America's Women

by Gail Collins

  Sarah Osborne died before she could be brought to trial. Good and Tituba were kept incarcerated, held in leg irons to make sure they did not fly away before they could be judged. The girls pressed further, naming Martha Corey, a respectable but outspoken middle-aged member of the community, who had made it clear she thought the entire witch business was so much hogwash. She was brought to the Putnam home to confront young Ann, who had accused her. As soon as she arrived, the girl fell into a fit and complained of being choked by an invisible specter. The Puritans believed witches often worked with “familiars”—beasts sent by the Devil to do his bidding—who nursed at “witch’s teats” concealed on the guilty party’s body. Ann Putnam claimed she saw a yellow bird nursing in the space between two of Martha Corey’s fingers. When the older woman tried to show the girl that there was nothing between her fingers, Ann cried out that she had been struck blind. Then she screamed that she saw Corey roasting a man on a spit in the family fireplace.

  The accused witches were helpless. Hauled into the Salem meetinghouse, they were confronted by outrageous charges—that they had killed babies, drowned sailors, flown through the air to demonic gatherings where they plotted the downfall of the community of the godly. When they attempted to defend themselves—pointing out that they had been in another town when some disaster occurred—the accusers simply said that the witch had sent her “specter” to do her bidding for her. The whole proceedings took place through a din of screaming and thrashing as the girls responded to any resistance by going into fits and claiming that the witch had sent a specter to pinch or smother them. The judges, who sometimes seemed as frightened of the girls as they were of witches, rarely asked the accused any questions except why they were torturing the children.

  Besides the marginal characters like Sarah Good, most of the people the girls accused were either citizens who had expressed doubts about their credibility, or those who had in the past taken sides against the Putnams in the town’s endless series of feuds and lawsuits. Virtually every Salem resident who was named as a witch came from the prosperous, commercial side of town, while the accusers who joined with the girls in identifying new suspects almost all came from the more remote agricultural end. The two sides had been divided over Reverend Parris’s appointment, as well as dozens of other disputes involving property boundaries, inheritances, and local government. The girls may have fallen under the sway of older women, like Mrs. Putnam, who joined in the denunciations. Or they may have simply been acting out the emotional dramas they heard rehearsed over the living room fire by their bitter parents.

  One of the most pathetic victims was Rebecca Nurse, a seventy-one-year-old Puritan matriarch whose family opposed the Putnams in a number of local battles. Ann Putnam Sr. was her main accuser, and some historians have suggested she may have seen Nurse as a surrogate for her husband’s elderly stepmother, a powerful woman who was in the process of disinheriting Ann’s family in favor of her own son. Ann, who claimed she had been suffering at the hands of the jailed Martha Corey, told the authorities that Martha was accompanied in her evil visits by Rebecca Nurse. Local officials visited the old woman, who was hard of hearing and ailing, at her home, where she was bedridden. She asked after the troubled girls, offered words of sympathy for Minister Parris and his family, but expressed the opinion that some of those who had been accused were “innocent as she.” When told that she, too, was a suspect, Nurse sat silent for a minute, perhaps stunned. “As to this thing, I am innocent as the child unborn; But surely, what sin hath God found out in me unrepented of that he should lay such an affliction upon me in my old age?” she asked.

  Dragged off to the meetinghouse, Nurse was forced to confront her accusers, who instantly fell to the ground, writhing in pain and crying that she was attacking them. The elder Ann Putnam claimed that she was being visited by the children of her sister, who reported that Rebecca Nurse had caused their deaths. The old woman, asked to explain all these bizarre occurrences, naturally had no good answer. “I cannot tell what to think,” she said. She pointed out that during the time she was supposed to have been tormenting the girls, she was confined to her bed with illness. That denial simply caused the victims to howl louder. “Oh Lord help me,” Nurse exclaimed. Eventually, two of her sisters, Sarah Cloyce and Mary Easty, were also charged with witchcraft.

