Not Your Founding Father: How a Nonbinary Minister Became America's Most Radical Revolutionary

By Nina Sankovitch

A thrilling celebration of a forgotten early American renegade, Not Your Founding Father reconsiders just how radical the American experiment could have been.

Early in the morning of October 9, 1776--in the small farming community of Cumberland, Rhode Island, in a house surrounded by cherry trees--twenty-three-year-old Jemima Wilkinson died, and the Public Universal Friend was born.

Old Cherry Wilkinson's children had already gained a reputation for scandal. Two of his boys had been dismissed from the local Quaker meeting for joining the colonial militia, and one of the girls was expelled for having a baby out of wedlock. Now, here was another Wilkinson child, riding about the countryside, claiming to be a genderless messenger of God.

Yet something about the Public Universal Friend set war-ravaged New England ablaze. The young minister seemed to embody the possibilities offered by the new nation, especially the right to total self-determination. To authorities, however, the minister was "the devil in petticoats," a threat to the men who sought to keep America's power for themselves.

And so the Public Universal Friend ventured west to create an Eden on the frontier, a place where everyone would have the right to not only life, liberty, and the pursuit happiness, but also peace and shared prosperity. But into every Eden comes a snake. And soon, financial scams, contested wills, adultery, plagiarism, allegations of murder, and murmurs of another war with England would threaten to destroy this new American utopia.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1982178701
• ISBN13: 9781982178703
• Release Date: January 2026
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Length: 400 Pages
• Weight: 1.13 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 9.0"