Mistress Bradstreet
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11. Ulrich, Good Wives,19-21. Ulrich provides a careful examination of a woman’s seasonal chores in her description of the lifestyle of an early immigrant woman, Beatrice Plummer. (back to text)
12. Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale, 50. (back to text)
13. Ulrich, Good Wives, 22. (back to text)
14. Ibid., 23. This account of killing a pig is based entirely on Ulrich’s description of this process. (back to text)
15. Ibid., 22. (back to text)
16. Ibid., 152. Ulrich writes, “The custom of naming a child for a dead sibling was part of a larger pattern of remembrance. Almost all New England children, whether named for grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, or lost brothers or sisters, became carriers of the past.” (back to text)
17. Earle, Child Life in Colonial Days, 18. (back to text)
18. Ibid., 23. (back to text)
19. Ulrich, Good Wives, 129; Goodhue, “Valedictory and Monitory Writing,” in Waters, Ipswich,519-24. (back to text)
20. Ulrich, Good Wives,126-27. (back to text)
21. For a more complete description of bread making in general, see ibid., 21. For the tradition of starting the bread with the first labor pangs, I am indebted to Carol Hong Richon, a practicing midwife. For food eaten by women in labor, see ibid., 127. (back to text)
22. Ibid., 131. Ulrich writes, “Momentarily at least, childbirth reversed the positions of the sexes, thrusting women into center stage, casting men in supporting roles.” (back to text)
23. Quoted in ibid. (back to text)
24. Ibid. (back to text)
25. Quoted in ibid. (back to text)
26. Ibid., 129. (back to text)
27. Earle, Child Life, 15. (back to text)
28. Bradstreet, “Childhood,” in Works, 53. (back to text)
29. Earle, Child Life, 11. (back to text)
30. Ulrich, Good Wives, 157. (back to text)
31. Ibid. These three stories are all told by Ulrich in Good Wives. She also provides specific examples of childhood disasters as well as a broad overview of the dangers children faced in colonial life. See especially 146-63. (back to text)
32. Quoted in ibid., 146. This interpretation is also indebted to Ulrich’s analysis. (back to text)
33. Bradstreet, “In Reference to Her Children,” in Works,232-33. (back to text)
CHAPTER ELEVEN:Enemies Within
1. Francis Bremer writes, “Some . . . were talking about the latest rumor, that a governor-general might be appointed by the king and lead a military force to suppress the colony.” Bremer, Winthrop, 229. (back to text)
2. Morison, Builders, 97. (back to text)
3. Morgan, Puritan Dilemma, 116. (back to text)
4. Bremer, Winthrop, 234. (back to text)
5. Anne was not alone. Most Puritans cherished their relationship to England; letters between the Old and New Worlds were their lifeline to civilization and to all that they had lost, including, of course, their childhood homes, their families, and all the comforts they had once known. Even the formidably idealistic minister Thomas Shepard could not stop “lamenting the loss” of England. McGiffert, God’s Plot, 63. (back to text)
6. Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay, ed. Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, 5 vols. (1853). Quoted in Bremer, Winthrop, 246. Bremer writes that “the General Court under the leadership of Dudley and Ludlow passed a series of sumptuary regulations. No tobacco was to be smoked in inns or public places, nor in an individual’s own home. No person in the future was to buy or make any apparel with lace or silver or gold embroidery. Clothes with excessive fashionable slashes (more than one slash in a sleeve, for instance) were prohibited.” Bremer, Winthrop, 246. (back to text)
7. For a more complete description of this episode in Williams’s life, see Morgan, Puritan Dilemma, 126. (back to text)
8. Ibid., 129. Later in life, Williams would write words that summed up his position concerning the condition of humanity in general: “Abstract yourselfe with a holy violence from the Dung heape of this Earth.” Ibid., 130. (back to text)
9. Quoted in ibid., 125. (back to text)
10. Bremer recounts this story in more detail in Bremer, Winthrop, 251. (back to text)
11. Morgan, Puritan Dilemma, 134. (back to text)
12. Quoted in Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers, 361. (back to text)
13. Hutchinson had borne fourteen children; three had died. (back to text)
In one of his many later attacks on Hutchinson and her husband, Winthrop described Mr. Hutchinson as “a man of a very mild temper and weak parts, wholly guided by his wife,” but this statement cannot be taken at face value, as it was simply another method of undermining Hutchinson’s standing in the community. Morgan, Puritan Dilemma, 134.
