New England women moved freely among their neighbors’ homes. They borrowed and they lent, they kept each other company while going about their chores, they assisted at the birth of one another’s children, and they disciplined their neighbors’ sons and daughters as if they were their own. Thus, the authority of a husband was always bounded by a broad circle of peers and dependents, and the obligations and satisfactions deriving from the role of neighbor offset to some degree the role of wife.

  When fate happened upon Hannah Duston on that March morning in 1697, she was recovering from the delivery of a child. Because reproduction framed every New England woman’s life, these women treated childbirth as a ritual, honored it by ceremony, and tested their faith and explored their eschatology in terms of it. Childbirth was an exclusively female social ritual. Women gathered to assist in and to bear witness to this female experience, and it was not unknown for an entire community of married women to attend a delivery. In the earliest phase of labor, the mother acted as host, serving refreshments to all who came. The humor that comes from an acceptance of the “natural” or the “inevitable,” especially of a shared experience, was evident at these birthing rituals; with the pain of labor and delivery imminent, beer became “groaning beer” and cake “groaning cake.”

  But as the delivery grew nearer, the humor ceased and roles were reversed: the guests began to help their hostess. They used herbs gathered in the field and garden to relieve her labor pains, and they assisted the midwife in any way they could. A New England woman often gave birth sitting in another woman’s lap, or supported by the steady arms of friends as she squatted on the midwife’s low, open-seated stool. A friend or neighbor gave the newborn its first milk, for colonial New Englanders believed the mother was impure for several days after delivery. Rituals also shaped the child’s initial experience of the world. She or he was laid on linens which had been passed down from mother to daughter, each piece embroidered, embellished, and reserved exclusively for this event. But the rituals were bawdy as often as they were sentimental. For example, a boy’s umbilical cord was left long to ensure, it was said, that his penis would grow to an equally impressive length.

  The arrival of an infant marked the beginning of several months’ confinement for the mother. Although many New England women made journeys during pregnancy, they were housebound for the first ten months of a baby’s life. A breast-fed child needed its source of milk near at hand, and colonial mothers usually found an eight- to ten-month-old baby too heavy to carry for long distances. Between the tenth and fifteenth months, however, mothers often left home for a long visit to their extended family or to friends. These trips were probably “weaning journeys,” undertaken to separate mother and nursing child.

  The steady cycle of pregnancy, birth, nursing, and weaning ensured that women were ever-conscious of their bodies. Colonial women of every region had to calculate their baby’s protection and care into the equations of everyday life. They had to consider the impact of lifting heavy objects as they went about domestic duties; they had to calibrate how wide the circle of their movement could be, with a needy infant waiting to be fed at home; they had to adjust to the alterations in their physical appearance during each pregnancy and lactation period and the permanent changes in the shape and resiliency of their body after many births. For women who were “fruitfull vines,” biology and anatomy did indeed seem to shape their destinies.

  Mothering, on the other hand, did not play the central role in a colonial woman’s identity that it did in the lives of nineteenth-century middle-class women. Other people held legitimate, competing interests in her children. As heirs to property, for example, children were primarily the concern of the father. To him fell the responsibility of dividing wealth and assets among sons and daughters, and in these critical matters a mother’s role was at best advisory. As dependent members of the community, children were the obligation of all adults rather than the exclusive responsibility of the mother. Indeed, “mothering” was a form of expertise in discipline and instruction that, once achieved by a woman, could be employed in the interest of any child. Neighbors were entitled and expected to instruct and care for the young if the occasion arose. The community acknowledged this generalized mothering by its habit of addressing any older woman as “mother” or “gammar” (grandma). As members of the family work force, children were vocational apprentices of the parent of their own sex: fathers trained sons in agriculture or in the family trade, while mothers taught housewifery to their girls. The chains of daily command followed this gender division as the family went about its workday. Finally, as part of a numerous brood, no individual child was likely to receive the exclusive attention of a mother. Mothering was, as one historian has put it, extensive rather than intensive.

  In its almost fully realized patriarchy, in the longevity of the marriage that established it, in the demographic advantages that made it multigenerational, the family of Hannah Duston’s girlhood and the family of her womanhood were unlike Chesapeake families. The second, perhaps equally significant reason for her divergent experience was the strength and pervasive influence on her family by Puritanism and its Congregational Church. Puritanism was more than a theology and more than an institution; it was, as scholars have observed and documented from the seventeenth century onward, a way of life.

  Not every man or woman who departed the old England for the new in the 1630s was a self-declared advocate of religious reform, but the most powerful and important of the immigrants were. The Massachusetts Bay Company had been formed by men committed to the purification of the Anglican Church and to the completion, as they interpreted it, of the Protestant Revolution in England. Their reformist impulse was not confined to liturgy or church structure, although they had strong theological and organizational agendas. Their critique extended to the moral values and behavior within Anglican society. They condemned the manners and mores of that English culture as strongly as they condemned the prayer books and bishops of its official church. They meant to create a community that fulfilled biblical guidelines and injunctions for daily life, and although they read that Bible through the prism of English social and political traditions, they read it differently from their King and his bishops.

