Anna White

Anna White (21 Jan. 1831 – 16 Dec. 1910) was a Shaker Eldress, social reformer, author, and hymn writer. Biography Anna White born in Brooklyn, New York, the third daughter of five children of Robert White and Hannah (Gibbs) White. Her parents were both Quakers, her father having joined by marriage. One of her earliest memories was hearing anti-slavery lecturer Lucretia Mott speak, but she was disturbed when Mott was "abruptly silenced by the guardians of Quaker orthodoxy." She went to a Quaker school in Poughkeepsie, New York called Mansion Square Seminary, and had a strong social conscience influenced by both her faith and her parents. At seventeen, White learned the trade of tailoring, and helped her mother distribute alms from the Quakers to the poor of New York. White became interested in the Shakers after her father joined Hancock Shaker Village, where he had done business. Anna was the only member of the family to join her father in the religion, formally joining the Mount Lebanon Shaker Society's North Family at 18 years old in 1849. Joining the Shakers alienated both of them from the rest of the family, with a rich uncle even threatening to dis-inherent her of if she went through with it. White signed the 1829 North Family Covenant, a legal document promising to live forever as a Shaker without compensation for work in the community, at only nineteen years old (typically it was only signed by those over twenty). White helped with housework, and cared for female visitors and guests. The music of the Shakers was one of the things that had initially attracted her to the religion, and she would go on to write hundreds of spiritual songs, and compile two books of Shaker music which included some of her own hymns.