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

were like the Libertines (whose name has entered the
language) conventionally charged with "moral laxity."
Moreover the midwifery role of Anne Hutchinson and
Mistress Hawkins only deepened suspicions of their
familiarity with the devil's power to use sexuality
as Winthrop's account of Mistress Hawkins' attempt
to induce fertility might suggest.33
For the vast majority of people of the age, mid-
wives were the only doctors. Hutchinson's use of her
medical expertise gives a particular historical meaning
to the extraordinary persistence of disease and treat-
ment imagery in Winthrop's account of her case, the
whole of which he called a "sore." Just like Revela-
tion's Jezebel, Winthrop's "American Jesabel" gave her
patients things to consume. His most frequent charac-
terization of her teaching was "poyson." The "last and
worst of all which most suddainly diffused the venome
of these opinions into the very veines and vitalls of
the People in the Country, was Mistris Hutchinson's
doubly weekly-lecture." The midwife-physician dispensed
an addictive substance that turned out to be the re-
verse of therapeutic. "Multitudes of men and women...
having tasted of [the Hutchinsonians'] Commodities
were eager after them, and were streight infected
before they were aware, and some being tainted con-
veyed the infection to others; and thus that Plague
first began amongst us." Since midwife-Hutchinson
had reversed her therapeutic role, godly men had to
assume it. They preached "against those errors, and
practices that so much pestered the Countrey, to in-
forme, to confute, to rebuke, etc., thereby to cure
those that were diseased already, and to give Anti-
dotes to the rest, to preserve them from infection."
Those who refused to relinquish Hutchinsonianism were
labeled "incurable" and purged from the social body.34
But the physiological metaphor was extended fur-
ther. It was conventional in ideological disputes in
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to describe
the generation and proliferation of opinions in effu-
sively procreative terms. When the Hutchinsonians
continued their teachings in Rhode Island, Winthrop
said they were "hatching and multiplying new Opinions."
The imagery was consistent with the notion of the
fruitful union between Christ and the believer, lead-
ing to the re-birth of the latter's soul. Where inde-
pendent-minded women were concerned, the perverse bear-
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