Ann Lee deserves better than her biopic
Ann Lee was a sharp-tongued woman from the back streets of 18th-century Manchester who joined a maverick Protestant sect that became known as the Shakers, or “Shaking Quakers.” In fact their shaking was the least of it: they howled, gurned and gibbered while flirting with the notion that God would return to Earth in the form of a woman. All sexual activity, even between man and wife, was forbidden. Ann then had a series of visions that, according to subsequent Shaker accounts, identified her as the “woman clothed with the sun” whose appearance in the Book of Revelation heralds the end of the world. In 1774, “Mother Ann” and a
