About book American Jezebel: The Uncommon Life Of Anne Hutchinson, The Woman Who Defied The Puritans (2004)
Early in "Civil Disobedience," Henry David Thoreau wonders why government refuses to "cherish its wise minority." He asks, "Why does it always crucify Christ and excommunicate Copernicus and Luther, and pronounce Washington and Franklin rebels?"His friend Margaret Fuller might have wryly asked why the martyrs who come to mind are all men. After all, until relatively recently, women were silenced long before their ideas could enjoy even the benefit of being denounced.How ironic that the first great political crisis of the Puritans' errand in the New World should have erupted over the preaching of a wealthy, well-connected, upstanding mother. Anne Hutchinson arrived in Boston with her husband and 11 children in 1634. She was a student of the colony's most powerful minister and a friend of the richest man in Boston. She and her family moved into a new house across the street from the governor, whose wife she assisted in childbirth. Anne's descendants eventually would include Franklin Delano Roosevelt and George W. Bush. But 3-1/2 years after her arrival in Boston, she was denounced as "an instrument of Satan" and banished.Eve LaPlante, the author of this fascinating biography and yet another of Hutchinson's illustrious descendants, takes her title from the normally temperate writings of Massachusetts' first governor, John Winthrop. Looking back at Mistress Hutchinson's expulsion as the salvation of Massachusetts, he referred to her as the "American Jezebel," a woman unmatched "since that mentioned in the Revelation."LaPlante claims, "Unlike most previous commentators, I aim neither to disdain nor to exalt my central character." But considering the facts of the case - and particularly the remarkable transcript of her two trials (one nominally judicial, the other ecclesiastical) - it's impossible to avoid a little exaltation.Without taking anything away from Hutchinson's originality, LaPlante notes that Anne had been well prepared for her notorious ordeal by her father, who had suffered a similar fate in England. Francis Marbury was a Cambridge-educated clergyman who repeatedly annoyed Anglican church officials by criticizing both the theology and the training of other ministers. Jailed three times before Anne was born, he was under house arrest during her childhood, allowing him to concentrate on teaching his children. Their central textbook at home was the transcript of his own trial.That unusual training helps explain Hutchinson's dazzling performance during her prosecution almost 60 years later in Newtown (now Cambridge, Mass). Denied any legal advice or counsel and pregnant for the 16th time, this first female defendant in the New World was called to stand before 40 magistrates for two days of relentless questioning and condemnation. She defended herself with alternating wit, humility, and defiance, parrying every Bible verse thrust at her with references of her own.The charge was multifaceted and shifted as she effectively defended herself, but the root of all the objections concerned increasingly popular meetings she held in her house each week to lecture on the Scriptures.Women were generally allowed such "pious gossip," but Hutchinson's seminars had begun to attract men, too, and she had grown more vocal about her objections to almost all the ministers in Massachusetts. Ultimately, she claimed that she could discern the final prospects of others' souls, make prophesies, and receive revelations.LaPlante structures the most engaging half of her biography around the transcript of the first trial. Eager to record Hutchinson's abominations along with their own corrections, the Puritans inadvertently left a record of her outsmarting the assembled experts of the 17th-century New World. The transcript itself has long been an instrument of torture in anthologies of American history, and anyone who endured it as an undergraduate will doubt my claims about how electric it becomes in LaPlante's treatment. But it's not just that she edits it effectively and modernizes the spelling and grammar. As she moves through this biting debate, LaPlante brings it alive by effectively explaining the theological arcana, fleshing out the personalities involved, and filling in the relevant history. (A postscript about her experiences visiting Hutchinson sites in England and America provides a rare and charming glimpse into the pleasures of a historian's detective work.)She's particularly good at delineating the judges' personalities and motives. Winthrop, for instance, comes off as petty and egotistical, but driven by a genuine concern for the survival of his nascent community. John Cotton, on the other hand, emerges as the master politician, expedient to a fault, playing both sides as long as he can before finally denying his old friend Anne to cleanse his own reputation.Hutchinson is a classic feminist hero, of course, a woman who dared to speak (and disagree) when women weren't allowed to teach or preach. Many of her judges condemned her along straight gender lines, noting that she "had rather been a husband than a wife," that she was "more bold than a man," that she had behaved in a way "not comely in