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

they had won power and had become part of what the
historian G. H. Williams calls the "magisterial" and
"classical" Reformation in Europe, these men consti-
tuted themselves a mediating caste, especially in the
eyes of those groups Williams describes as constituting
the "radical Reformation." The New England Puritans
and their Hutchinsonian opponents had already extended
the magisterial/radical conflict to the New World, and
Winthrop was perfectly accurate in associating the Hutch-
insonians with Familists, Libertines, and the Anabaptists
of Minster--groups whose names were watchwords for re-
ligious and sexual anarchy in the seventeenth century.5
Both Williams and Keith Thomas have pointed out the
meaning for women of the Protestant tenet of the priest-
hood of all believers. Williams describes how it worked
doctrinally--"the extension of the priesthood of the
Christophorous laity to women"--and Thomas relates the
premise to the prominence of women both in positions of
leadership and in sheer numbers in the Civil War Sects"
in old England, that is almost contemporaneously with
the rise of the Hutchinsonians in New England. In tra-
ditional patriarchal society (already undercut by the
individualizing tendencies of magisterial Protestantism)
speaking women were, by definition, rebels. Female sec-
tarians reproduced in the family the religious divisive-
ness Puritans created for the established churches,
challenging men to make good for women what they claimed
for themselves.
Keith Thomas amplified his account of the female
challengers to the patriarchal order in England, describ-
ing a range of entirely feminist activities, including
petitions to Parliament. He mentions the Civil Marriage
Act, "the lively discussion of polygamy and of marriage
within the forbidden degrees, the unusual part played by
women in war, litigation, pamphleteering and politics;
the appearance in English of continental feminist writ-
ings [inspired by the Radical Reformation there]; and the
attacks, sometimes by women themselves, on their limited
educational opportunities, their confinement to domestic
activity, their subjection to their husbands and the in-
justices of the commercial marriage market." Thomas asso-
ciates this challenge with the emergence of the evalua-
tion of the individual rather than the family as the pri-
mary political unit.7
The "dictatorship" or "oligarchy" ruling the churches
of Massachusetts Bay, comprising a hierarchy of ministers,
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