Marginal Religion, Marginal Women J. William Frost (bio) Cristine Levenduski. Peculiar Power: A Quaker Woman Preacher in Eighteenth-Century America. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1996. x + 171 pp. Epilogue, notes, bibliography, and index. $34.95. Susan Juster. Disorderly Women: Sexual Politics and Evangelicalism in Revolutionary New England. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994. x + 224 pp. Index. $37.50. Elizabeth Ashbridge (1713–1755) is the only eighteenth-century Quaker woman minister whose life story bears resemblances to fictional heroines like Moll Flanders and Pamela, though without any seduction scenes. Ashbridge, born Sampson, the only child of a prosperous English family, eloped at age fourteen with a poor weaver who died five months later. Her father, a ship’s doctor who had been absent most of Elizabeth’s life, refused to allow her to come home, so she went to live with Irish Quaker relatives. Five years later, Elizabeth met a gentlewoman who turned out to be a shady character and attempted to kidnap her. Her passage to America was marked by Ashbridge warning the captain of a threatened mutiny, but her service brought no escape from what may have been an illegal indenture. Instead, she was overworked, ill fed, and almost stripped and beaten when she told a fellow servant of her supposedly religious master’s ill use (perhaps a sexual advance). Because she was a good singer and dancer, she debated becoming an actress. Instead, after buying the last year of indenture through the profits of skilled needlework, she married an itinerate schoolteacher named Sullivan whom she did not love. From childhood Ashbridge had been religious, wishing to have been a boy so she could be a minister. Raised an Anglican, she had debated and then rejected becoming a Roman Catholic in Ireland, and now engaged in a religious search, visiting many denominations. In spite of her antipathy to Quakers, when welcomed on a visit to Quaker relatives in Pennsylvania, Elizabeth Sullivan found spiritual unity with Friends. Her husband, however, was abusive in his opposition. In time, the Sullivans both became schoolteachers in Mount Holly, New Jersey and she seemed on the way to [End Page 213] converting her husband. Instead, in a drunken fit, he joined the army, but later in the West Indies refused to fight as a conscientious objector. The army disciplined him so severely that he became unfit for service and was returned to the military hospital at Chelsea, where he died. The widow Elizabeth Sullivan continued to teach school and pay off her debts. Here the written narrative ends, although Sullivan lived another twelve years in which she became an influential Quaker minister who traveled in order to preach the faith and married Aaron Ashbridge, a wealthy Pennsylvania farmer. She died on a religious journey to England. Her journal, with a testimonial from her meeting and husband, was published in 1774 and went through several editions. The heart of Cristine Levenduski’s book is an analysis of Ashbridge’s diary that was recently reprinted in a critical edition with an introduction by Daniel Shea in Journeys in New Worlds: Early American Women’s Narratives and has been widely anthologized. 1 Levenduski says Ashbridge’s autobiography offers a “synecdoche” into being a widow, an immigrant, an indentured servant, a wife, and a Quaker—all vulnerable and “marginal” roles in early America. The diary is allegedly even more revealing than that of her more famous contemporary and probable acquaintance, John Woolman, because it departs from the normal format of a Quaker journal. And Levenduski is right that Ashbridge’s personality and sense of self is most unusual: she was an educated, opinionated woman, who accepted responsibilities for her troubles and yet was victimized by others. The journal makes her both conscious actor, sensitive to her class and poverty, and passive recipient of God’s grace. She sought family stability and a “father,” but made decisions that brought neither. In a sense she was even responsible for her husband’s death, for he accepted the Quaker position on war. She also defied patriarchy as a daughter and a wife. Through all her wanderings, depressions, and persecutions Ashbridge engaged in a religious search that brought her...