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

"go native." Yet the Puritans had put themselves in
the way of running such a danger (even as their own
theological premises contained the dragon's teeth of
Hutchinsonianism). Donald Meyer suggests that adver-
sary conditions had sustained the vision of the "un-
bounded will" of God that became intolerable once
those conditions (in America or in Europe) were sur-
mounted. But perhaps the effort of the establishment
of a garden had itself turned the Puritans into beasts.
(The coincidence of the Pequot War with the Antinomian
controversy should be mentioned in that context, since
both Indians and women seem to have represented to Puri-
tan male orthodoxy its own potential for lustful anarchic
eruption.) In Hawthorne's view, the grim head of a
bloody wolf shone out from Governor John Endicott's
iron breast, which reflected the whole grisly range
of punished beings, purged, as Hutchinson was, from
Puritan society, and from Puritan psychology. As
Puritan writers construed the world outside in terms
of self; as, also, they divided characteristics of
themselves into masculine and feminine, requiring that
their wills, their masculine side, check their "hearts,"
their feminine side, in relation to earthly concerns
including the physical delights of the marriage bed,
that is of their own bodies; then it is apparent that
men's succumbing to women would represent their succumb-
ing to a part of themselves that should be subordinate.
Just as men should order the community to leave many
secular cares with women, so, too, they wished to free
their perceptions of God from entanglement with the body.
The wish suggests how close were the values of Puritan
men to Hutchinson's; the former used women to reinforce
the suggest of the project of separation; the latter
insisted that separation of self from sex had to be
complete in its own terms, and not dependent on sexual
individiousness.38
The subordination of women could make men feel they
were like God when their other premises might deny it.
In the passage in which Winthrop described his love
for Christ, and Christ's for him, Christ was to Win-
throp as Winthrop was to his wife. The terms make
it clear how, existentially, a man could identify
with God, and how, consistent with such identifica-
tion, he needed a given distinction from his wife to
affirm such godlikeness. If this sexual distinction
had been made irrelevant to the relationship with
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