Elizabeth Ashbridge
(1713-1755)
Although little is known about Elizabeth Ashbridge beyond what is
recorded in her brief autobiography, Some Account of the Fore Part of
the Life of Elizabeth Ashbridge...Written by her own Hand many years ago
(1755), the narrative itself provides a portrait of a remarkable woman whose
spiritual questing and marital trials reveal much about religious imperatives
and gender roles in eighteenth-century American culture. Born to Anglican parents
in England, Ashbridge lived a rather adventurous adolescence. Eloping at
fourteen, an act prompting permanent estrangement from her authoritarian
father, she became a widow within months of her marriage. Banished from her
parents’ home, she spent several years in Ireland, where she began to seek
religious enlightenment. At nineteen she emigrated to the colonies as an
indentured servant, hoping to begin a new life. The first part of the Account
records these experiences and presents a protagonist who even as a young girl
showed signs of the fervent independence and spiritual predilection that would
mark her adult life as a convinced (that is, converted) Quaker.
Lamenting that the
Anglican ministry was closed to women, she turned to other denominations but
found little consolation among the Baptists, Presbyterians, and Catholics with
whom she worshiped in search of spiritual truth. Her appeals to the priestly
patriarchy of various churches were met with imperious indifference.
Ashbridge’s indenture to a cruel master whom she had taken for “a very
religious man” augmented her sense of the hypocrisy of much that passed for
piety; it also impelled her to buy her freedom and marry a worldly suitor
named Sullivan who “fell in love with me for my dancing.” Not long after,
visiting Quaker relations in Pennsylvania, she embraced their religion, a
commitment that profoundly changed her.
Despite her initial
distaste for the practices of the Society of Friends, which sanctioned—against
her early ecclesiastical and social tradition—the preaching of women, Ashbridge
was drawn to the beauty and eloquence of the faith, and her conversion is told
with simple power. Her newfound spiritual mission made her a more somber and
self-directed woman, alienating the husband who had loved her for her mirthful
nature. The remainder of the narrative is a poignant account of Ashbridge’s
struggle to observe her new faith against the growing anger and abuse of her
husband. Not until Sullivan’s death, told in the Account, and her
eventual union with Aaron Ashbridge, himself a Quaker, did she find the marital
and spiritual harmony she had for so long sought.
Elizabeth Ashbridge’s Account
underscores the importance of life-writing as a tool of female vindication in a
patriarchal culture. For its candor and emotional power, for the integrity of
the religious sensibility it conveys, and for its illuminating portrayal of
domestic relations in colonial America, the narrative merits a significant
place in our literary history.
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