  The accused were confined in jails that resembled medieval dungeons—dark, cold, and frequented by rats. They were chained to the walls, the better to keep their specters under control. One of the prisoners was Dorcas Good, the four-year-old daughter of Sarah, who had probably expressed some bitterness at the people who had caused her mother to be dragged away. The girls claimed Dorcas’s specter had been biting them. At her hearing, whenever the little girl looked at her accusers, they screamed and displayed bite marks on their arms. Dorcas was carted off to jail, where she was kept in heavy leg irons for nine months. The girl was eventually freed but remained mentally disturbed for the rest of her life.

  As news of the Salem witches spread, women in other towns began to experience the symptoms of possession. Men almost never felt they were possessed, but they came up with charges of their own—sickness or agricultural disasters that could only have been caused by an unnatural evil—or reported nighttime visitations that tormented their sleep. The out-of-towners brought their cases to Salem and asked the girls who was responsible. The girls were always willing to comply, although sometimes, when they confronted the people they had named in court, they were unable to identify them.

  When Rebecca Nurse was tried in Boston, her accusers screamed and cried out that they were being pinched by an invisible hand. Rebecca’s daughter, Sarah, demonstrated that one of the girls had pulled pins out of her clothing and inflicted the pain on herself. Perhaps influenced by that discovery, or Nurse’s virtuous history, the jury returned a verdict of not guilty. The girls shrieked and fell into fits, creating an uproar that terrified the courtroom. The chief justice asked the jury to go back and reconsider. The jurors obediently returned with a finding of guilty. The Massachusetts governor, William Phipps, then reviewed the case at the request of Nurse’s family and issued a reprieve. But as soon as the old woman was released, the girls again fell into what looked like mortal illness and it was made clear that if any of them died, the governor would be held accountable. Phipps retracted his reprieve and Nurse was hanged along with four other women on July 19. It was the first mass execution of witches in American history. Later, Rebecca’s sister, the gentle Mary Easty, was hanged too, after releasing a plea to the judges “that no more innocent blood be shed.”

  “By my own innocence I know you are in the wrong way,” she wrote.

  The girls began naming more and more powerful members of the community, including a number of men. George Burroughs, one of the former ministers at Salem village church, was hauled back from a parish in Maine and hanged as the witches’ ringleader. George Jacobs, a feisty eighty-year-old Salemite who had also been allied against the Putnams, was accused by one of his servants. (“You tax me for a wizard, you may as well tax me for a buzzard,” the old man said when he was arrested.) The servant, Sarah Churchill, later recanted and said she had been forced by the other girls to testify or risk being charged herself. Jacobs’s granddaughter Margaret, who had also been charged, then accused her grandfather, possibly in an attempt to save her own life. But she later retracted her statements and begged her grandfather’s forgiveness. Margaret’s father, George Jacobs Jr., was accused next and fled to Canada. Her mother, Rebecca, who apparently had always been somewhat demented, was dragged off to jail.

  Many of the people accused of witchcraft saved themselves by confessing. The authorities probably intended to punish them later anyway, but the ploy worked, and all the alleged witches who admitted their pact with Satan were able to remain alive until the trials came to an end, and they recanted their confessions. It seems surprising, in a way, that twenty people chose to insist on their innocence and face death. But they we
re Puritans who believed that claiming untruthfully to be a witch was as bad as embracing Satan himself, and they died for their religion. When a minister urged her to make a last-minute confession, the uncowable Sarah Good cried back from the scaffold: “I am no more a witch than you are a wizard, and if you take away my life, God will give you blood to drink.”

