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“Contempt for her Practice”: Elizabeth Ashbridge’s Quest for Religious Freedom through Pious Rhetoric and Rebellious Female Agency

Elizabeth Ashbridge’s autobiographical conversion narrative, Some Account of the Fore Part of the Life of Elizabeth Ashbridge, stands apart from other similar texts of the time due to the identity of the author and the emotional lens in which she frames the events of her life. Ashbridge writes not only as a Quaker and a minister but also as an immigrant, as a former indentured servant, and as a woman. In their separate scholarship, Cristine Levenduski and Etta Madden share the interpretation that Ashbridge does not frame her narrative around her status as a minister but instead portrays her past hardships through the rhetoric of the absolved to emphasize her conversion to her Quaker audience. Her tale recounts the suffering she endures under the persecution of male authority figures as she seeks to find a religion that can affirm her piety and match her passionate faith, without confining her to patriarchal restraints. During her narrative, she retrofits her prejudices toward Quakers as demonstrations of her former ignorance of their mannerisms and customs. Yet even once she prescribes her Quaker identity as her duty to God she still battles with reconciling the public position that women in the Quaker community had, specifically the ability of Quaker women to speak during meetings. Ashbridge uses the rhetoric of the redeemed in which she catalogs the onslaught of traumas of her life prior to becoming Quaker to present herself as a cautionary tale, but beneath this, her enduring resolve to practice her intense faith is what leads to her authoritative status as a minister. In another sense, Ashbridge’s narrative is unique because it documents a lifelong struggle with the religious constraints on agency for women that she eventually breaks free of by way of the gender equity characteristic of Quaker practice. In fact, Elisabeth Ceppi notes that Ashbridge also wrote her lesser known “Epistle to the Goshen Monthly Meeting” during the same time the narrative was probably written (141–42), which positions the narrative as the textual precursor to her station as a minister. Ceppi adds that “Her desire to reconcile the tensions between spiritual ideas and social practice—born within herself and in eighteenth-century American culture did not end at the conclusion of her narrative” (150). Furthermore, Julie Sievers asserts that