Rebecca Cox Jackson
Rebecca Cox Jackson (February 15, 1795 – May 24, 1871) was a free Black woman, known for her religious feminism and activism and her writing.
Her autobiography was published in 1981 as Gifts of Power: The Writings of Rebecca Cox Jackson, Black Visionary, Shaker Eldress, edited by Jean McMahon Humez.
She wrote that after this awakening, she received divine gifts including healing people, seeing the future, having visions, control over the weather, hearing God's voice, acting as a medium, and learning to read spontaneously.
[2][3][4][5] Jackson worked as an itinerant preacher before joining the Shaker movement, which shared her values of egalitarianism and celibacy.
[6] In 1859, Jackson and her protégé and lifelong companion Rebecca Perot founded a Shaker community of Black women in Philadelphia.
[9] After her mother's death, Jackson lived with her widowed brother Joseph Cox, a tanner and elder in the Bethel A.M. E. Church eighteen years older than her.
"[8] Jackson's brother was a powerful leader in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, so her involvement placed her as his subordinate.
After her conversion, she was frustrated that her brother refused to teach her to read and that, when transcribing her religious correspondence, he did not directly copy her words.
[11] During this time, she faced religious persecution, with American Methodist Episcopal ministers warning church trustees not to listen to her preaching.
[13] Jackson still found an audience, as Richard Williams notes that in the winter of 1936, she led sixty-nine discussions in Methodist and Baptist congregations and private homes.
[19] In June, 1847, Jackson and her "protégé and lifelong companion"[1] Rebecca Perot, along with other Little Band members, moved to Watervliet, New York, living in the South Family Dwelling House.
[21][22] However, the community wanted her to make a pledge to a white Eldress named Mother Paulina Bates in order to be considered a "full member.
She and other religious figures used the fact that her community acknowledged the importance of pregnancy and creating life as a strategy to combat the prominence of male symbolism in religion and spirituality, as well as in leadership roles.
Her narrative explores both daughterly and maternal subject positions, but her quest for agency separates both from biological limitations".
[21] She was able to reframe a power dynamic where she initially did not benefit, into a situation where she created her own path and future; because she felt God was paving a way for her, nothing was impossible for her.
[33] Based on two manuscripts of the autobiography, Jean McMahon Humez compiled Gifts of Power: The Writings of Rebecca Cox Jackson, Black Visionary, Shaker Eldress, which was published in 1981.
[5] According to scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. in his book The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism, Alice Walker wrote him that Gifts of Power was the first book she read after finishing her novel The Color Purple and that Walker's dedication in The Color Purple ("To the spirit") draws from her reaction to Jackson's autobiography.
Notably, in a May 2022 Q Spirit post, Kittredge Cherry described Jackson as "the first black queer spiritual narrative in American history.
In 2018, artist Cauleen Smith created a work entitled Space Station: Two Rebeccas, referencing Jackson and Perot.
[5] Alice Walker stated that "These two women lived together, ate together, travelled together, prayed together and slept together until the end of Jackson's life some thirty-odd years after they met".
