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Authors: Elizabeth Mahon
Tags: #General, #History, #Women, #Social Science, #Biography & Autobiography, #Biography, #Women's Studies
Scandalous Women: The Lives and Loves of History's Most Notorious Women (18 page)
BOOK: Scandalous Women: The Lives and Loves of History's Most Notorious Women
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Anne came by her opinionated nature honestly. Her father, Francis Marbury, spent the first three years of her life under house arrest by the church on a charge of heresy,
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the same charge that would be brought against Anne. A Cambridge-educated clergyman, he was jailed only a few months into his first post. Marbury had repeatedly challenged the Anglican Church authorities on religious truth. Although Anne wasn’t formally educated, her father taught her and her siblings, using his trial transcriptions, the Bible, and a book of martyrs. Arguing about scripture passed for leisure time in the Marbury household.
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the same charge that would be brought against Anne. A Cambridge-educated clergyman, he was jailed only a few months into his first post. Marbury had repeatedly challenged the Anglican Church authorities on religious truth. Although Anne wasn’t formally educated, her father taught her and her siblings, using his trial transcriptions, the Bible, and a book of martyrs. Arguing about scripture passed for leisure time in the Marbury household.
The colony magistrates passed a series of resolutions that were aimed at curbing dissidence, including a direct condemnation of meetings with more than sixty people. Anne had more than that on a slow day. They were also annoyed that when she began questioning whether certain ministers had the “seal of the spirit,” her followers began to heckle some of these ministers at their sermons. This was considered “traducing the ministers and the ministry” and it was a big no-no.
Anne was summoned before the General Court with Winthrop presiding. He told her that she was “called as one of those that have troubled the peace of the commonwealth.” Anne refused to meekly submit, pointing out that she hadn’t actually been charged with anything. Despite her advanced pregnancy, she was forced to stand for several days as they tried desperately to get her to admit to blasphemy. Not exactly Christian behavior! She and Winthrop sparred back and forth like prizefighters, Anne bobbing and weaving as she matched him scripture for scripture. Winthrop accused her of breaking the fifth commandment of honoring thy father and mother, which to Winthrop included all authority figures, including him. When she was told this, Anne replied, “Put the case, sir, that I do fear the Lord and my parents. May not I entertain them that fear the Lord, because my parents will not give me leave?”
When Winthrop tried to prove that her meetings were public rather than private, Anne insisted that since women had no public role, her thoughts were private and not subject to censure. If she decided to have some friends over to her house for some cider and a little religious talk, that was her business, no one else’s. Anne even cited the apostle Paul’s letter to Titus, which called for “the elder women to instruct the younger.” Winthrop then accused her of keeping the women from getting their husbands’ dinner on time. Time and again, Anne had Winthrop against the ropes, sweating, until Winthrop finally snapped, “We do not mean to discourse with those of your sex.” Kind of hard not to do when the person on trial is a woman.
But it wasn’t just the meetings that riled them up. It was Anne’s unique take on scripture that disturbed the Puritan leaders. Like the Puritans, Anne believed in God’s free grace, which was a covenant between God and man, where God drew the soul to salvation. Where Anne and the Puritans were at loggerheads was on the need to prepare oneself by doing good deeds. Anne thought that this smacked of buying your way into heaven.
She was ahead of her time in her belief that everyone could be saved, even nonbelievers. This didn’t sit well with the Puritans, who believed that they were God’s chosen people. And then there was the matter of her belief that God placed the Holy Spirit direction within those he saved, and guided their actions like some sort of cosmic GPS. She was also a bit picky about which ministers she felt had a direct line to God. Only her brother-in-law and the Reverend John Cotton, who had also left England not long before, having upset the church authorities, met her high standards. And then there was her belief that one could have a personal relationship with God cutting out the middle man of clerical authority. This threatened the very foundation on which the Puritans had built their state, their church, and their lives. They even came up with a special name for her beliefs called Antinomianism, which is Latin for “against the law.” Winthrop and his buddies of course were on the right side of the law.
When Anne’s spiritual guru and best friend, John Cotton, was called as a witness for her defense, things got really interesting. Cotton was caught between a rock (Anne Hutchinson) and a hard place (John Winthrop). He considered Anne to be his spiritual collaborator, writing that she was “the apple of our eye.” But the pupil had surpassed the master. And he’d already gotten into a heap of trouble back in the old country for his beliefs, so he was walking a fine line. Cotton managed to defend Anne, sort of. He wouldn’t admit that Anne had talked trash about the other ministers in his favor, although he made certain to point out that he was distressed at the idea. With Cotton’s testimony, Anne would have defeated the charges against her.
But Anne couldn’t keep her mouth shut. Having an audience was just too good to resist. She was like the smartest girl in class who can’t help showing off how smart she is. Winthrop, being the gentleman that he was, let her hang herself. He must have been rubbing his hands with glee, though. Anne started off talking about her journey of faith, how she remained unsettled by the quality of the preaching in the Church of England.
That would have been fine if she had just stuck to that topic, but then she dug a hole for herself that was deeper. She continued on about how the spirit of the Lord opened the Bible and thrust certain passages in her mind. She then revealed that “the Lord did give me to see that those who did not teach the New Covenant had the spirit of the Antichrist.”
Oh, no, she didn’t! The judges were flabbergasted. It was one thing for a man to consider revelation through scripture, but the idea that a woman should claim such a thing was crazy talk. However, Anne was not done. Not only did she claim to hear the voices of Moses, God, and John the Baptist but she then pulled out the big guns. Comparing herself to Daniel in the lion’s den, she told them that she knew she was going to be persecuted in New England and that their lies would bring a “curse on upon you and your posterity and this whole state.” Yeah, nothing like telling the people who hold the power of life and death over you that they are going to be cursed for punishing you. With these revelations, even Cotton had to back off.
