Birth of an Unlikely Leader

Anne Hutchinson and her husband arrived in Massachusetts in September of 1634, settling down quickly. The fiery spirit that marked her stand against the Puritan leaders in the colony had not yet erupted, but rather continued to simmer, as she and her husband established themselves in a two-story house in what would become present-day downtown Boston.

Having been trained as a midwife in England, Hutchinson continued the practice in the America, becoming a respected figure in the community amongst the colony’s women. While still constrained by the pressures and rules of the day, she was able to establish a base of followers whom she and Minister John Cotton preached the “Covenant of Grace,” which would spark what is the called the Antinomian Controversy, the first schism within Puritan New England, one which threatened to undermine the power of both the church and government in the infant society.

An easy target, due to a disregard of social mores and overall womanhood, Hutchinson found herself at the center of a legal quandary. She had preached publicly, wholly unacceptable for a Puritan woman, and had questioned the doctrine taught by the church, claiming that the “Covenant of Works” espoused by Massachusetts’ ministers led followers to believe they could simply do good and get into Heaven, apart from finding personal salvation.

Within two years of moving to Boston, Hutchinson faced an uphill battle against the the colony’s magistrates. Any man would have been intimidated, but Hutchinson went head-to-head with the most powerful men in the hemisphere.

Sources:

https://www.nps.gov/sapa/planyourvisit/anne-hutchinson-in-massachusetts-bay.htm

http://historyofmassachusetts.org/anne-hutchinson/

The Creation Story

Anne Hutchinson’s life straddled a defining period in European and later, American, history. Born in Alford, England in 1591, her lifetime saw the founding of the New World in Virginia, Puritan separatists in New England, and further fracturing of the mother country as a result of religious and socioeconomic turmoil.

The daughter of ‘radical’ Puritans, who fought to cleanse the Church of England of all practices not outlined in the Bible, including many Catholic traditions. Hutchinson was well-educated at a young age, able to read, write, and recite the Bible at will. While her father, Francis Marbury, softened his approach to the Crown and the Church of England throughout his adult life, his daughter, Anne, continued a hard-line attitude. She married a fellow puritan, William Hutchinson, in 1612. Quite unusually for the time, Hutchinson, according to available accounts, publicly and privately interacted with his wife without ‘paternalistic’ friction of any sort, especially given her stature as the more powerful figure of the pair.

It was in the early years of Anne Marbury’s marriage to Hutchinson that the two found an admiration for the famous preacher, John Cotton, who was posted as a minister in the nearby town of Boston. Cotton fled England for Massachusetts in 1633, threatened with jail time for his preaching. Hutchinson, receiving messages from God, sailed to Boston the next year with her family. Even on the journey to the new colony, she argued with one of her fellow passengers, a reverend, on the nature of being saved spiritually. Unheard of for the time, Hutchinson began to overstep gender boundaries before she even set foot in the New World.

Sources:

Image – https://hallnjean.wordpress.com/

Winship, Michael P., The Times and Trials of Anne Hutchinson: Puritans Divided, (2005)

 

Anne Hutchinson: American Badass

    Anne Hutchinson is one of few women from the early colonial period that we are taught about in school, at least in the case of my education. Her unusual story has given her a special place in history, as it is one of both familiar themes and unthinkable details. Hutchinson has a special place within the context of American history, too, as she represents the rebellious spirit that has driven our nation since the Pilgrims and Jamestown settlers washed ashore in the 17th-century.

My job in creating this “Remember the Ladies…” project will be to interpret not only Anne Hutchinson’s life and the time in which she lived, but also her place in the story of the United States, and why she is still as relevant today as she was in the 1630s. Hutchinson’s stand against the overwhelming entity that was the Puritan church is timeless, and is luckily still taught in high school history lessons (again, in my experience). The fact that she is a woman is reason enough to delve into her story of disobedience, as no other woman in Puritan society from that time has left as large an impression as she has, apart from the fictional Hester Prynne from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850).

Given that gender is the most important and interesting component of Hutchinson’s stand against the Puritan church’s unchanging divine beliefs, blog posts subsequent to this will interpret those relevant events through the lens of her position as a woman in 17th-century Boston, so soon after the unsteady founding of the religion-based colonies in that region. From her origins in England to her slaughter in the New Netherlands, I will do my best to honor Anne Hutchinson as I may, and hopefully add a new angle to how historians view this truly incredible woman.