by Gail Collins
Lydia Chisman, another leading Baconite, took a different approach. When Governor Berkeley asked Edmund Chisman why he had supported the rebels, his wife stepped up “and tould his honour that it was her provocations that made her Husband joyne in the Cause that Bacon contended for,” wrote a witness. Mrs. Chisman added that “if he had not bin influenc’d by her instigations, he had never don that which he had don.” On bended knees, she begged Berkeley to pardon Edmund and hang her instead. The governor, who had referred to Mrs. Chisman as a “whore” during the trial, was unmoved. Edmund Chisman was condemned to hang, though he died in prison before the sentence could be carried out. Lydia, who was not charged, was later able to regain her husband’s estate. And she married again.
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The Women of New England:
Goodwives, Heretics, Indian Captives, and Witches
“HIS DEAREST CONSORT,
ACCIDENTALLY FALLING OVERBOARD”
When the Mayflower first sighted land off Cape Cod in November 1620, its 102 passengers had been at sea for ten weeks. The trip had been rough—so much so that the crew had considered turning back midvoyage. The would-be colonists had been seasick so often that one sailor had cursed the ship’s passengers, telling them he looked forward to dumping half of them overboard. (William Bradford, the Pilgrim leader who reported the story, happily added that the sailor himself was the Mayflower’s first fatality.) There were nineteen adult women on board, all but one married, along with seven young girls and a handful of small children. Most of them were crammed in the area below the main deck, which must have reeked of seasick passengers who wore the same clothes, day and night, for the entire trip. In bad weather, when the hatch was closed, the room would have been dark except for an oil lamp or candle, the air cold and the floor wet from the seawater leaking in.
Looking out at the endless, bleak wilderness of North America, the Pilgrims must have wondered if their little group would be lost forever, another Roanoke. Later on, they would discover that fishermen had visited the area and taught English to some of the local Indians. But at the time they landed, they probably feared they would never have anyone to talk to again except the few dozen families in their party, some of whom had already grown to loathe one another. They had only a small store of provisions—one trunk per family. It was possible they would never again see a clock or a cat or eat an apple. If their few scrawny goats died—and the livestock on board was starting to die at a rapid rate—they would lose their only source of milk. There were no spinning wheels aboard, or other implements the women had used in Europe to make the things they could not buy at market. If they ruined a dress or broke a plate, it couldn’t be replaced.
After they landed, the men went off to explore, leaving the women waiting on the Mayflower with the children and a skeleton crew. They had been remarkably lucky in surviving the voyage, but almost as soon as the ship was anchored, people began to get fatally ill from what was probably a form of pneumonia or typhus. None of the women on the Mayflower ever recorded their emotions as their ship bobbed up and down in the harbor and they stared at the unyielding forest, wondering whether their husbands would even return from their exploration. All we know is that one of them, Bradford’s wife, Dorothy May, gave it all up and threw herself to her death in the water. The Pilgrims never acknowledged it was suicide, and they officially recorded that Dorothy May—who had managed to survive ten weeks in high seas—had failed to keep her footing while the ship lay at anchor. “His dearest consort, accidentally falling overboard, was drowned in the harbor,” wrote Bradford’s biographer, Cotton Mather. Dorothy May Bradford, the twenty-two-year-old mother of a small son left behind in England, slipped out of history. Her family and friends could not afford to mourn for long, or even acknowledge her despair. And her husband soon married again.
By the next spring, almost all the women who stood with Dorothy May looking over the side of the Mayflower were dead as well. The illness that became known as the General Sickness took about half the party, and it hit hardest among the wives. All but four of them died. They may have killed themselves caring for their families, tending their ailing spouses and children until they succumbed from exhaustion. Certainly, their high fatality rate was not due to the weakness of their sex, since the unmarried girls among the passengers survived. And although the Mayflower, when it set sail to return to England, offered free passage to any woman who wanted to leave, nobody accepted.
