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Early modern assumptions about gender made possible the acknowledgment and celebration of raptures such as these. Anglo-American settlers, in common with their contemporaries across the Atlantic, associated particular attributes and roles with masculinity and others with femininity, but they did not assume that those attributes or roles were or should remain attached only to one sex or the other: any man or woman could and indeed should embody both masculine and feminine attributes in appropriate contexts.14 Puritan men could thus cultivate a loving and passionate devotion to Christ, envisaging him as a prospective bridegroom, and meanwhile marry women on Earth, developing ardent relationships with their wives that prefigured eventual union with their male savior. In relation to their wives on Earth, they were functionally male, whereas in relation to Christ in the spiritual realm (which was to them very real), they became functionally female. In this world and the next, Puritans could find romantic and sexual fulfilment in a combination of passions that many modern Westerners would find incomprehensible.15
Just as men would become the brides of Christ, so godly women would adopt male attributes through spiritual redemption. Ministers assured their flocks that those who received God’s grace would become “members of Christ,” dedicated to his service and empowered by their regeneration. Contemporaries used the word “member” to denote a penis, and Puritans often wrote of their “spiritual ejaculations,” referring to spontaneous prayer but surely aware of the word’s double meaning. Thus, while the awakened souls of both men and women surrendered themselves to be penetrated and fertilized by their savior, they also became phallic and ejaculatory extensions of Christ. The repeated use of phallic images to denote spiritual power reminds us how dominant patriarchal conceptions were within Puritan culture and of the limits to gender fluidity. Yet women could assume masculine attributes and become correspondingly potent. A virtuous woman as much as any man had “the image of Christ and God upon her,” and on the Day of Judgment, her soul would “be marvellously changed into the likeness of the Lord Jesus Christ himself.”16
Meanwhile, images of the divine in clerical writings were sometimes explicitly maternal and reproductive. Willard referred to “the womb of providence” and spoke of the world as “a sucking infant depending on the breasts of divine providence.” Nehemiah Walter urged his readers to “lay” their “lips unto the breasts of the gospel” so as to take from it “spiritual food.” Clergymen, the congregations over which they presided, and the colleges at which they trained also assumed maternal, reproductive personas. William Adams referred to ministers as “travailling in birth with souls till Christ be formed in them.” Samuel Danforth, reminiscing about the early years of settlement, recalled the “pious care” taken of “sister churches, that those that wanted breasts might be supplied.” John Wise described Harvard College as “our dear mother,” producing “fair, and numerous offspring.” Contemporaries endowed body parts and the physical processes associated with them with clearly gendered attributes (the breast and womb representing maternal nourishment and fecundity, the penis connoting virility). Yet men, women, and even institutions could acquire male and female organs, along with their functions and the cultural significations that they carried.17
Men adopted a bride-like posture not only as Christians but also in other contexts. They made sense of situations in which they deferred to male-identified authority by assuming in those contexts a female persona. John Cotton, in whose Boston congregation John Winthrop was a member, declared that the relationship between rulers and subjects in a commonwealth was equivalent to that between “husband and wife in the family,” so that men who became empowered as voting citizens on election days should then defer to those whom they elected, as wives should obey their husbands.18 Meanwhile, women could assume masculine roles in particular circumstances and be treated as if male figures by men and women around them. If a husband was ill or absent, a wife could step into his shoes and expect male neighbors to engage with her as if they were dealing with her husband. As household mistresses, women routinely exercised authority over male servants and other dependents. Their doing so might seem incompatible with patriarchal assumptions, but as the historian Phyllis Mack reminds us, a subordinate male was “functionally feminine in relation to his female superior,” who in turn was “functionally masculine in relation to her apprentices or dependents.” By no means all women had the opportunity to embody patriarchal authority as household heads, but hierarchies of age and status routinely placed women in positions of precedence over men. Rank or status often outweighed biological sex in deciding who had authority in a given position; whoever had that authority became male-identified. Dominance and subjection found expression through gendered language, but social and political order rested just as firmly on male as on female submission to those placed above them. Gendered power operated more in terms of situation than with regard to the sex of those involved: it did not belong exclusively to any one sex.19
That measure of flexibility in gender roles depended in part on biological assumptions that made a much less absolute distinction between men and women than later conceptions of the body would claim to exist. Most contemporaries believed that four fundamental fluids or humors (blood, choler, melancholy, and phlegm), present in all human bodies, governed physical functions and emotions. The humors were in constant flux, which led to a never-ending struggle against disequilibrium. (Contemporaries believed that humoral imbalance caused disease, thus the use of bleeding and purging to restore a healthy balance between the four fluids.) Men and women differed from each other to some degree because they had a distinct combination of these four fluids; the physical and moral frailty of women resulted from their distinctive humoral makeup. Yet those differences between men and women were as unstable as the humors themselves. From this perspective, there could be no clear-cut distinction between the sexes. Equally significant in its implications for gender was Galen’s still-influential “one-sex” model of the body. This model assumed that female reproductive organs were nothing more than male organs inverted (the uterus an internal version of the scrotum, the ovaries resembling male testicles, and the penis appearing in women as the cervix and vagina). According to Galen, a failure of heat prevented female organs from thrusting outward, so that women, according to this model, were beings who had failed to develop fully into men. This denial of any clear-cut boundaries between male and female bodies, in humoral and one-sex models, would have legitimated and facilitated the flexibility of gender roles in early modern culture.20
That Puritans could envisage for each believer, including men, two intensely passionate marital relationships, one with an earthly spouse and the other with a heavenly bridegroom, was due, then, to specific conceptions of gender and even of anatomical sex that the colonists brought with them across the Atlantic. There is no evidence to suggest that Native American traditions and practices influenced English settlers’ understanding of gender or sexuality. Early reports from the New World had described a category of Native American men, often referred to by Indians as “half man / half woman,” who lived as women, dressed in female clothing, and engaged in sexual relations with other men. There were also Indian women who assumed male clothing and roles, though this phenomenon seems to have been less widespread. From a Native American perspective, the “half man / half woman” seems to have embodied and promoted a harmony that resulted from reconciling opposites within the physical and spiritual realms. The composite identity of these individuals enabled them to mediate between the polarities of male and female as well as between those of spirit and flesh. Yet European explorers and settlers neither understood nor respected the assumptions underlying Native American conceptions of gender: that Indians revered men who lived as women and who made themselves sexually available to other men in their communities exemplified for Europeans the immorality and savagery of Indian culture. Indeed, Europeans used the word “berdache” (an Arabic word meaning “male