the sight of God nor fitting for her sex."While acknowledging the misogyny that fueled this trial, LaPlante also illustrates the way Hutchinson cleverly played the gender card herself, falling back on her status as a women to argue that nothing she said was a matter of public import.More important, LaPlante is willing to wade into the extraordinarily murky waters of this theological debate. (Even Winthrop acknowledged privately that he was challenged by the arguments involved.) That can make for tough reading, but it allows LaPlante to demonstrate the threat to the existing government posed by Hutchinson's radical Calvinism and her insistence on the validity of her own conscience. In other words, she wasn't persecuted just because she was a feisty woman, as some bland feminist critiques suggest. She was expelled because her spiritual claims threatened a fledgling government that took spiritual claims seriously.The second half of the story, which details Hutchinson's banishment to Rhode Island is, perhaps inevitably, less dramatic and effective. And some cursory comments about the fate of contemporary women politicians are a reminder of how little LaPlante supplies in the way of tracing the complex influence of Hutchinson's ideas into the present day.But those weaknesses are minor and take nothing away from the success of her presentation of the trials. What LaPlante has reconstructed here supplies a welcome new podium for a brave Puritan theologian who wouldn't hold her tongue.http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0330/p1...
This book was very slow going for me, but I'm still glad I read it. The author, a descendant of Anne Hutchinson, describes the trial of Anne Hutchinson that was conducted in early 17th c. Boston on the charges basically of "preaching" but probably more accurately, of speaking critically about other local preachers. The author reviews written records of the trial, as well as personal correspondence/memoirs of many of the key players in order to write her history, and fills in the edges with other information about the Boston-area settlements at the time. I enjoyed a lot of the general historical information, and information about Anne and her family and how they lived--where I found it slow-going was to follow the theological arguments that were being made, in particular when actual language was quoted. LaPlante did try to "translate" some of this language into modern terms, and in many cases explained the origin of some of the beliefs of the time, but it was still sometimes hard to follow. This is probably not because of any fault on her part, but more that I don't make much of an effort when I don't find it particularly interesting....What I DID find interesting was the irony inherent in a bunch of people leaving England because of religious persecution only to enforce the same type of religious persecution in the name of slightly different beliefs! I much appreciated learning about the group of Boston colonists that left and established a new colony with greater religious freedom--that later became Rhode Island. All in all, worth reading. Covers a part of American history I really didn't know much about. (The author points out that when we think of colonial America, we are often thinking only of the 1700s up to the Revolution...but a lot of impt things happened in the 1600s too!)
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"The Uncommon Life of Anne Hutchinson, the Woman Who Defied the Puritans" is a long title for a book on one's family; when a book is about the detailed history the GW Bush clan one must make allowances. If you bet on a horse, as in a U.S. presidential election, you must know everything possible about that horse and it's trainers. G.W. Bush's maternal grandmother is said to be related to Anne Hutchinson. This is a beautiful and highly informative work of art. I have a first edition that is like new!
—Dolores Marconi
The indirect progenitor of Harvard University, and the co-founder of Rhode Island, from which our true religious freedom and the First Amendment arose. Hutchinson came to Massachusetts in the 1600's as a Puritan refugee, and found herself at odds with John Winthrop, possibly the original male chauvinist pig. Puritans came to America seeking freedom to worship as they believed, and, at least under the rule of John Winthrop, immediately began oppressing any and all who otherwise deviated from their strict beliefs. The war against the Pequot Indians for being annoying savages who had the nerve to have their own ideas was icing on the cake.
—Phyllis
I understand that this was a difficult read; there were lots of details and it was hard to put the whole picture together. Many rabbit trails. However, I must say that I'm very glad to have read this book and am very happy to know about Anne Hutchinson's life. I'm fairly amazed all that she accomplished and really surprised that I never knew about her, before. She is not a feminist that waves a NOW sign and burns her bra, but she is an assertive, intelligent person who happens to be a woman. If she waves any flag, it is that of a deeply devoted Christian. Praise God for freedom of religion and equality of the sexes and thank you Anne for helping pave the way.
—Julie Bell