Most of the girls who survived the first winter went on to live long lives and produce flocks of little colonists. Mary Chilton, a thirteen-year-old whose parents both died in the winter infections, was, according to tradition, the first woman to step onto Plymouth Rock. She married a man who came over on the next boatful of settlers and they had ten children. Priscilla Mullins was orphaned by the General Sickness and married John Alden, the barrel maker, who was said by Bradford to be “much desired” as a potential husband. The legend that Alden came to ask for her hand on behalf of Miles Standish and that the clever Priscilla said “Speak for yourself, John” comes from a poem written in 1672 and retold in the nineteenth century. One of their eleven children, Captain John Alden, became an important participant in two of seventeenth-century New England’s great crises—first, as hero in the Indian wars, and later, as an accused warlock during the Salem witch-hunt.
“NOT SO HUMBLE AND HEAVENLY AS IS DESIRED”
Most of the early Massachusetts settlers whose boats came after the Mayflower were Puritans fleeing from religious persecution in England. Unlike the southern colonists, the Puritans never allowed things to become so disorderly that the normal lines of male dominance got blurred. The Puritans were very orderly indeed, and they believed that the husband represented God’s authority in the household. A woman had a right to the love and support of her spouse, but she did not have a right to question his judgment. She was a daughter of Eve, morally weak and easily led into error. The Massachusetts authorities enforced both civil and religious law, and they took their lead from the Bible—particularly St. Paul, who had told the Corinthians, “Let your women keep silence in the Churches…. And if they will learn any thing, let them ask their husbands at home….” In church, the women sat apart from men, entering through a separate door. They were not permitted to speak during services, and they had no formal say in the selection of a minister or any other community matters. “Touching our government, you are mistaken if you think we admit women…for they are excluded, as both reason and nature teacheth they should be,” wrote Bradford in 1623. The Puritans back in Europe must have been gossiping that their friends in the American wilderness had adopted savage practices, like female suffrage.
But the Puritan women had crossed a large ocean in very small ships to get to America, and many of them were not feeling particularly deferential. When the residents of Chebacco, a town near Gloucester, decided they wanted to build their own meetinghouse, the men went off to Boston to petition the local authorities for permission. While they were gone, the women built the meetinghouse themselves. In Maine, tax collectors ran into irate housewives threatening to scald them with boiling water. The court records are full of examples of women who gave as good as they got in a verbal—or even physical—battle, and male Puritans sometimes complained about their bad attitudes. In 1644, a settler named John Brock noted that his own sister was “not so humble and heavenly as is desired.” By the middle of the century Massachusetts teenagers were forming what the authorities regarded as gangs, and young women were sneaking off to attend coed parties or getting together with their girlfriends and singing bawdy songs.
As the colonies became larger and more commercial, they also attracted more non-Puritan residents who didn’t share the early settlers’ worldview. Even a virtuous matron walking the streets of Boston or Salem in the later seventeenth century had to make her way past the catcalls of sailors and fishermen lounging around the town. Loose women drank with men in the taverns and walked about with their breasts exposed. Betwee
n 1671 and 1687, the Boston selectmen drove forty-six women out of town for bad behavior. Several women wound up in trouble with the law for wearing trousers—one, who disguised herself as a sailor, was discovered by her fellow shipmates and tarred and feathered. Another, Dorothy Hoyt, was ordered whipped by the Essex County magistrate in 1677 for wearing men’s clothing. But rather than reform, she simply fled the colony.
Although women were not supposed to hold positions that properly belonged to the head of the household, they frequently did the work anyway. Mary Starbuck, who moved to Nantucket in the 1660s, found the isolated community ready to accept her as a preacher and civic leader. “Little of moment was done without her,” reported one visitor. Single women and widows had the legal ability to conduct business, and by 1687, more than 10 percent of the people involved in trade in Boston were female—most of them widows. Massachusetts also had its equivalent of Margaret Brent in a superachieving spinster named Elizabeth Poole, who purchased lands in Plymouth Colony from the Indians in 1637 and moved there with only her cattle for company. Besides founding the settlement of Taunton, Poole also became a major stockholder in the ironworks that was established there after iron ore was discovered on the banks of the local river.