The judges ruled that Anne would be jailed under house arrest until the spring, when she would be dealt with by the church. They weren’t so kind to her supporters, who were disenfranchised for signing a petition in support of her. The others were disarmed just in case they decided they had a divine revelation to kill the judges. Many of the petitioners recanted and were allowed to keep their guns.
Anne’s actions had the Puritan godfathers running so scared that, to minimize Hutchinson’s threat, they decided to get started on building the college they’d been planning. After her trial, they finally got cracking on it. Harvard graduates everywhere can thank Anne Hutchinson for the fact that their school was founded to stop smart-alecky female fanatics from getting the better of the law in court and convincing other females that they had a right to their own opinions. Modeled after Winthrop’s alma mater, Cambridge, the new college was named after John Harvard, a recent immigrant to the colony, who had bequeathed half his estate and his library to the college before his premature death at the age of thirty.
In March 1638, Anne was accused of heresy and also of “lewd and lascivious conduct” for having men and women in her house at the same time during her meetings like they were having a spiritual orgy. She was found guilty and excommunicated by the Boston church. It had the opposite effect on her than it would have on most people. Instead of being “oh, woe is me!” Anne was ecstatic, claiming that “it was the greatest happiness, next to Christ that had befallen her.” Winthrop claimed that actually it was the churches in the colony that should be happy, as “the poor souls who have been seduced by her had settled again in the truth.” In other words, “Hooray for our team!”
No one knows what her husband, Will Hutchinson, thought about having to uproot his family once again. No doubt after over twenty years of marriage, he was used to his wife’s convictions. His only recorded words about Anne are, “I am more nearly tied to my wife than to the church. I do think her to be a dear saint and servant of God.” Winthrop called him “a man of a very mild temper and weak parts and wholly guided by his wife.” After leaving the colony with her family, Anne ended up on the island of Aquidneck on Narragansett Bay. Thirty families voluntarily followed her into banishment. The men signed the Portsmouth Compact, creating the new settlement of Rhode Island. Anne gave birth with great difficulty in the summer of 1638, to a hydatidiform mole, a cluster of cysts that develops in place of an embryo. The Puritan fathers patted themselves on the back and broke out the cigars when they heard the news of the “monstrous birth.” To them it just proved the point that she was evil and they were wise to kick her out.
Will Hutchinson died in 1642, having served as governor of the new colony. When it looked as if the Massachusetts Bay Colony was going to annex the Rhode Island colony, Anne decided to move with some of her children to the New Netherlands. The last thing she wanted was to be under the yoke of John Winthrop and his friends again. Anne and her family settled a farmstead on a meadow in Pelham Bay, near what is now the Split Rock golf course in the Bronx.
A year later, Siwanoy Indians scalped Anne and six of her children and burned down their house. Only her daughter Susan survived. Anne had been warned about a possible Indian attack, but she ignored it because of her long history of good relations with the Natives. Instead of arming herself, or abandoning her home, Anne did what she had always done: put her faith in the will of God. The Siwanoy chief Wampage renamed himself Ann-Hoeck after his most famous victim. Nine-year-old Susan was adopted by the Siwanoy and lived with them until she was eighteen, when she returned reluctantly to her family in Boston. The river near where Anne was killed is now known as the Hutchinson River.
Anne Hutchinson was an American visionary, a pioneer who became the poster girl for religious freedom and tolerance. Long before the Constitution guaranteed the right of free speech, Anne was defending hers. In 1987, Governor Michael Dukakis pardoned Anne, 350 years after John Winthrop “banished [her] from out of our jurisdiction as being a woman not fit for our society.” A bronze statue of Anne stands proudly on the front lawn of the Massachusetts State House, calling her a “courageous exponent of civil liberty and religious toleration.” Ironically, her statue looks toward the cemetery, steps away from where her old nemesis John Winthrop now rests.
I am going to be the first of a new genus, the peculiar bent of my nature pushes me on.
—MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT
Mary Wollstonecraft wrote her masterwork,
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
, in a frenzy in six weeks, distilling thirty years of anger. Published in 1792, it was an immediate success, attracting admirers that included future First Lady Abigail Adams. It was a ferocious rejection of the traditional ideas of femininity. She was not writing to please; she wrote about what she felt was real. In this landmark work she argued that women were not naturally inferior to men, but appeared to be only because they lacked an education. She suggested that both men and women should be treated as rational beings and imagined a social order founded on reason.
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
, in a frenzy in six weeks, distilling thirty years of anger. Published in 1792, it was an immediate success, attracting admirers that included future First Lady Abigail Adams. It was a ferocious rejection of the traditional ideas of femininity. She was not writing to please; she wrote about what she felt was real. In this landmark work she argued that women were not naturally inferior to men, but appeared to be only because they lacked an education. She suggested that both men and women should be treated as rational beings and imagined a social order founded on reason.
From the moment of her birth in 1759, Mary had a chip on her shoulder. She felt unloved and unappreciated by her parents, who preferred her older brother, Ned, to her. And as each new baby was born in the family, Mary got lost in the shuffle. When her paternal grandfather died, his will divided his estate between her father, her brother, and her aunt. Nothing was left to her and her sisters, a slight that she never forgot. It was her first hint of the injustices that were meted out to women.
BOOK: Scandalous Women: The Lives and Loves of History's Most Notorious Women
2.13Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
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