14. Ibid. (back to text)
15. Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers, 361. (back to text)
16. John Cotton and Zechariah Symmes, quoted in ibid. (back to text)
17. Quoted in ibid., 364. (back to text)
18. Plymouth Colony Records, quoted in Deetz and Deetz, Times of Their Lives, 153. (back to text)
19. Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers, 364. (back to text)
20. Quoted in ibid. (back to text)
21. The words gossip and gossiping were originally positive ones, derived from an eleventh-century term, godsib, that meant “godparent.” But by the late sixteenth century, circumstances had changed and gossip had come to mean “a woman’s female friends invited to be present at a birth” as well as a woman “who delights in idle talk; a newsmonger, a tattler.” The latter definition had emerged from increased male anxiety about unfettered female talk. Any indication of a woman’s overstepping her bounds, such as an “ungoverned tongue” or, for that matter, her husband’s allowing her to get out of hand was judged with great severity. Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers, 223; Kamensky, Governing the Tongue: The Politics of Speech in Early New England, chap. 1. Kamensky writes, “By reporting her husband’s shortcomings to her ‘Gossips,’ a ‘nimble-tongued Wife’ effectively ‘published’ his failure for ‘all the town’ to hear. And ‘publishing,’ as every Englishwoman knew, was men’s business. Men, cultural norms held, were speakers—‘publishers,’ in period parlance. Obedient women were listeners” (21). See chapters 1 and 3 for a more complete discussion of the ramifications of a female’s unfettered speech. (back to text)
22. Kamensky, Governing the Tongue, 21. (back to text)
23. For a more complete discussion of the ideas of the public and private roles of women in the seventeenth century and Anne Hutchinson’s complicated relationship to these roles, see Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers,380-85. Also, Eve LaPlante writes, “[A]s a woman she [Hutchinson] had no public role. . . . As a woman she had no voice or vote” (American Jezebel,12). (back to text)
24. Morgan, Puritan Dilemma, 137. (back to text)
25. Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers, 362. (back to text)
CHAPTER TWELVE:Ipswich
1. Although no one recorded exactly when the Dudleys and Bradstreets began their journey, November 1635 seems the most likely time, as it was the last month before the snows of winter would strike and it was before Anne had had her second baby. (back to text)
2. Morison, Builders, 223. (back to text)
3. Quoted in White, Anne Bradstreet, 130. (back to text)
4. Letter from Mary Dudley to Mrs. John Winthrop, quoted in ibid., 132. (back to text)
5. Quoted in Cronon, Changes in the Land,49-50. (back to text)
6. Bradstreet, “Contemplations,” in Works, 205, lines 23, 16, 17, 19, 24, 25. (back to text)
7. Ibid., lines 10-11. (back to text)
8. Quoted in Morison, Builders,223-24. (back to text)
9. Later in life, she would give thanks for the privacy of the long night hours in a poem to Simon. See “Another,” in Works, 227, line 2. (back to text)
10. Morison, Builders,
218. This catechism was more properly known as The Westminster Shorter Catechism. (back to text)
11. “The New England Primer,” in McMichael, Concise Anthology of American Literature,54-55. (back to text)
12. Leighton, Early American Gardens, 127. (back to text)
13. Ibid., 232, 235-37, 243-44, 246-47, 275-76, 287-88, 299, 301-2, 308. (back to text)
14. One contemporary expert wrote, “We absolutely forbid its entrance” into salads, citing evidence that eating garlic was a punishment for those who had “commided the horrid’st Crimes.” Ibid., 307, 267-68, 321, 336-38, 343-44, 376-77, 384, 385-86. (back to text)
15. Ibid., 124-25. (back to text)
16. “M. W.,” The Queen’s Closet Opened. Incomparable Secrets in Physick, Chirugery, Preserving, Candying, and Cookery (London: Nathaniel Brook, 1656), quoted in Leighton, Early American Gardens, 133. (back to text)
17. Leighton, Early American Gardens,87-88. (back to text)
18. Ibid., 101. (back to text)
19. Ibid., 107. (back to text)
20. Bradstreet, “Meditation 35,” in Works, 278. (back to text)
21. Ulrich, Good Wives, 51. (back to text)
22. White, Anne Bradstreet, 131. (back to text)
