Elizabeth Ashbridge Notes

Elizabeth Ashbridge (1713-1755).

Some Account of the Fore Part of the Life of Elizabeth Ashbridge, who died in Truth's service at the house of Robert Lecky at Kilnock in the County of Carlow Ireland; the 16th of 5th mo. 1755.


Elizabeth Ashbridge, narrating the course of her conversion to Quakerism, displays the sharpness of religious prejudice both in her own harsh judgments and in the mistreatments to which people repeatedly subject her:

1. She elopes for love, but her first husband dies after 5 months. This she calls punishment from God for having disobeyed her parents, considering that they had the right to dispose of her as they might.
2. Her father disowns her for disobedience, which she presents almost without comment.
3. She works in Ireland and is well treated there by the Catholics with whom she stays, but the Catholic Church requires political affiliation among other things, and she does not agree because, raised an anglican, she's a royalist. She dutifully learns gaelic while she's there.
4. Deciding to return to the colonies, she betrays an Irish slave rebellion onship.
5. The ship's captain threatens Ashbridge, sells her into indentured servitude.
6. Her owner abuses her in ways suggestive of sexual sadism, denying her clothing and having her whipped naked in public.
7. She purchases her freedom a year early.
8. She marries a schoolmaster who likes her dancing.
9. She gets some notion that she shouldn't dance because that's against God's will. She makes no mention of a change in attitude towards sex, but nowhere is there any mention of pregnancy or household or anything of the sort. She seems contrite that her dancing misled her husband, but whether it misled him to marry for a hope of sensual satisfaction that is false because it's antispiritual or because she's unwilling to follow through with it remains unclear.
10. She goes to see some Quaker relatives.
11. She converts to quakerism.
12. Her husband subjects her to much cruelty hoping to dissuade her from her new sect. The language he gives him seems to indicate that he sees this as a way of returning her to the apparent good humours that she had when he married her (at various points she descrbes what would probably be considered treatable depression anywhere in the US today.) Given the dynamic around her dancing, one wonders the extent to which her husband's concern with her mood amounts to concern over sexual willingness.
13. Her husband finally gives up on her, and one day he gets drunk and signs up to go do battle in Cuba.
14. She concludes her narrative expressing sorrow for his death before conversion to true faith.

The woman seems educated and in some ways perceptive, but it's difficult to know how much. The narrative shows severe flattened effect and extreme confusion. She continues to seek from God what people deny her. She has apparent talent as a performer; she has physical passion at least twice, and may downplay that in her account. Yet she denies these, denies those around her, and wonders at their mistreatment of her.

On the other hand, that mistreatment does seem extreme, let alone undeserved. Her parents convince her that they own her. She must recognize that for falsehood at some point in her youth, but the insight seems buried in grief by the time she writes this narrative. Dancing accompanies the love of a man once again when she marries once again. Dancing accompanies any experience of passion that she does relate, yet she dismisses such things as inadequate reasons for matrimony.

Most unfortunate and ill-treated woman, altogether.