, high-quality furniture, and total prohibition on sexual intercourse. The ecstatic singing, trembling, and shouting adherents engaged in at their services earned the group its name.
Born to a poor blacksmith in the industrial center of Manchester, England, Lee was sent to work in a factory as a child and never learned to read or write. She tried to avoid marriage. But her father forced her to wed another blacksmith, Abraham Standerin, in 1762.
Unhappy in her marriage, Lee joined a small religious sect led by Jane and James Wardley that had split away from the Quakers. The Wardleys were famous for their confrontational attitudes and had been known to burst into Anglican churches to disrupt services. Lee joined in several such escapades and was jailed repeatedly beginning in 1770. Encouraged by the Wardleys, she also decided to embrace celibacy, to her husband’s consternation. (The couple split up five years later.)
Seeking religious freedom, Lee and eight other Shakers immigrated to New York, where she founded the American wing of the Shaker church in 1774. An unusual event—the “Dark Day” of May 19, 1780—played an important role in Shaker history. On that morning, the sun seemed not to rise over New England. Although probably caused by thick smoke from a large fire, the event was interpreted as a bad omen and triggered a wave of religious fervor across New England and New York.
In 1781, Lee left New York to seek more converts in New England. She established the settlement at Harvard, Massachusetts, one of what would eventually be twenty-one Shaker communities in the United States. The communities lived by principles of hard work, shared property, celibacy, and equality of the sexes. Lee believed that God was both the father and the mother, and many of her followers believed she was Christ’s female counterpart.
Lee died in 1784 at age forty-eight, but the church founded by “Mother” Ann Lee grew quickly after her death. At its height in the mid-nineteenth century, the Shakers claimed 5,000 adherents living by one of Lee’s famous mottos: “Hands to work, and hearts to God.”
ADDITIONAL FACTS
- While still living with her husband, Lee had four children, all of whom died in infancy, and suffered four stillbirths.
- American composer Aaron Copland (1900–1990) incorporated the melody of the Shaker hymn “’Tis the Gift to Be Simple” into his ballet Appalachian Spring, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1945. The song was originally written by Shaker elder Joseph Brackett (1797–1882).
- Unable to retain male members, the ranks of Shakers began to dwindle in the late nineteenth century. As of 2010, only a handful of Shakers remain at the 1,800-acre community of Sabbathday Lake, Maine, which was founded in 1794.