  The roster of accused witches became a cross section of seventeenth-century New England womanhood—pious matrons, sullen servants, homeless outcasts, canny businesswomen, feisty goodwives. Elizabeth Proctor, wife of one of the most prominent men in Salem, ran the family tavern while her husband looked after his other businesses. Twenty-two-year-old Abigail Hobbs was a wild child who roamed around at will, sleeping in the forest when the mood struck her, saying what she thought and running totally out of her parents’ control. Mary English was married to the richest man in Salem and believed to be something of a snob. Bridget Bishop had been married three times and was frequently in court for fighting with her latest husband. Most of the men named were husbands of women who had already been accused. Giles Corey, the cranky eighty-year-old husband of Martha, refused to speak at his trial and was punished by being pressed to death under rocks, the only person in American history to be executed in that grisly manner. Elizabeth Proctor’s husband, John, was hanged. (His name was used by Arthur Miller for the hero in his fictionalized play about the witch-hunts, The Crucible.) Mary English’s husband was arrested, as was John Alden, a hero of the French and Indian Wars and the son of the famous Priscilla and John. “He lies with the Indian squaws and has Indian papooses,” one girl cried as he was brought before them. The accusers were originally unable to pick Alden out from a crowd of other men, but the judges gave them a second chance, moving them outside so they would have better light to make their identification. Like the Englishes, Alden decided that flight was the better part of valor and escaped from jail, probably by bribing the eminently bribable wardens. He remained out of sight until the hysteria died away.

  The backlash began with a ghost. On the day Mary Easty was hanged, a seventeen-year-old girl named Mary Herrick who lived in a town just outside Salem reported that Easty had appeared to her and declared her innocence. Meanwhile, some of the accused witches in prison who had confessed began to issue retractions. Increase Mather, one of Massachusetts’s most important citizens, preached a sermon in which he argued that “it were better that ten suspected witches should escape than that one innocent person should be condemned.” Critics who had long been unhappy with the hunt became more outspoken. Never before, they noted, had New England courts convicted people of witchcraft purely on the testimony of witnesses whose proof was visions nobody else could see. The prisons were overflowing with suspected witches, some as young as eight years old. The economy was suffering, as farms went untended while families struggled to cope with the imprisonment of their relatives. Children whose parents had been taken away were left to neighbors’ charity.

  Cotton Mather, one of the leading voices behind the prosecutions, was embarrassed by his father Increase’s defection. But he was far more humiliated when an opponent of the trials published an eyewitness account of Mather’s handling of another “bewitched” woman, Margaret Rule, with an emphasis on the clergyman’s attempts to calm the girl by rubbing her naked breasts and belly. Governor Phipps, who had avoided the witch problem by going off to fight the Indians, returned to discover that his own wife had been accused. In October, he announced that he was forbidding any more imprisonments or trials. In January 1693, a year after the witch-hunt began, and after two dozen people had already died, a special court met to consider charges against fifty-two of the remaining prisoners and rapidly dismissed almost all the cases. Governor Phipps began signing reprieves for those who had already been convicted or confessed, and he later issued a general pardon. That didn’t necessarily mean the accused witches could go home. Massachusetts required that prisoners pay for the cost of their room and board before they could leave jail, and some of those who had been incarcerated could not settle their bills. Young Margaret Jacobs had no one to pay for her release. Her father had fled the country; her mother, although free, was penniless and deranged; and her grandfather had been hanged. A local fisherman heard her sad story and finally put up the money, then later sued Margaret to recover his investment.

  No one involved in the Salem saga got to enjoy a really happy ending. Minister Parris found many of his parishioners had turned against him—he seemed disturbed, and even surprised, that the family of Rebecca Nurse no longer wanted to be in the congregation. By 1695, he had been removed from the pulpit, but in typical Salem fashion it took several years before the competing factions in the community could actually agree it was time to go. Parris’s wife died, his son became insane, and Betty married and faded into obscurity. The next pastor, a younger and far sunnier character, gradually reconciled the community and revoked the excommunications of Rebecca Nurse and Martha Corey.

  Like Betty Parris, most of the other young girls who were involved in the trials grew up and married without making any further mark on history. The only witness who actually recanted was young Ann Putnam. In 1706 she confessed that she had been deluded. Satan, she told the Salem congregation, “deceived me in that sad time. I did it not out of any anger, malice or ill will.” She expressed particular sorrow about her role in accusing Rebecca Nurse and her two sisters. The congregation, which apparently blamed Ann’s already-dead mother for her behavior, forgave her. She died at the age of thirty-seven, never having married. In her case, at least, Tituba’s magic proved accurate.

