The Wordy Shipmates

The Old Testament’s Ten Commandments were at the heart of Puritan life, which was rooted in patriarchy and male supremacy. Vowell devotes special consideration to the Fifth Commandment: “Honour thy father and they mother.” Vowell explains: “This paternal and maternal language is not mere empty words to these Puritans. They believe the Fifth Commandment requires them to obey the parental authority of king and church” (79). Interpreting this to mean that all should pay deference to male authority figures, men acting as church and political fathers controlled Puritan society.

At various historical moments, that obedience was superficial and imperfect, but it was always a commitment. The paternalist loyalty to the English king was one reason why the Massachusetts Bay colonists did not become separatists, even though they were at odds with the Church of England: The breach would have been in violation of the Fifth Commandment.

This paternalism extended to the politics of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Winthrop, as governor, saw “himself as a father and the other colonists as his children” (78)—it was his job to dole out punishments accordingly. When Winthrop came under fire from various dissenters for leniency, strictness, or power grabbing, he defended himself as a father owed loyalty and obedience.

The gendered dimensions of this ideology came into play most obviously with the trial and banishment of Anne Hutchinson. The double standards that plagued women “kept her from pursuing her calling. She should have been a minister or a magistrate. She should have had John Cotton’s job—or John Winthrop’s” (237). However, since women could not be public figures, the popularity of her home sermons was anathema to Puritan society. Unlike male preachers who diverged from dogma, Hutchinson faced accusations of witchcraft before her final sentences of banishment and excommunication arrived. Even when Hutchinson established Portsmouth, as a woman, she could not sign its Compact. Vowell reflects that these restrictions necessarily distort the historical record: The text of the Compact is etched into a memorial with the male signers’ names, while a nearby statue of Hutchinson is in a gendered space—a “Women’s Healing Garden” that elides most of her major historical influence. 

A central debate that emerged in New England was the proper relationship between church and state. Religion permeated and dictated every aspect of Puritan life and society. Since each profession was, in their worldview, ultimately assigned and approved by God, leaders like John Winthrop quashed dissent like the kind leveled by Roger Williams, who pushed for a division of church and state to “protect believers from their government” (128), and “to guard against any intrusion of the civil sphere into the religious sphere” (129).

When Williams established Rhode Island, he designated it as a place of religious freedom. The settlers signed the “Providence Agreement” that specified that “orders or agreements [that] shall be made for public good […] only in civil things” (149). Defining government as a civil stressed that the state could not require religious obedience—religion was a separate sphere. Williams’s view became the standard for American societies, but it did not win out over homogenous religious settlements during his lifetime.

As Vowell notes, questions about the proper relationship between civil and religious institutions have continued through ensuing generations of American politicians into the 21st century.