Born on February 29, 1736, in Manchester, England, Ann Lee was the unlettered daughter of a blacksmith who was probably named Lees. In her youth she went to work in a textile mill. At the age of twenty-two she joined a sect known as the Shaking Quakers, or Shakers, because of the shaking and dancing that characterized their worship. (Those practices had originated among a sect known as the Camisards, or Prophets, in France in 1688, many of whose adherents had later fled to England to avoid persecution.) She married reluctantly at twenty-five and over the next few years was deeply affected by the loss of all four of her children in infancy. In the following years she agonized over her conviction of sinfulness, suffering great remorse about her marriage. After a prolonged period of penance by mortification in 1770, during which she apparently experienced a divine illumination, she began to preach a new gospel, opposing marriage and sexual relationships and affirming the dual nature of God╤the original incarnation of the masculine in Christ to be followed during the present millennium by a feminine incarnation in the person of Ann Lee. Regarded thereafter as such by her followers, she was referred to as Ann the Word or Mother Ann and was celebrated as the leader of the Shakers. She was imprisoned for periods in 1772 and 1773 for preaching in the streets.
Prompted by a vision in 1774, she came to the New World with eight disciples. They arrived in New York City in August. In the spring of 1776 a colony was established at Niskeyuna (subsequently Watervliet) near Albany, New York. From about 1780 Ann Lee began proselytizing in the neighborhood and later in other parts of New York and in New England. Her evidently magnetic personality and the appeal of her doctrine of a communal life of neatness, simplicity, economy, charity, and equality of races and sexes, won wide attention. Whole congregations of Baptists joined the Shakers, and, despite occasional persecution (owing, in part, to the group╒s pacifism) their numbers swelled to several thousand during the next five years.
Led by Mother Ann╒s visions, the Shakers at Watervliet evolved beginnings of the communal life which later became the distinctive pattern of Shaker social organization. She died at Niskeyuna on September 8, 1784. After her death her followers organized the United Society of Believers in Christ╒s Second Appearing, which was also known as the Millennial Church and, most commonly, as the Shakers, and which by 1826 had grown to encompass 18 Shaker villages in 8 states. The intensive communal life of the Shaker settlements was of a remarkably stable nature. Within it developed styles of work that resulted particularly in distinctive furniture-making and other crafts. The Shakers gradually disappeared as an active religious sect, but their influence on American crafts and design proved permanent.
