A History of the Wife (21 page)

With the birth of her son Samuel in 1633, Anne embarked upon the demanding role of mother in a frontier community. Between 1633 and 1652, she give birth to a total of eight children, the “eight birds hatcht in one nest” evoked in one of her poems.
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Her four sons and four daughters all survived into adulthood. At a time when one could expect to lose a quarter or half of one’s children before they became adults, Anne’s good fortune with her children was a further reason for her to

praise the Lord.

Like other Puritan mothers, Anne Bradstreet breast-fed her babies. In England during the early seventeenth century, when upper-class women commonly took in wet nurses, Protestants condemned wet- nursing as unhealthy and unnatural. Puritans and other strict Protes- tants considered it a mother’s religious duty to nurse her babies. Contrary to our “puritanical” ideas today, mothers breast-fed in the presence of visitors and spoke about the process with “unpuritanical” ease. Here are Anne Bradstreet’s graphic words on the subject: “Some children are hardly weaned although the teat be rub’d wth wormwood or mustard, they wil either wipe it off, or else suck down sweet and bit- ter together... .”
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She used the weaning process as a metaphor for the lives of certain Christians who are “so childishly sottish that they are still huging and sucking those empty breasts,” and remain unable to move on to “more substantiall food”—i.e., a higher sphere of existence— without the bitterness God forces into their lives. Anne Bradstreet’s breast imagery sprang from her personal experience as a mother and from her conception of God’s cosmic order.

While Anne Bradstreet welcomed her pregnancies, she was by no means immune to the fears that parturition represented for a colonial mother, since one-fifth of adult women’s deaths occurred in child- birth.
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One of the poems Anne addressed to her husband, “Before the birth of one of her Children,” makes these fears explicit.

How soon, my Dear, death may my steps attend, How soon’t may be thy Lot to lose thy friend, We both are ignorant, yet love bids me

These farewell lines to recommend to thee, That when that knot’s unty’d that made us one, I may seem thine, who in effect am none.
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We glimpse Anne’s premonition, fortunately unfounded, that she would die in childbirth. We also get a sense of her loving relation to the “friend” she found in her husband.

Her five marriage poems attest to a profound love, the kind that any wife in any age might hope to experience. “To my Dear and loving Husband” expresses those feelings in a charming, straightforward manner.

If ever two were one, then surely we.

If ever man were lov’d by wife, then thee; If ever wife was happy in a man, Compare with me ye women if you can.
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From Ipswich, where they had moved in 1635, she wrote “A Letter to her Husband, absent upon Publick employment,” evoking a union of mind and body that transcended separation.

My head, my heart, mine Eyes, my life, nay more, My joy, my Magazine of earthly store,

If two be one, as surely thou and I,

How stayest thou there, whilst I at Ipswich lye?

. . . . .

Flesh of thy flesh, bone of thy bone,

I here, thou there, yet both but one.
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And in another poem to her husband, she playfully imaged their union in creaturely pairs—two deer, two turtles, two fish—who, browse “together at one Tree,” “roost within one house,” and “in one River glide.”57 This passionate wife is far removed from the sexually repressed Puritan stereotype formed on the basis of fire-and-brimstone sermons rather than a handful of conjugal love poems.

It was by no means common in the seventeenth century for women to write poetry, either in England or the New World. About half of Puri- tan women could not read and even more could not write.
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And many colonists were of the mind of John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, that women should not “meddle in such things as are proper for men, whose minds are stronger.” Here he was referring to the case of Anne Yale Hopkins, the wife of Governor Edward Hopkins of Connecticut, whose mental instability—according to Winthrop—was caused by “giving herself wholly to reading and writing.” His diagnosis reflected age-old beliefs about the proper sphere for wives: “For if she had attended her household affairs, and such things as belong to women,... she had kept her wits, and might have improved them usefully and honourably in the place God had set her.”
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Anne Bradstreet was well aware of this common attitude, which she

confronted in one of her shorter poems, “The Prologue,” by imagining herself in the minds of her detractors: “I am obnoxious to each carping tongue/ Who sayes my hand a needle better fits.” And then, with a bow to men’s presumed superiority, she simply asked that women be granted “some small acknowledgement” of their poetic ability, however limited, dubbing her own verse “unrefined stuffe” in contrast to the “glistering gold” of men.
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It not hard to understand why Anne Brad- street felt the need to defend herself against the tight community of Puritans for whom lofty poetic expression was deemed an exclusively male purview.