  3

  Daily Life in the Colonies:

  Housekeeping, Children, and Sex

  “MY BASON OF WATER FROZE ON THE HEARTH”

  If the Salem witch-craft “victims” were faking their attacks, they had the advantage of performing under the cover of half-darkness. Almost everything that the colonists did indoors occurred in dim light, or flickering shadows. The houses in which the women spent so much of their lives were generally extremely primitive—settlers in parts of Pennsylvania actually lived in caves. There was little in the way of windows, and for a long time there was no window glass; the colonists covered whatever small openings they made in the walls with oiled paper. Candles were expensive, and even at the beginning of the nineteenth century, most houses had only one or two candlesticks. What light there was generally came from the fireplace, although in some parts of the country splinters of pine were used as minitorches. Whatever the source of illumination, it was hard on the eyes. People who read by candle sometimes singed their books while trying to get the page close enough to the light. During the day, women who wanted to sew worked next to the window—an uncomfortable location in the winter.

  During winter in the northern colonies, people must have felt cold all the time. Even the fireplace was limited help in a drafty, uninsulated house. To take advantage of the heat, you had to stand so close as to risk incineration. Harriet Beecher Stowe described a New England housewife “Standing with her back so near the blaze as to be uncomfortably warm” while her dishtowel was “freezing in her hand.” Anna Green Winslow, a Revolutionary War–era schoolgirl, gave thanks in her diary for living in a warm house, then added that “my bason of water froze on the hearth with as good a fire as we could make in the chimney.”

  The fireplaces were huge—big enough to walk around in, and the scene of perpetual hazard. Children fell into the flames, and embers rolled out and burned down houses. What little furniture the houses had was not designed for comfort. Feather beds, the closest thing the colonists had to luxury, looked more appealing than they felt. They were dreadfully uncomfortable in hot weather and so high that people needed bed steps to get on top. “Night and morning were made fearful to me by the prospect of having to climb up and down,” a Massachusetts woman recalled. Unless she managed to land right in the middle, she added, “I passed my night in rolling down hill, or in vain efforts to scramble up to the top, to avoid falling o
ut on the floor.”

  Women could live out their entire lives without ever feeling back support. The churches, where they spent hours listening to sermons, offered only benches. At home they sat on stools. There was at most only one real chair in the average seventeenth-century American home, and it was reserved for the head of the household; hence, the word chairman. (When the elders of Boston started bearing down on Anne Hutchinson, one of the things they noted with alarm was that in meetings with both male and female followers, she was the one who got the best seat.) Indoors was a spare and grim place, but the average female settler wanted very much to be there. Recruiting pamphlets always made it a point to claim that women in the American colonies spent all their time at housework. In reality, few of the early farmers could afford to pass up the chance to use their wives as field hands. But it was what the Englishwoman wanted to hear; her goal was not to work side by side with her spouse, but to be in charge of her own domestic establishment.

  Women didn’t shun outdoor labor because they feared the work. Their domestic duties were actually harder, with no downtime and less variety. Field tasks changed with the seasons—once the planting was done, the farmer knew he would never have to look at another seed for eleven months. The homemaker was trapped in an endless cycle of cooking, cleaning up, and then getting ready for the next meal. “This day is forty years since I left my father’s house and come here, and here have I seene littel els but harde labour and sorrow,” wrote Mary Cooper, a housewife who lived on a farm in Long Island in the years before the Revolutionary War. Of all the American women who wrote diaries in the eighteenth century, Mary is unique in that she constantly complained. Colonists were a stoic lot, experts at repressing emotion or throwing all their woes into the lap of a hopefully benevolent Deity. But Mary didn’t withhold. “O I am tired almost to death,” was one of her favorite refrains.