  In the model community the Puritans sought to create in America, all participants’ roles were carefully defined. Yet the logic of the theology, state policy, and traditions that the immigrants carried with them produced contradictions and inconsistencies. Some were particularly important to women. For example, the extensive regulation of personal behavior, the official “prudishness” that later generations would associate as the core of “Puritanism,” was confounded by a steady record of sexual and moral offenses that suggests that the bawdiness of seventeenth-century English culture had survived the transatlantic voyage intact. Traditions such as pre-bridal pregnancy and marital infidelity proceeded unabated, for, in fact, the small agrarian communities and the blending of what nineteenth-century middle-class society would call the private and the public worlds, the immediacy of sexuality and procreation in cramped spaces, gave these behaviors a logic that the Puritan code of morality could not erase.

  A constellation of social problems rose from Puritan theology. The New England Puritans proclaimed the possibility of salvation equally for men and women, yet the radical implications of this theology—a critique of political and social inequality by either gender or class—were never acknowledged by Puritan religious or civic leaders. In fact, in the Puritan colonies political participation was not expanded but restricted; to the criterion of property ownership, John Winthrop’s government added the requirement of full membership, rather than simple attendance, in the church. Yet women’s “sainthood,” as individual salvation was officially called, did not confer political rights. Second, women’s participation within the church was defined ambiguously. Women were enjoined to silence during all worship services, although the same Gospel of St. Paul that justified this restriction also encouraged women to read the Bible and to teach others its word. Finally, neither the clergy nor the magistrates who regulated the life of the “city upon a hill” were able to resolve the tensions between the moral and social autonomy that sainthood encouraged and the uniformity and conformity they demanded of all colonists. Puritans did not resolve, except by fiat and force, such critical questions as how did sainthood disrupt the hierarchy of gender or of the family, or who determined the code of behavior for an individual saint. During the seventeenth century, women challenged Puritanism to clarify these issues, sometimes consciously and sometimes unintentionally, through their actions.

  The most famous, or as John Winthrop would have it, the most notorious woman to challenge the authority of ministers and magistrates was Anne Hutchinson. Hutchinson’s dissent followed close on the heels of another controversy, stirred by Roger Williams, who challenged the authority of Bay Colony leaders only five years after the Puritan community was settled. His three-pronged attack—challenging the legitimacy of the Bay Company’s title to the land, arguing that ministerial authority was limited, and denying the right of the colony’s government to compel attendance in, or obedience to, the Puritan Congregational Church—earned him exile in the dead of winter. Hutchinson’s criticism of ministerial authority was similar to Williams’s. And although it came from a woman and not from a minister, the threat was taken seriously. For Anne Hutchinson, like Roger Williams, had gathered strong popular support.

  Anne Hutchinson was born Anne Marbury in 1591, and raised in Alford, England. Her father, a clergyman, encouraged her to read and discuss theology with him. At twenty-one, Anne Marbury married a successful Alford merchant named William Hutchinson and produced a large family of her own. Fifteen children were born to her during the course of a long and supportive marriage, and thirteen survived.

  In 1634, William and Anne Hutchinson were part of the flock that followed minister John Cotton to Massachusetts Bay. She was forty-three, accustomed to a life of material and intellectual satisfaction. He was civic-minded, as befit a successful member of the gentry, and quickly entered Boston political life as a town commissioner, an inferior-court judge, deputy to the colony’s legislature, and deacon in the Boston church over which Cotton now presided.

  The Hutchinsons were, ostensibly, the kind of immigrants in whom the colony’s leadership delighted. Yet within a year, trouble began. At first the problem centered around the pulpit of John Cotton. The Alford congregation that came to America with Cotton had their own notions of how a minister ought to be selected, and by whom. In Massachusetts, the Bay Company leadership appointed all ministers and paid them. The Hutchinsons and their friends protested that those tasks belonged exclusively to the congregation. At issue was a lay challenge to state control. When the Alford faction tried to organize a separate church but could not gain official recognition for it, they began to meet privately. The prospect of competing or alternative churches did not sit well with the authorities. Many of the dissenters resolved the matter by moving outside the Bay Colony’s borders, and thus its jurisdiction. But William and Anne Hutchinson (whose father, as a clergyman, had been imprisoned twice and silenced by church courts for his attacks on incompetent ministers) chose to remain in Boston to continue the fight.

  Governor John Winthrop succeeded in blocking the efforts of the Reverend John Wheelwright, the leader of the dissent and Anne Hutchinson’s brother-in-law, who sought to establish an independent, lay-dominated church nine miles outside Boston. Winthrop’s tactics did not appeal to one of Wheelwright’s most prominent followers, Henry Vane. In May 1636, Vane opposed Winthrop and took the governorship away from him. But Vane’s victory was short-lived. Winthrop and his faction rallied, discrediting Wheelwright by charging him with preaching sedition and wresting the governorship back from the young Vane. Before 1636 was over, the movement for lay control was broken and Wheelwright was banished.

