the safety of Boston.
Anne Hutchinson preaching in her house in Boston. (Library of Congress)
Although shamefully few Americans know it, an even more powerful case for female participation in the exchange of ideas was made by Hutchinson’s friend Mary Dyer. The only person courageous enough to protest when Hutchinson was excommunicated from their Boston church, Dyer returned to England in 1652; there, she converted to the newly founded Society of Friends, more commonly called Quakers. While she was abroad, Massachusetts and Connecticut passed laws banning Quakers, and Dyer was exiled from both colonies upon her 1657 return. Although she could have remained safely in more liberal Long Island, she defied convention—and the pleading of her husband and sons—to repeatedly return to Boston to preach her vision of a loving, egalitarian God. On June 1,1660, the theocracy of Massachusetts, which was both church and state, hanged Mary Dyer.
The Quaker beliefs that she professed soon became America’s most important intellectual root of female freedom. Founded in England by George Fox, the Society of Friends quickly established itself in America. Women were important participants in the Quaker movement from the beginning: the group consistently committed itself to the idea of human equality. From the beginning, Quaker women were considered to have an inner light from God just as men did, and they were equally entitled to express moral and spiritual ideas. Nor were their views limited to the quiet of Quaker meeting houses; women were ordained and engaged in street preaching just as men were.
As Quaker culture evolved, especially in Pennsylvania, female leaders developed schools, hospitals, and other charitable organizations, and they controlled financial decisions on these enterprises. Older women also exercised strong powers over younger women, including resolving such personal issues as whether or not a young woman should accept a particular marriage proposal. Obviously, voting of a sort was inherent to such decision making, but because Quakers in general did not participate in secular government, their internal egalitarianism did not necessarily translate into a movement for political equality.
Quakers also were exceptional in seeing American Indians as full human beings—although even Quakers assumed their own religion to be the correct one. They sent missionaries to convert the natives, and, like virtually all other newcomers, took little heed of the political models offered by native societies. In some of those societies, especially the tribes of the northeastern Iroquois Confederacy, women were powerful. In many tribes that practiced farming, the culture was matrilineal. This was a crucial distinction from Europeans, for it meant that children took their mothers’ names and traced their families through the maternal, not the paternal, lineage. Thus, it was impossible to be a bastard, and the European shame of illegitimacy was unknown. Beyond that, matrilineal societies rejected the newcomers’ patriarchal view of women as the property of their fathers and husbands. In the Iroquois tribes that northeastern settlers encountered, for instance, a newly married man went to live with his wife’s family, and his children belonged to that clan, not to his. Personal possessions were relatively rare, but those that did exist were passed on through the mother’s line, not the father’s. If a marriage did not work out, couples easily separated, and the man went home to his mother.
Moreover, in many tribes, women held genuine political and military power. Women in the Iroquois Confederation, for example, traditionally controlled the fate of captives: they decided if a prisoner of war was to be killed, tortured, held for ransom, or adopted into the tribe. Although Pocahontas lived farther south, her famous intercession on behalf of John Smith thus can be seen as the native rule, not the exception. In the southeast, Cherokee women sometimes participated in actual combat and earned the title of “War Woman.” During Massachusetts warfare in 1676, the Pocasset band of Wamponoag was led by a woman named Wetamoo, whose head was displayed on the Taunton town square when only 26 of her 300 men survived the battle.
Indian women held their own councils and participated in treaty-making with whites—much to the annoyance of a number of white writers. Indeed, in the same year of 1848 that whites held their first women’s rights convention, the Seneca tribe of the Iroquois Confederation adopted a new constitution. Under its provisions, both men and women elected judges and legislators, and all major decisions had to be ratified by three-fourths of the voters and by three-fourths of the clan mothers. Despite this, historians deem this period to mark a decline in the status of Seneca women: after their men interacted with European men, Seneca and other native women would continually lose traditional rights as their cultures adopted the white example.
Few Americans, however, were aware of these alternative societal structures, and almost none were willing to emulate the “savages”—or even the egalitarian ideas of their Quaker missionaries. Nevertheless, there were other female political leaders in mainstream colonial America, many of whom have been forgotten and remain unrecognized even by modern feminists. Lady Deborah Moody, for example, led the first English settlement of what is now Brooklyn when she took followers of her religious ideas there in 1643. They left Massachusetts because of disagreements with Governor John Winthrop, who called Lady Deborah “a dangerous woeman [sic].” Like Anne Hutchinson, her home was attacked by Native Americans. But Moody not only survived, she stayed there, holding steadfast to political and religious liberty. She also paid the natives for their land and went on to build an enlightened community.
Other charismatic religious women led similar settlements, making themselves, in effect, political leaders. Jemima Wilkinson, who called herself the “Publick Universal Friend,” took some 300 men and women into the wilderness of western New York in 1788, where her commune established peaceful relationships with its Seneca neighbors. “Mother” Ann Lee was even more successful. She immigrated from England just before the outbreak of the American Revolution, and, distrusted by both sides, was imprisoned for the pacifism she preached. Within a decade, her original eight disciples expanded to several thousand; eventually, the Shaker movement that she founded developed economically successful colonies in 18 states.
It was not coincidental that rebellious women—Hutchinson, Dyer, Moody, Wilkinson, Lee, and others—took refuge in New Netherland and its later version, New York. The Dutch who settled there in 1626 not only were religiously tolerant, they also were exceptionally egalitarian in their treatment of women. Colonial Dutch women retained their maiden names, which were recreated each generation with a father’s first name used as a girl’s surname. Married women not only had property rights, but also, commonly, prenuptial agreements. Most significantly, Dutch women engaged in a great deal of commercial enterprise, even after marriage.
Margaret Hardenbroeck, for example, owned a shipping line, exporting furs and importing merchandise from Holland; despite two marriages and five children, she frequently sailed across the Atlantic on business. Polly Provoost also was an importer; she attracted customers by laying America’s first sidewalk outside of her business. Annejte Loockermans Van Cortlandt paved the first street in America; her daughter, Maria Van Rensselaer, eventually controlled a 24-square-mile Albany fiefdom. Among the first public expenditures in New Amsterdam was the construction of a house for the colony’s midwife, Tryntje Jonas; her daughter, pioneer settler Annetje Jans, farmed 62 acres of land along Broadway, and her granddaughter, Sara Roeloef, was employed as an interpreter among English, Dutch, and Algonquin speakers. Although none of these women voted or held office, a historian of early Manhattan described Van Cortlandt’s home as “one of the centres of the petticoat government that so often controlled the affairs of the Colony.”
The least covert, most undeniable political power exercised by a colonial woman was that of Catholic Maryland’s Margaret Brent. Although from a noble family, she emigrated when Lord Baltimore granted her a tract of land as an inducement. Presumably he saw her as more talented than two of her brothers, for she led them, a sister, and servants to Maryland in 1638. Remaining determinedly single, she owned thousands of acres of land. When the governor, Lord Baltimore’s younger brother, lay dying, he granted his power of attorney to her, and she ran the colony after his death. After Lord Baltimore,