Puritans had many ways of differentiating between what was proper for men and what was proper for women. Women and men entered church by separate doors and were seated according to their sex and rank: men with men, women with women, maidens with maidens, children with children.
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The most prominent men sat in the foremost pews. Only men were expected to speak publicly.

Most Puritan women were content to attend church services without drawing attention to themselves. Their major concern was getting there in the first place. A weekly walk to a church two or three or even five miles away was no small matter for mothers with small children, not to mention sick and elderly charges. The Bradstreets’ and Dudleys’ move to Ipswich may have been occasioned by the distance they had to travel from Cambridge to Boston in order to attend services. Given her fre- quent illnesses and the demands of motherhood, Anne Bradstreet was not always able to trek across the Charles River and devote an entire day to the logistics of church attendance.

Puritan men throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries often petitioned their governing officials for new churches on the grounds that their wives and children needed one closer to home. And pressure was brought to bear by the women themselves in more per- sonal ways. Thus Hannah Gallop wrote to her uncle John Winthrop, Jr. (son of the first governor of Massachusetts and himself the Governor of Connecticut), to support the establishment of a church in Mistick, Connecticut, because mothers “that have young children sucking” obliged to travel long distances “manie times are brought exeding faint

& much weakened, & divers are not able to goe al winter.”
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Ultimately the Bradstreets moved in 1645 or 1646 from Ipswich to

Andover, where they hoped to create a new community. The town

records note that Simon Bradstreet’s house lot consisted of twenty acres. Once again Anne had to pack and unpack the family’s belongings, set up housekeeping in a frontier settlement where foxes and wolves in the adjacent forests posed a constant threat, and reorganize the lives of her children and servants. Her eldest son, Samuel, was being prepared to enter Harvard College, and her youngest son, Simon, was sent to Ipswich for his grammar school education. In Andover Anne gave birth to her last three children and somehow continued the literary work that was integral to her life.
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It was there that Simon thrived as the owner of a sawmill and became a public figure with activities that took him to various parts of New England. The Bradstreets prospered in Andover, which held on to its social homogeneity and agrarian charm right into the twentieth century.

The minister of their congregation was John Woodbridge, married to Anne’s sister, Mercy. When the Woodbridges traveled to England in 1647, they took with them Anne Bradstreet’s poems, which were pub- lished in London in 1650 under the title
The Tenth Muse,
apparently to the surprise of the author. In his preface to this volume of some two hundred pages, John Woodbridge described Anne Bradstreet as a “Woman, honoured, and esteemed where she lives, for her gracious demeanour, her eminent parts, her pious conversation, her courteous disposition, her exact diligence in her place, and discreet managing of her family occasions.” And in keeping with this flawless portrait of an industrious, well-bred wife thoroughly committed to her family and community, he hastened to add that “these Poems are the fruit but of some few houres, curtailed from her sleep, and other refreshments.”
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In no way did Woodbridge want to present Bradstreet’s literary work as a rival to her primary domestic responsibilities. To get some sense of the negative attitude toward women writers at that time, one has only to read the public letter addressed by Thomas Parker to his sister, which appeared in London in 1650. He condemned her literary achievements in no uncertain terms: “your printing of a Book, beyond the custom of your Sex, doth rankly smell.”
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The Tenth Muse
was Bradstreet’s only publication during her lifetime, though she continued to write until her death in 1672. Her
Several Poems Compiled with Great Variety of Wit and Learning,
posthumously published in 1678, was one of only four books authored by women in seventeenth-century New England, as compared with 907 authored by