  The Hutchinsons had played a prominent role in Wheelwright’s dissent. Their home had been used for private worship services, and Wheelwright had preached often at their farm. Anne Hutchinson’s house had also become the gathering place for women’s meetings at which devout Puritan women—who were denied attendance at the public lecture or weekday sermon—gathered to discuss Scripture. The women’s meetings were well established before Anne Hutchinson’s arrival in the colony, but Hutchinson expanded them and Winthrop and his colleagues soon saw them as a vehicle for dissident proselytizing. The magistrates wanted no such opportunities to fall into Hutchinson’s hands.

  What was the nature of Hutchinson’s threat to Winthrop’s order? Did the growing number of women, and later men, who came to hear her critique local ministers’ sermons raise a challenge to established authority regardless of the content of their discussions? Or was there something specifically heretical or unorthodox in her views? Were her challenges theological or organizational? Did her criticisms address women’s role in the church and women’s relationship to God, or were they universal? Did her popularity reflect widespread concern over theological and institutional issues, or were social, political, and gender dissatisfactions being displaced?

  On these questions, historians have long disagreed. The records of Hutchinson’s many interrogations and trials come to us from Winthrop himself and are decidedly biased. Some scholars argue that Hutchinson was an antinomian, committed to the principle that no authority mediated between an individual and God, that salvation came through a direct relationship with God and that “good works” or social morality played no part in salvation. Antinomianism clearly challenged the importance and the authority of the clergy. It was a potential challenge to the regulation by any authority of a “saint’s” behavior.

  Winthrop’s account of the Hutchinson trials suggests that he saw in Hutchinson’s dissent a challenge to family order, sexual morality, and the subordination of women to men. The gathering of sixty to eighty women for discussion was, in itself, disruptive. “Though women might meet (some few together),” he wrote, “to pray and edify one another; yet such a set assembly (as was their practice at Boston) where sixty or more did meet every week, and one woman (in a prophetical way, by resolving questions of doctrine, and expanding scripture), took upon her the whole exercise was agreed to be disorderly and without rule.” This practice as much as the content of Hutchinson’s commentary would lead to a division between husband and wife.

  If, as Winthrop insisted, Anne Hutchinson argued against the resurrection of the body, the hierarchy of sex was challenged. If believers became “demi-gods,” beyond sexual distinction, and if “there is neither male nor female for you are all one in Jesus Christ,” what implications did such equality have for earthly chains of command? The question was not new in Puritan thought, but the attention to it, the bald posing of it in Winthrop’s Boston, was not welcome.

  Finally, some historians have considered the issues raised by Hutchinson less important than the socioeconomic discontent they galvanized. They have interpreted support for Hutchinson as a veiled protest by merchants’ interests against the economic and political constraints of Winthrop’s government. The variety of interpretations confirms that the confrontation between Puritan authorities and Anne Hutchinson was a central event of the 1630s. It hardened the government’s determination to demand conformity, not only in doctrine, but in the social arrangements between the sexes. It established the principle that religious dissent, or error, and a woman’s insubordination were linked—whether the rebellion against her proper place was symptom or source did not matter. For example, in 1641 Anne Eaton, the daughter of an English bishop and the wife of the governor of the colony, was tried and excommunicated for her heretical position against infant baptism. The authorities declared that Eaton’s “fall” was the result of reading and a failure to seek guidance from her husband. Sarah Keayne was found guilty in 1646 of “irregular prophesying in mixed assembly,” and Joan Hogg was convicted nine years later of “disorderly singing and idleness, and for saying she [was] commanded of Christ to do so.”

  When the Quakers arrived in Massachusetts in the 1650s, the Puritan conviction that inappropriate feminine behavior and religious error were connected was reinforced. Quaker women enraged and shocked Puritan officials, using this Puritan conviction to dramatize their own cause. In 1662, for example, the Quaker Deborah Wilson walked naked through Salem. Her purpose, she said, was to call attention to the cruelty and immodesty of the government’s practice of stripping Quaker women to the waist to whip them in public. When Quaker Lydia Wardell of Hampton was called to appear before the elders of the church for her religious views, she presented herself at the Sabbath lecture stark naked. She did it, she explained, to wake up church members who were “blinded with Ignorance and Persecution.”

  Most Puritan women, like most Puritan men, did not place themselves in critical opposition to their church. They entered the church by a separate door from men and, throughout most of the seventeenth century, until family pews became the norm, sat segregated from their husbands, fathers, and brothers. No member of their sex was a minister and none signed the church covenant that created a congregation. They had no formal voice in the selection of the minister and no voice at all during the service he conducted. Yet they could pursue, attain, and have acknowledged the presence of God’s grace within them, and thus enter the privileged ranks of full membership in the church. Sainthood was one of the few public distinctions available to a woman, and as the steady rise in the number of women saints over men attests, this distinction was valued. Beginning in the eighteenth century, it was a New England—wide pattern that women became church members at an earlier age and in greater numbers than their husbands.