Not Your Founding Father: How a Nonbinary Minister Became America’s Most Radical Revolutionary Hardcover, Nina Sankovitch

Description

Not Your Founding Father: How a Nonbinary Minister Became America’s Most Radical Revolutionary
Hardcover – January 20, 2026
by Nina Sankovitch

Not Your Founding Father is a bold, revelatory work of historical nonfiction that reclaims one of the most radical and misunderstood figures of early America: the Public Universal Friend, a nonbinary religious leader whose life challenged gender, faith, and power at the very moment the United States was being born.

On October 9, 1776, in a small farming community in Cumberland, Rhode Island, twenty-three-year-old Jemima Wilkinson died—and in their place emerged the Public Universal Friend, a genderless messenger of God. Refusing all gendered pronouns and rejecting their former name, the Friend insisted they were no longer human but a vessel for divine truth.

In war-torn New England, the Friend’s message ignited fascination and fury. To followers, they embodied the revolutionary promise of self-determination and spiritual freedom. To authorities, they were a dangerous scandal, dismissed as “the devil in petticoats,” threatening a fragile social order built on patriarchy, property, and control.

As Nina Sankovitch vividly recounts, the Public Universal Friend led followers west to establish a utopian settlement on the frontier, envisioning an Eden grounded in peace, equality, shared labor, and personal autonomy. But even this radical experiment proved vulnerable. Financial schemes, contested wills, accusations of adultery and plagiarism, whispers of violence, and fears of renewed war with England all conspired to undermine the fragile community.

Blending meticulous research with gripping narrative, Not Your Founding Father situates the Friend within the broader revolutionary moment, revealing how questions of gender, authority, faith, and freedom were never settled at the nation’s founding. The book challenges tidy myths of American origins and reminds readers that queerness, resistance, and radical self-definition have always been part of the American story.

Provocative, deeply researched, and timely, Not Your Founding Father is essential reading for anyone interested in queer history, early America, and the unfinished work of freedom.