Anne Hutchinson’s life was full of irony.  In hope of finding religious freedom in America, she and her family left their home in England, breaking away from what they considered to be the corrupt Catholic Church. The Puritan movement which she embraced, however, turned out to be rigid and patriarchal to the extreme.

A devoted wife, midwife, and mother of 15 children, Anne dared to speak about the right to live according to conscience and not necessarily the law.  She held discussions in her home where visitors felt free to question religious beliefs and to decry racial prejudice, including enslavement of Native Americans. Expressing these beliefs was precisely what led her to be expelled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony.  After Anne and her children settled in a new home in Long Island, the irony turned tragic:  She and her children met their deaths at the hands of Native Americans.  Knowing that she understood the risks inherent in her courageous stances, we are grateful to her for being a pioneering advocate for religious dissent, the right to assemble, and women’s rights. -- Margaret Wakeley

“It was never in my heart to slight any man, but only that man should be kept in his own place and not set in the room of God.”

The Puritans who settled Massachusetts in the 1630s were motivated in part by a desire to escape religious persecution.  But they did not come to create a haven of religious freedom.  On the contrary, they believed their holy commonwealth would stand as “a city on a hill,” a beacon of purified Christianity in which biblical values of piety and sobriety would govern the conduct of its members.  Severe punishment awaited those who fell short of these standards, a fate that was extended too to those who criticized the Puritan code.  Rarely was there ever such a concentration of persons so godly, so sober, and so eager to cast the first stone.  Among the most famous victims of Puritan justice was Anne Hutchinson, a mystic and healer, whose particular heresy was to maintain that it was a blessing and not a curse to be a woman.

Anne Hutchinson arrived in Boston in 1634, accompanied by her husband, William, a prosperous businessman, and their several children.  They were committed Puritans, though of the two Anne was by far the more zealous.  She was an unusually independent woman for her times, a skilled midwife with a particular gift for herbal treatments.  She was also an avid student of the Bible, which she freely interpreted in the light of what she termed divine inspiration.  Though she generally adhered to the principles of Puritan orthodoxy, she held extremely advance notions about the equality and rights of women.  These positions had put her in some tension not only with the established church of England but also with her own coreligionists.  Nevertheless, she had decided to emigrate in the belief that New England afforded greater religious freedom as well as wider opportunities for women.

In Boston the Hutchinsons quickly achieved a prominent social position.  Anne’s services as a midwife were in great demand, and many a family soon found themselves in her debt.  Before long she also began inviting women to join her in her home for prayer and religious conversation.  In time these meetings became extremely popular, attracting as many as eighty participants a week.  Hutchinson would present a text from the Bible and offer her own commentary.  Often her spiritual interpretation differed widely from the learned but legalistic reading offered from the Sunday pulpit.  In particular, Hutchinson constantly challenged the standard interpretation of the story of Adam and Eve.  This was a vital text for the Puritans, key to the doctrine of original sin.  But it was regularly cited to assign special blame to women as the source of sin and to justify the extremely patriarchal structure of Puritan society.

Increasingly, the ministers opposed Hutchinson’s meetings, ostensibly on the grounds that such “unauthorized” religious gatherings might confuse the faithful.  But gradually the opposition was expressed in openly misogynistic terms.  Hutchinson was a modern “Jezebel” who was infecting women with perverse and “abominable” ideas regarding their dignity and rights.  Anne paid no attention to her critics.  When they cited the biblical texts on the need for women to keep silent in church she rejoined with a verse from Titus permitting that “the elder women should instruct the younger.”

In 1637 she was brought to trial for her subversive views.  She was forty-six at the time and advanced in her fifteenth pregnancy.  Nevertheless, she was forced to stand for several days before a board of male interrogators as they tried desperately to get her to admit her secret blasphemies.  They accused her of violating the fifth commandment – to “honor they father and mother” – by encouraging dissent against the fathers of the commonwealth.  It was charged that by attending her gatherings women were being tempted to neglect the care of their own families.

Anne deftly parried and defended herself until it was clear that there was no escape from the court’s predetermined judgment.  Cornered, she addressed the court with her own judgment:

You have no power over my body, neither can you do me any harm.  I fear none but the great Jehovah, which hath foretold me of these things, and I do verily believe that he will deliver me out of your hands....Therefore, take heed how you proceed against me;  for I know that for this you go about to do to me, God will ruin you and your posterity, and this whole state. 

This outburst brought forth angry jeers.  She was called a heretic and an instrument of the devil.  In the words of one minister, “You have stepped out of your place, you have rather been a husband than a wife, a preacher than a hearer, and a magistrate than a subject.”

Anne was held in prison during the cold winter months.  Her family and a stream of sympathizers continued to visit her, and to them she continued freely to impart her spiritual teaching.  In the spring she was banished from the commonwealth along with her youngest children.  After seven days of difficult travel through the wilderness they arrived in Rhode Island.  There they were reunited with William Hutchinson, who had gone ahead to establish a homestead.  But soon after her arrival Annie suffered a painful miscarriage.  In Boston the details were gleefully recounted by her persecutors, who saw in her misfortune a vivid confirmation of God’s judgment.

In 1642 William Hutchinson died.  He had been a devoted husband throughout his wife’s ordeal.  When the authorities had tried to pressure him to disavow his wife’s teachings, he had said “he was more nearly tied to his wife than to the church; he thought her to be a dear saint and servant of God.”  Alone with six of her children Anne decided to leave Rhode Island, to go as far as she could from the long arm of the Massachusetts authorities.  She got as far as the Dutch settlement on Long Island.  There sometime in the summer of 1643 she and her children were massacred by Indians.