The most committed members of the Society of Universal Friends were a group of unmarried women who took leading roles in their households and community.

[7][10] Wilkinson had fine black hair and eyes,[11] and from an early age was strong and athletic,[7][5] becoming an adept equestrian as a child, remaining so in adulthood,[7][5] and liking spirited horses and ensuring that animals received good care.

[6]: 11–12 [7] Biographer Paul Moyer says it may have been invented to fit a then-common narrative that people who experienced dramatic religious awakenings were formerly profligate sinners.

[15][19] Amid these family disturbances and the broader ones of the American Revolutionary War, dissatisfied with the New Light Baptists and shunned by mainstream Quakers, Wilkinson faced much stress in 1776.

[c][36] Hudson says that when visitors asked if it was the name of the person they were addressing, the Friend simply quoted Luke 23:3 ("thou sayest it").

[41][42] The Friend dressed in a manner perceived to be either androgynous or masculine,[43][44][45] in long, loose clerical robes which were most often black,[46] and wore a white or purple kerchief or cravat around the neck like men of the time.

[47][44] The preacher did not wear a hair-cap indoors, like women of the era,[48][44] and outdoors wore broad-brimmed, low-crowned beaver hats of a style worn by Quaker men.

[53][54] Early on, the Public Universal Friend preached that people needed to repent of their sins and be saved before an imminent Day of Judgment.

[12] Most papers focused more on the preacher's ambiguous gender than on theology,[65][66] which was broadly similar to the teachings of most Quakers;[67][68] one person who heard the Friend in 1788 said "from common report I expected to hear something out of the way in doctrine, which is not the case, in fact [I] heard nothing but what is common among preachers" in mainstream Quaker churches.

[74][75] The Friend preached humility[76] and hospitality towards everyone;[77] kept religious meetings open to the public, and housed and fed visitors, including those who came only out of curiosity[77] and indigenous people, with whom the preacher generally had a cordial relationship.

[84][86] Richards had a large part in planning and building the house in which she and the preacher lived in the town of Jerusalem,[87] and when she died in 1793, she left her child to the Friend's care.

[92] By late 1788, vanguard members of the Society had established a settlement in the Genesee River area; by March 1790, it was ready enough that the rest of the Universal Friends set out to join it,[92][93] making it the largest non-Native community in western New York.

[99] Furthermore, the lands were in the tract on which Phelps and Gorham defaulted which was resold to financier Robert Morris and then to the Pulteney Association, absentee British speculators.

Abraham Dayton acquired a large area of land in Canada from Governor John Graves Simcoe, though Sarah Richards persuaded the Friend not to move so far.

[103] The officer and an assistant later tried to arrest the preacher at home in Jerusalem, but the women of the house drove the men off and tore their clothes.

[103] A third attempt was carefully planned by a posse of 30 men who surrounded the home after midnight, broke down the door with an ax, and intended to carry the preacher off in an oxcart.

[103][105] When the Friend appeared before the court, it ruled that no indictable offense had been committed, and invited the preacher to give a sermon to those in attendance.

[103][105][106] The Public Universal Friend's health had been declining since the turn of the century; by 1816 the preacher had begun to suffer from a painful edema, but continued to receive visitors and give sermons.

[107][108] The Friend gave a final regular sermon in November 1818 and preached for the last time at the funeral of sister Patience Wilkinson Potter in April 1819.

[107] The body was placed in a coffin with an oval glass window set in top, interred four days after death in a thick stone vault in the cellar of the Friend's house.

[111][113] The Friend's Home and temporary burial chamber stands in the town of Jerusalem, and it is included on the National Register of Historic Places.

[114][116][117] As late as the 1900s, inhabitants of Little Rest, Rhode Island, called a species of solidago Jemima weed because its appearance in the town coincided with the preacher's first visit to the area in the 1770s.

[120] The first view was taken by many writers in the 18th and 19th centuries, including David Hudson, whose hostile and inaccurate biography (written to influence a court case over the Society's land) was long influential.

[39] T. Fleischmann's essay "Time Is the Thing the Body Moves Through" examines the Friend's narrative with an eye to the colonizing nature of evangelism in the US,[141] viewing it as "a way to think through the limitations of imagination as a white settler".