What was Ann Lee’s early life like?

Ann Lee was the illiterate daughter of a blacksmith. The second of eight children, she grew up in poverty and began working in a textile mill in her youth. At 22 she joined the Shaking Quakers—the Shakers—a radical sect emphasizing personal revelation and public confession of sin. A few years later she was in an unhappy marriage and suffered the losses of her four children in infancy.