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

ANNE HUTCHINSON AND THE PURITAN
ATTITUDE TOWARD WOMEN
Ben Barker-Benfield
Historians of the Antinomian Controversy, 1636-
1638, from Charles Francis Adams in 1892, to J. K.
Hosmer in 1908, and most recently, David Hall in 1968
have generally agreed with John Winthrop in his
assessment of the danger it posed to the existence
of New England. The controversy between Winthrop's
New England Way and the Hutchinsonians (the Anti-
nomians) was "the sorest tryall that ever befell
us since we left our Native soyle." If Winthrop's
faction had not been helped by God, the old Serpent,
Satan, "would soon have driven Christ and Gospel
out of New England...and [have led] to the repos-
sessing of Satan in his ancient Kingdom." Satan's
"instrument...so fitted and trained to his service
for interrupting the passage [of the] Kingdome in
this part of the world," was, as it was at the time
of his first temptation of man, a woman.1
In some respects Anne Hutchinson represented the
emergence of dynamic individual consciousness as a
potential for everyone after the Reformation. "Mrs.
Hutchinson, like Hampden, Lilburne, Winstanley , and
many more, heralded the arrival of that new man who
was to be so startlingly delineated by Rousseau a
century later; an uncommon man who struggled to break
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