Many businesses that were theoretically operated by men were actually conducted by their wives while they were at sea, or traveling, or engaged in some other commercial pursuit. Pennsylvania eventually gave women who were left in charge of their husbands’ businesses the right to establish credit on their own, sue, and sign contracts. (The intent was not to make the women more independent, but to protect their creditors in case the traveling husbands abandoned them.) These wives were accepted as merchants, farmers, printers, or store managers, as long as they didn’t take the title. A few jobs, like tavern and innkeeping, were seen as a natural extension of a housewife’s hospitality. Midwives were, of course, almost universally women, and about a quarter of the doctors in seventeenth-century America were women as well. One Mistress Allyn served as an army surgeon during King Philip’s War. She was paid 20 pounds for her effort, making her the only well-paid female physician of the century. But even at that, her salary was only about two-thirds of a male practitioner’s.
“PREACHES BETTER GOSPELL
THAN ANY OF YOUR BLACK-COATES”
The church was everything in early New England—the organizing principle around which the government, the community, and the individual households revolved. So it’s not really surprising that when women attempted to assert themselves, they did it through theology. Except for Roger Williams, the most famous dissident in early colonial history was Anne Hutchinson. Her father, a clergyman in England, educated Anne well beyond the level of most women—or men—of her day, and encouraged her to debate theological issues with him. When she was twenty-one, she married William Hutchinson, a successful merchant who always gave his “dear saint” the strongest possible support. No matter what else Anne was doing, she always seemed to be pregnant or nursing a baby—she eventually had fifteen children. She was forty-three and very much her own person when her family emigrated to Massachusetts in 1634, following their minister, John Cotton. Boston was still a very small place, with less than a thousand inhabitants. William quickly became an important member of the political elite and Anne, who was skilled in the “healing arts,” became part of the community of women who helped one another at times of childbirth and illness. The conversations over the birthing bed drifted to Anne’s religious philosophy—that the gift of heaven was freely bestowed by God and was attained through a direct relationship with the Almighty. To the gloomy Puritan community, obsessed with the concept of sin and perpetually worried that they might not turn out to be among those predestined for salvation, the idea of a personal, joyous relationship between believer and Deity must have been seductive. At some point Anne shifted from casual conversations among the women in the delivery room to more formal discussions in her own home. She soon began to attract what were, for the tiny colony, enormous crowds of up to eighty people. Most shockingly, some of the listeners were men.
Within a year of her arrival, Anne was the talk of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Edward Johnson, a newcomer to Boston, reported that when he arrived in town he was approached by “a little nimble tongued Woman” who urged him to visit “one of her own Sex” and who “Preaches better Gospell than any of your black-coates that have been at the Ninneversity.” Some historians believe that Anne’s battles with the establishment were not, at bottom, about religion at all, but a larger struggle between the merchant class the Hutchinsons represented and the Puritan authorities, who feared the more open and diverse society that commerce required. At any rate, Governor Winthrop, whose own wife had the becoming habit of expressing her concern that she was not worthy of him, found Mrs. Hutchinson unbearably opinionated, “a woman of haughty and fierce carriage, of a nimble wit and active spirit, a very voluble tongue, more bold than a man,” he wrote disapprovingly.
John Cotton, Anne’s mentor, was worked upon by the other local clergy and finally joined in their consensus that she had to be brought under control. That was the way the men of Boston almost always resolved their disagreements. A small and fragile colony could tolerate only so much dissension, and once most of the male authority figures came down on one side of an argument, the minority took it as a sign that it was time to concede. Because women had never been allowed to take part in public affairs, they did not always understand the system. Anne Hutchinson was not the only strong-minded woman who would come to grief because she could not, or would not, accept the masculine approach to settling public disputes.
