Free American Jezebel by Eve LaPlante

revolutionary idea that a woman could teach religion, even to a man: “Apollos, a godly and learned man, did not refuse to profit in the school of a…woman: and so became an excellent minister of the Church.”
    Winthrop mocked her. “See how your argument stands? Priscilla, with her husband, took Apollos home to instruct him privately, therefore Mistress Hutchinson without her husband may teach sixty or eighty?”
    “I call them not. But if they come to me, I may instruct them.”
    “Yet you show us not a rule.”
    “I have given you two places of Scripture,” she answered, growing impatient.
    “But neither of them will suit your practice.”
    Her calm dissolving into sarcasm, she said, “Must I show my name written therein?”—meaning in Scripture.
    This retort seems especially ironic in light of how rarely women’s names appear in the records of colonial America. But Winthrop could not appreciate Hutchinson’s wit. Her speech and actions were most unseemly in a woman, he and his peers believed. Although he had not noticed it when she first arrived in Boston, he was sure now that her behavior was out of place, which suggested the presence of evil, or the Antichrist.
    In the courtroom he defended his position by citing two other passages. In 1 Corinthians 14:34–35, the apostle Paul admonishes all women to be silent in church and all wives to seek spiritual guidance from their husbands. And 1 Timothy 2:12 states, “I permit not a woman to teach, neither to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.” This general wish for silence from women extended also into the courtroom, as Winthrop had earlier explained to Hutchinson: “We do not mean to discourse with those of your sex.”
    Winthrop was arguing for nothing more than the role expected of any seventeenth-century Englishwoman. The model woman then—modest, meek, submissive, virtuous, obedient, and kind—was solely occupied with supervising and maintaining the home, cooking, sometimes brewing and dairying, and bearing and rearing children. She was expected to suffer all these in silence, as in the oft-quoted passage from Genesis 3:16: “Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children.” The other role a woman could assume was that of nurse or midwife, which Anne and her mother did. Complex discourse, deep thought, and books of all kinds were believed to tax a woman’s weak mind and keep her from pleasing her husband, who was her superior intellectually. A woman who aimed for more was asking for trouble, Winthrop was sure. After Anne Hopkins, a well-read Connecticut woman who was married to the governor of Hartford, suffered a breakdown in 1645, Winthrop confided in his journal that her error was “giving herself wholly to reading and writing…. If she had attended her household affairs, and such things as belong to women, and not gone out of her way and calling to meddle in such things as are proper for men, whose minds are stronger, she had kept her wits, and might have improved them usefully and honorably in the place God had set her. ”
    Luckily for the governor, all of his female intimates conformed to this model of femininity. Margaret (his third wife, for the first two had died, as was common, in childbirth) signed letters to him, “your faithful and obedient wife,” and said she felt she had “nothing within or without” worthy of him. His sister signed letters to him as “Your sister to command.” The wife of his son John described herself to John as “thy ever loving and kind wife to command in whatsoever thou pleasest so long as the Lord shall be pleased to give me life and strength.” All these women cheerfully obliged the governor. Why couldn’t Mistress Hutchinson?
    This bout of biblical squabbling between Hutchinson and Winthrop over social identity and status ended in another standoff. Neither side was willing to accept the validity of the