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

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Mistris Dier brought forth her birth of a woman child, a fish, a beast, and a fowle, all woven together in one, without a head.... "Mistris Hutchinson being big with child, and grow- ing towards the time of her labor, as other woman doe, she brought forth not one (as Mistris Dier did) but (which was more strange to amazement) 30 monstrous births or thereabouts, at once...none at all of them (as farre as I could ever learne) of humane shape." Hutchinson was not only remote from normal women's childbearing, but even from the single monstrosity of Mary Dyer's parturition. Hutchinson's bearing thirty inhuman monsters was-appropriate to her crea- tion of all of those Eves at her classes of sixty or more. The godly then "made use of" the monstrous births "in publick," as God used Jezebel's sexual powers in furthering his powers, using them to demon- strate the authority's righteousness. Winthrop's refusal to see Hutchinson's mind apart from her phy- siology illustrates how accurate Hutchinson was in putting her' finger on the profound sexual bias of the operation of grace.36 The context for the explanation of Winthrop's attitude to Hutchinson, of the remarkable refusal of Puritans to make good on the priesthood of all believers as far as women were concerned, and, per- haps, of the asseveration of a sexual relation between men and God, was the fluidity of an identity rooted in contradictions. Puritans destroyed the traditional restraints between man and God and created a more dynamic sense of who man was, and therefore of what he could be. But such adventurousness evoked the appropriate fears of anarchy, of not knowing who they were at all. In other words, the radical psychological, theological and social changes accomplished by Puritan men did not leave them secure enough to permit women the same changes in practice, even though they were conceded to women in theory. On the contrary, these radical changes generated a practical need for men to insist on denying them to women. But the theoreti- cal concession (the idea of the priesthood of all believers, on which the men's own changes was based) generated a continuous process of religious radicalism, whose prophets compounded Puritan anxieties simply by applying Puritan standards more rigorously. That 83
is, they held up to the Puritans precisely the anti- authoritarianism of which the Puritans were guilty. The dissenters could be seen as better Puritans. The English and American Puritans themselves had challenged the interlocking patriarchal units, and in accordance with the psychology described by Gorer and Spitz, they undermined fathers' familial authority. They had disobeyed the traditions of their fathers-- ancestors, bishops, king, and earlier God--and that was precisely the offense for which Winthrop and his cohorts condemned Hutchinson. As the Puritan regi- cides chopped off Charles I's head, they, as well as the female sectarians who claimed to be as good Puri- tans as Hugh Peter (persecutor of Anne Hutchinson and Charles I) and Oliver Cromwell, or better, were under- mining the family that reflected and reinforced the form of the patriarchal state Charles had headed. Per- haps the Protestant erection of an unmediated, Hebraic Father was compensation for the rebellion against age- old earthly fathers. Yet the rebellion continued in its behavioral dynamic in the way Miller has described, so that even the new Hebraic totem was pulled down, and the Puritan tradition splintered into anti- authoritarianism, materialsim--and the individualism that Hutchinson has been taken to have heralded. The priesthood of all believers had potentiated anarchy from the beginning, as the tensions within covenant theology attest.37 These tensions were compounded by the decision to take the Puritan errand into a "wilderness." The Puritans saw themselves as representing Christianity, which was for them, civilization, in the face of a howling wilderness, of non-civilization, Satan's stamping ground, beastliness. The Puritans' small area of order had its inner psychic dimension, hope- fully to be infused with grace, to float the new man out of the circumambient beastliness of his unredeemed body. Puritan rhetoric moved easily between the inner and outer venues for this struggle. Jonathan Mitchell said in 1663 that "We in this country being far removed from the more cultivated parts of the world, had need to use utmost care and diligence to keep up learning and all helps...lest degeneracy, barbarism, ignorance and irreligion do by degrees break in upon us." This was a constant refrain, and American history could be written from the point of view of those who did in fact 84
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Page 3 and 4: down the restrictive barriers of an
Page 5 and 6: elders, teachers and deacons, were
Page 7 and 8: able to the more godlike intellect
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Page 11 and 12: cal Reformation, which the Hutchins
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Page 17 and 18: In view of Hutchinson's Eve-like th
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Page 25 and 26: so the adulterous Prynne was given
Page 27 and 28: and Hawthorne was here adumbrating
Page 29 and 30: Thought, eds. A. M. Schlesinger, Jr
Page 31 and 32: 30. Without picking up this sexual
Page 33: "great dispute is, who is a right f

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

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