23. Later in life Anne would describe the “carping tongues” of those who thought “my hand a needle better fits” than “a poet’s pen,” in Bradstreet, “The Prologue,” in Works, 16, lines 27-29. (back to text)
CHAPTER THIRTEEN:Such Things as Belong to Women
1. Edward Johnson, quoted in Morison, Builders, 120. (back to text)
2. Thomas Weld, quoted in Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers, 370. (back to text)
3. This idea comes from Mary Beth Norton’s Founding Mothers and Fathers. See especially 222-39. Norton writes that it was “only birthing rooms” that “provided women with environments that consistently excluded men” (223). (back to text)
4. Bradstreet, “A Letter to Her Husband,” in Works, 226, line 14; “Another,” in ibid., 227, lines 11-13. (back to text)
5. Bradstreet, “Another,” in Works, 227, line 2. (back to text)
6. Woodbridge, “Epistle to the Reader,” in Works, 3. (back to text)
7. Quoted in Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers, 368. (back to text)
8. Ibid., 368, 365. (back to text)
9. Ibid., 369. (back to text)
10. Edward Johnson, quoted in ibid., 369. (back to text)
11. Quoted in Morison, Builders, 239. (back to text)
12. Ward wrote, “It is said, that Men ought to have Liberty of their Conscience, and that it is Persecution to debar them of it: I can rather stand amazed than reply to this: it is an astonishment to think that the braines of men should be parboyl’d in such impious ignorance.” Ibid., 238. (back to text)
13. Anne wrote about this struggle between the spirit and the desires of the flesh in her prose reflections as well as her poetry. The most famous example is “The Flesh and the Spirit,” where Spirit describes how often she has allowed herself to be “a slave” to Flesh’s “flattering shows.” In Works,215-218, lines 52, 51. (back to text)
14. Quoted in Morison, Builders,220-21, 219. (back to text)
15. Ibid., 218. (back to text)
16. Nathaniel Ward, “Introductory Verse” in Bradstreet, Works, 4. (back to text)
17. Ward’s Body of Liberties takes a step forward for the rights of women, protecting them from the abuse of their husbands. See Morison, Builders, 234. In addition to his Simple Cobbler of Aggawam, his rant against women and fashion contained an implicit plea for the education of women. In other words, according to Ward, those women who chased from one silly fashion to another did indeed have only “squirrel” brains. But he raised the hope that there were others who refrained from such frivolous behavior and who therefore had more substantial mental faculties. (back to text)
18. Quoted in Morgan, Puritan Dilemma, 143. (back to text)
19. Quoted in Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers, 128. In 1648, Massachusetts Bay passed a law that assigned the death penalty for rebellious children. See ibid., 104. (back to text)
20. Quoted in ibid., 74. (back to text)
21. Quoted in Eve LaPlante, American Jezebel, 50. (back to text)
22. Quoted in Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers, 374. (back to text)
23. Quoted in Morgan, Puritan Dilemma, 149. (back to text)
24. Ibid. (back to text)
25. For the perception that women could not be “public” individuals and that, therefore, the Hutchinson trial upset the colony’s notions about “private” and “public” proceedings, see Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers, especially chapter 8. (back to text)
26. Quoted in Morgan, Puritan Dilemma, 149. (back to text)
27. Ibid., 150. (back to text)
28. Ibid., 151. (back to text)
29. Quoted in Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers, 387. (back to text)
30. Morgan, Puritan Dilemma, 153. (back to text)
31. Quoted in ibid., 154. (back to text)
32. For a more extensive account of Hutchinson’s trials, see Eve LaPlante’s American Jezebel. (back to text)
CHAPTER FOURTEEN:Old England and New
1. Bradstreet, “An Elegy upon That Honourable and Renowned Knight Sir Philip Sidney,” in Works, 191, lines 80, 83. (back to text)
2. Ibid., 191, line 84. (back to text)
3. Bradstreet, “In Honour of Du Bartas, 1641,” in ibid., 192-94, lines 4, 20, 32, 36, 49, 53, 94. (back to text)
4. Bradstreet, “In Honour of That High and Mighty Princess Queen Elizabeth of Happy Memory,” in ibid., 198, lines 100-5. (back to text)
5. Ibid., 195-98, lines 124, 46, 48, 51, 78. (back to text)
6. Ibid., lines 45, 113, 128, 127. (back to text)
