I pray instruct me a little, ought you not to instruct this man?” She said cheekily, “I think I may-Do you think it is not lawful for me to teach women and why do you call me to teach the court?” The flustered governor quickly clarified, “We do not call you to teach the court but to lay open yourself.” Hutchinson I hear that you are a woman that God hath given grace unto, and that you have knowledge in the word of God.

In her Scripture-laden defense, she cited “a clear rule in Titus, that the elder women should instruct the younger.” But Governor John Winthrop countered that her seditious and rousing teaching went far beyond what he imagined Titus had in mind-namely, “that elder women must instruct the younger about their business, and to love their husbands and not to make them clash.” In his attempt to trap Hutchinson into admitting that she was authorized to teach men, the governor presented her with a case study: “suppose that a man should come and say, Mrs. Three years later, she was charged with heresy and sedition and judged “a woman not fit for our society” and banished “from out of our jurisdiction.” įorty male experts of the court examined Anne Hutchinson on, among other issues, the propriety of her popular weekly meetings.

She served the community as a midwife and initiated weekly meetings where her lively comments on sermons and Scripture drew crowds of women and men. She came under the influence of nonconformist John Cotton and followed him with her husband and growing family to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1634. Īnne Hutchinson was the well-educated daughter of an English Anglican cleric and educator. The published account of her trial for sedition and heresy-before the Massachusetts General Court when she was forty-six and pregnant with her sixteenth child-illustrates why she has been memorialized as “a martyr on behalf of lay interpretation.” It also explains why the Governor of Massachusetts called her a ‘jezebel’-an impudent and unrestrained woman, who like King Ahab’s powerful Phoenician wife Jezebel, stepped out of her place, daring to oppose and control civil and religious authority figures, and in the case of Hutchinson, to teach and influence men and vulnerable people. 1591-1643) was a courageous woman who fought for many of the freedoms we now take for granted.

American Jezebel by Eve LaPlante