men.
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This is not the place to examine Bradstreet’s long metaphysical poems or her biblical commentaries or her scientific and alchemical treatises. But it is the place to argue that whatever restrictions Puritan society placed upon girls and women—and there were many—they were at least expected to use their minds for religious instruction. Both men and women were encouraged to read the Bible, especially the “Geneva Bible” prepared under the auspices of John Calvin and trans- lated in 1560 by English Protestant exiles living in Switzerland. In 1642, Massachussets passed a law requiring parents to teach their chil- dren and apprentices to read so they could become familiar with Scrip- ture.
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Women were also encouraged to discuss the weekly sermon in female groups, a common practice in England that was brought to the New World by the generation of Anne Bradstreet’s parents.

Anne Bradstreet’s mother, Dorothy Dudley, offered a stellar example of the Puritan wife devoted to both public and private worship. In the eulogy she wrote for her mother, Anne specifically named these activi- ties: “The publick meetings ever did frequent,/ And in her Closet con- stant hours she spent.” Mrs. Dudley was praised as “A worthy Matron of unspotted life,/ A loving Mother and obedient wife,/ A friendly Neighbor, pitiful to poor,/... A true Instructer of her Family.”
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For Anne, her mother had provided a model of selfless devotion to a strong-willed husband and to the children who still counted on her for counsel and support in the New World.

Anne’s father, Thomas Dudley, confirmed this vision of a loving, obe- dient, friendly, compassionate spirit in the letter he wrote to Anne’s sis- ter, Mercy, at the time of his wife’s death, though considering the circumstances, it would have been bad form to say anything less. He could probably have added many of the other virtues so prized in Christian wives: humility, meekness, modesty, submissiveness, and patience. It may be hard for us today to imagine that these were the main qualities lauded in women. In private, colonial women had to be physically and emotionally robust just to sustain themselves and their families during an unforgiving New England winter, but in public they were obliged to conform to the appearance of the weaker vessel. And many women, like Dorothy Dudley, had so internalized the Puritan ethos that they undoubtedly believed the creed of female frailty and wifely dependence. It was less common to speak of men’s dependence

on their wives; yet observers of marriage throughout the centuries have noted that husbands often fall to pieces, and even die, after the death of a wife... or they quickly marry again. The latter was the case for Thomas Dudley, who, despite his devotion to a wife of forty years, remarried barely four months after her death.

Anne Bradstreet was in her own way no less exemplary than her mother. To her mother’s conjugal and maternal strengths, she added the gifts of the writer, inaugurating a tradition of American women poets that would, in time, embrace Emily Dickinson and Adrienne Rich.

Yet we would be wrong to generalize on the basis of Anne Bradstreet’s marital happiness. Others were not so lucky. Anne’s younger sister, Sarah, for instance, made a disastrous marriage that ended in scandal and divorce. After a trip to London with her husband, Benjamin Keayne, in 1646, Sarah returned to Massachusetts alone amid charges that she had preached in mixed assemblies and performed acts unbe- coming to a wife. Her husband accused her of having infected him with syphilis, presumably acquired through adultery.

While her father, then the governor of Massachusetts, was able to push her divorce through the General Court, she was nonetheless excommunicated from Boston’s First Church for “Irregular prophecy- ing” and “odious, lewd & scandalous uncleane behavior with... an Excommunicate person.”
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She seems to have gotten off easily since the penalty for proven adultery was whipping or a fine, or both. It was common in both New England and the South for adulterous offenders to be required to stand in public with a rope around their necks as a form of mock execution, or to appear in church draped in a white sheet, holding a white wand, and, one way or the other, to apologize to the community. Laws had even been passed to punish adultery with death, as early as 1612 in Virginia and 1631 in Massachusetts, but that penalty was almost never exacted.
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(Capital punishment for adultery in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Haven seems to have been enforced only three times.) Sarah was permitted to marry again, in spite of the fact that her first husband was still living, but she did lose cus- tody of her daughter.