Anne Hutchinson and the Puritan Attitude toward Women Author(s ...

and if once they could winde in them, they hoped by
them, as by an Eve, to catch their husbands also,
which indeed proved too true amongst us." And again,
Hutchinson's sex gave a special meaning to a conven-
tional seventeenth-century image, the "seduction"
of men's minds. Her followers' use of their sexual
powers was a persistent point of reference for Win-
throp. He compared them to the "Harlots" who had
dealings with a young man (Proverbs, 7:21), even
though the Biblical story includes only one harlot,
and glossing it in a way that suggests how impossible
Winthrop found it to distinguish women's using their
tongues independently in speech, from the perverse
use of what woman's mouth was expected to do--to kiss:
"with much faire speech they caused them to yeeld,
with the flattering of their lips they forced them."
The metaphor is one of woman raping men. In'the final
analysis, Hutchinson was the "american Jesabel," and
Winthrop specified the Jezebel "mentioned in Revela-
tion" (although that name in both Winthrop and the
Bible conjured up Ahab's wife, who "cut off all the
prophets of the Lord," I Kings 18:4, and played the
harlot, II Kings 9:30). The Jezebel in Revelation
used her sexual power to seduce men, body and soul,
before the orthodox male God espoused by John of Patmos
took charge of Jezebel's sexual power and used it
to his own ends. "I have a few things against thee,
because thou sufferest that woman, Jezebel, who calleth
herself a prophetess, to teach and to seduce my ser-
vants to commit fornication, and to eat things sacri-
ficed unto idols. And I gave her space to repent of
her fornication, and she repented not. Behold, I will
cast her into a bed, and them that commit adultery
with her into great tribulation, except they repent
of their deeds. And I will kill her children with
death; and all the churches shall know that I am he
who searcheth the reins and hearts; and I will qive
unto every one of you according to your works."
So Hutchinson and her female followers were a host
of new Eves, threatening the social and theological
order imposed by the new Adams. No wonder Winthrop
felt that Satan threatened New England with total ruin;
his vision of Christ and Gospel being "driven out"
suggests, perhaps, the idea of the flight of the ear-
lier bridal pair, Adam and Eve.30 The vision had an
objective correlative in the very topography of settlement.
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