![]() ![]() Although some succumbed to doubt and despair, others used the demanding doctrines of reformation to refigure their lives. As childbearers, sexual partners, passionate believers, good housekeepers, and fragile sinners, Puritan women both challenged and defined the boundaries of appropriate behavior. Far from endorsing female subjection, the Puritan movement initially encouraged female assertiveness, not by overt questioning of social norms but by nurturing lay engagement in religious discourse.Įnglish settlers were attempting to put the new wine of dissenting protestantism into the old bottle of patriarchal order. It would be hard to find another time or place in American history where the theological speculations of a housewife could carry such political weight. ![]() They tell us that John Winthrop “ruled with an iron hand,” that religion “endorsed female subjection,” and that Hutchinson’s judges “were almost as outraged by her ‘masculine’ behavior as by her heretical beliefs.” These shorthand accounts of a complex story inadvertently lose one of its most interesting dimensions-Hutchinson’s ability to unsettle and potentially unseat the iron-handed governor. AMERICAN HISTORY TEXTBOOKS often use the story of Anne Hutchinson’s trial and banishment as evidence of patriarchal domination of women in Puritan Massachusetts. ![]()
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