The ministers, among them John Cotton, passed a series of resolutions aimed at curbing dissidence, including a direct condemnation of the meetings at the Hutchinson home. In the fall of 1637, Anne was summoned before the General Court, with the governor presiding. She stood alone, facing a panel of men. The meeting room doors were held open so the crowd of eager bystanders could hear. For a long time she did very well, matching Governor Winthrop Bible citation for Bible citation. But she was doomed to lose eventually. Emboldened by her success, she began to instruct the members of the panel as she had her audiences at home, and her fate was sealed. She was banished, and Reverend Cotton urged the other women in his congregation to remember that although Anne had led them in many edifying conversations, “she is but a Woman and many unsound and dayngerous principles are held by her.”
Once exiled, Anne moved with her family and a few followers to Rhode Island—a place so sparsely populated that she must indeed have felt like a voice crying out in the wilderness. She suffered either a miscarriage or from something called a hydatiform mole—a cluster of cysts that develop in the womb in place of an embryo. Word quickly spread that Anne Hutchinson had given birth to a mutant—with one lump for each of her heresies—and that one of her strongest supporters, Mary Dyer, had borne some sort of demon-child as well. The Reverend Thomas Weld claimed Hutchinson had delivered “30 monstrous births…none at all of them…of humane shape.” Winthrop outdid himself in his attempt to describe the “beast” Mary Dyer delivered, which he claimed had a face and ears growing on its shoulders, three clawed feet, and four horns. People in England reported a rumor that Henry Vane, an ex-governor of the colony who had been one of Anne’s supporters, had sailed across the Atlantic with Anne and Mary and had “debauched both, and both were delivered of monsters.”
After her beloved husband died, Anne and her youngest children moved to an area of New York that is now part of the Bronx, where they were killed in an Indian attack. But her unhappy fate didn’t deter other women from religious rebellion. Mary Oliver of Salem was said to outstrip even Hutchinson “for ability of speech, and appearance of zeal and devotion.” Winthrop wrote that she might have been a real danger to the establishment if she had higher social status—Oliver was the wife of a poor workman. She was summoned before the magistrates six times for challenging church authority, jailed, forced to sit on publ
ic display in the stocks, and beaten. But she was apparently unbowed. Once, when a Salem official put her in the stocks without a trial, she sued him and collected damages of 10 shillings.
Anne Eaton, the wife of Winthrop’s successor, was excommunicated in 1641 for her position on infant baptism. Her fall from grace, the authorities decided, was due to her failure to seek her husband’s guidance. Lydia Wardwell of Hampton, summoned by the church elders to explain why she failed to show up for Sunday services, appeared before them in the nude. She told them she wanted to get their attention so she could point out the error of their ways. She got their notice all right, but she also got a lashing, and her husband was beaten, too, for defending his wife’s right to protest. The Puritan establishment must have felt surrounded by outrageous women, challenging both their authority and their most sacred teachings. They had particular problems with the Quaker missionaries, like Mary Dyer, who had gone to England and become a Quaker after Hutchinson’s expulsion. Puritan officials simply wanted to make Dyer go away, but she seemed drawn by the lure of martyrdom, returning to Boston over and over again. In 1660 she finally achieved her goal and was executed.
The Quakers gave women an active role in church affairs, although it was generally limited to the regulation and guidance of other women. But in a time when women were normally denied any chance to speak in public or assume roles of leadership, those opportunities were important. A Quaker woman from a humble family could rise in the community’s esteem under her own power if she developed a reputation for saintliness and good sense within the meetings. She could even win a wealthy husband—a religious version of Cinderella. Susanna Hudson was a servant in Northern Ireland who married a poor weaver named Joseph Hatton. She became a minister at the local Quaker meetings and was so respected that when the family decided to emigrate to America, the community basically bribed them to stay put, paying apprenticeship fees for her boys. But in 1759 Joseph died, and Susanna, who had been left a small inheritance by another Quaker, used the money to visit Pennsylvania. Thomas Lightfoot, one of the wealthiest Quaker farmers in the colony, met her and was so moved by her testimony at the Quaker meeting that he followed her to Ireland, proposed, and brought her back to America as his wife.