7. Bradstreet, “The Prologue,” in ibid., 16, lines 27-28. (back to text)
8. Woodbridge, “Epistle to the Reader,” in ibid., 3. (back to text)
9. See Ulrich, Good Wives, 146. (back to text)
10. Quoted in Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers, 395. Over time the story about Hutchinson’s “monster” mushroomed into far-fetched tales that implicated all of her followers in her heresies. As late as 1667, long after all those involved were dead, one such version was recorded by an Englishman as part of his official report on the state of the colony. “Sir Henry Vane,” he declared, “in 1637 went over as governor to N. England with 2 women, Mrs Dier [a famous supporter of Hutchinson] and Mrs Hutchinson . . . where he debauched both, and both were delivered of monsters.” Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers,394-95. (back to text)
11. Bradstreet, “Autobiography,” in Works, 244. (back to text)
12. New England’s First Fruits (London, 1643), quoted in White, Anne Bradstreet, 156. (back to text)
13. Bradstreet, “A Letter to Her Husband,” in Works, 226, lines 20, 22. (back to text)
14. Bradstreet, “Another II,” in ibid., 229, lines 4, 17, 25-28. (back to text)
15. Ulrich, Good Wives. Ulrich develops the term deputy husband throughout her book but provides the fullest explanation of the concept in chapter 2. (back to text)
16. Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers,139-64. Norton’s discussion of “fictive widows”—women empowered by their husbands to make legal decisions—suggests that these women were often perceived as a threat to men. See 162-80. For more on the status of widows, see Ulrich, Good Wives,7, 38, 148, 249, and Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers,10, 139-64. (back to text)
17. Quoted in Morgan, Puritan Dilemma, 171. (back to text)
18. Quoted in Morison, Builders, 238. (back to text)
19. Quoted in Green, A Short History, 501. (back to text)
20. Morgan, Puritan Dilemma, 177. (back to text)
21. Quoted in Green, A Short History, 530. (back to text)
22. Ibid., 531. (back to text)
23. John Milton, quoted in White
, Anne Bradstreet, 102. (back to text)
24. Bradstreet, “A Dialogue between Old England and New,” in Works, 182, lines 96-103. (back to text)
25. Ibid., 183, lines 131-37. (back to text)
26. Ibid., 179, lines 138-40, 24. (back to text)
27. Ibid., 186-88, lines 236-37, 270-72, 282-84. (back to text)
28. Ibid., 184, lines 245, 246, 171-72, 187. (back to text)
29. Nathaniel Ward, “Introductory Verse,” in Bradstreet, Works, 4, line 18. (back to text)
30. Anne wrote several poems to Dudley in which she expressed her admiration for him and the important role he had played in encouraging her writing. See Bradstreet, “To the Memory of My Dear and Ever Honoured Father” and “To Her Most Honoured Father, Thomas Dudley Esq., These Most Humbly Presented,” in Works,201-3, 13. Ward’s role is suggested by his contribution to the prefatory material of The Tenth Muse. Anne never made any reference to Simon as a reader of her work; he does not seem to have played an important role as her intellectual companion, at least according to the records that are left. Certainly Simon himself left no account of what he thought of his wife’s poetry. (back to text)
CHAPTER FIFTEEN:Now Sister, Pray Proceed
1. Ulrich, Good Wives, 3. (back to text)
2. Bradstreet, “An Epitaph on My Dear and Ever-Honoured Mother,” in Works, 204, lines 6, 8-9, 17-20. (back to text)
3. Bradstreet, “Meditation 72,” in ibid., 289-90. (back to text)
4. She was the widow of one of his neighbors in Roxbury, Samuel Hackburne. See White, Anne Bradstreet, 219. (back to text)
5. Thomas Dudley, quoted in Ulrich, Good Wives, 10. (back to text)
6. Evidence of Anne’s literary partnership with her father can be found in her poem, “”To Her Most Honoured Father.” Referring to The Quaternions as her “four times four,” she writes, “I bring my four times four, now meanly clad / To do their homage unto yours, full glad,” in Works, 13, lines 14-15. (back to text)
7. Bradstreet, “Before the Birth of One of Her Children,” in ibid., 224, lines 9-10, 19-26. (back to text)
8. Bradstreet, “In Reference to Her Children,” in ibid., 234, lines 83-86, 91-94. (back to text)
9. Bradstreet, “To Her Most Honoured Father,” in ibid., 13, line 5. (back to text)