PURITAN PATRIARCHY
In my previous post, I touched on the question of whether there was ever a golden age in the history of the USA, within which women were held to occupy a “nobler sphere” than men’s “bank-note” world.
And with respect to Sophia Hawthorne’s response to her mother in the 1850s that she did not share her concerns about improving the rights of women, because wives already exerted “a power which no king or conqueror can cope with”, I suggested tongue-in-cheek that this statement was never meant to apply to American women in general and that Sophia’s comment owes much her experiences living in North West England during the period that her husband Nathaniel was the US Consul in Liverpool.
It was an easy pitch to go on to try to claim that American women, as the daughters of the Mayflower, had always been more relatively oppressed than their English cousins. The more so that Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘The Scarlet Letter’ lays bare the ‘morbid intensity’ of Puritan preoccupations with sin, evil and guilt and their interweaving with male perceptions of feminine innocence and powerlessness.
The Scarlet Letter which is set in the period 1642-1649, has also been viewed as a retelling of the loss of Paradise because it similarly links innocence - sin – expulsion – suffering – and redemption through mortification.
Clearly, Hawthorne was well-place to tell the story, being a direct descendant of John Hathorne, a judge during the Salem Witch Trials (1692-1693).
And if we need contemporary validation, we need go no further than John Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’ which embroils itself in the same bitter puritanical pottage:
‘O fairest of Creation, last and best
Of all Gods works, Creature in whom excell'd
Whatever can to sight or thought be formd,
Holy, divine, good, amiable, or sweet!
‘How art thou lost, how on a sudden lost,
Defac't, deflourd, and now to Death devote?
Rather how hast thou yeelded to transgress
The strict forbiddance, how to violate
The sacred Fruit forbidd'n! som cursed fraud
Of Enemie hath beguil'd thee, yet unknown,
And mee with thee hath ruind, for with thee
Certain my resolution is to Die;
How can I live without thee, how forgoe
Thy sweet Converse and Love so dearly joyn'd,
To live again in these wilde Woods forlorn?
These are the sad and bitter words of a sad and bitter man.
Having lost any opportunity for advancement in public service and facing persecution following the Restoration of the Monarchy in 1660, and having lost his loved second wife, Milton was left blind and plagued by three unruly daughters.
The three girls “on whom he ought now to have been able principally to depend, were his most serious domestic trouble. The poor motherless girls, the eldest in her seventeenth year in 1662, the second in her fifteenth and the youngest in her eleventh, had grown up, in their father’s blindness and too great self-absorption, ill-looked-after and but poorly educated; and the result now appeared.
They “made nothing of neglecting him “; they rebelled against the drudgery of reading to him or otherwise attending on him; they “did combine together and counsel his maid-servant to cheat him in her marketing's” - they actually “had made away some of his books, and would have sold the rest.”
But as Dr Samuel Johnson commented, there was a strong case that Milton only had himself to blame for his predicament:
"It has been observed, that they who most loudly clamour for liberty do not most liberally grant it. What we know of Milton's character, in domestick relations, is, that he was severe and arbitrary. His family consisted of women; and there appears in his books something like a Turkish contempt of females, as subordinate and inferiour beings.
That his own daughters might not break the ranks, he suffered them to be depressed by a mean and penurious education. He thought women made only for obedience, and man only for rebellion."
ENTER A CHESHIRE WENCH
But as for many of us, Milton must have reflected in his later years that ‘life would be pretty terrible if we only got what we deserve’. He was enduringly fortunate that his friend Dr Nathan Paget (an eminent physician who was originally from Stockport, Cheshire) introduced him to his relative Elizabeth Minshull who became his third wife.
She was the daughter of a yeoman farmer from Wistaston in South Cheshire – in fact Elizabeth and I were both born in the same hamlet, within the village bounds, Wells Green.
Elizabeth was 24 years old when they married in London on 24 February 1663. John was 31 years older, blind and had three daughters from a previous marriage, but they were married for over 11 years until he died on 8 November 1674.
"A genteel person, a peaceful and agreeable woman," says Aubrey, who knew her.
‘She was pretty, and had golden hair, which one connects pleasantly with the late sunshine she brought into Milton's life. She sang to his accompaniment on the organ and bass-viol, but is not recorded to have read or written for him; the only direct testimony we have of her care of him is his verbal acknowledgment of her attention to his creature comforts.
Yet Aubrey's memoranda show that she could talk with her husband about Hobbes, and she treasured the letters he had received from distinguished foreigners. At the time of their marriage Milton was living in Jewin Street, Aldersgate, from which he soon afterwards removed to Artillery Walk, Bunhill Fields, their last residence."
As a widow, Elizabeth later returned to Cheshire no later than 1681, living until 1727.
After residing some years in London she retired to Nantwich, Cheshire in 1681, where ‘divers glimpses’ reveal her as leading the decent existence of a poor but comfortable gentlewoman as late as August or September, 1727.
On her death, the inventory of her effects, amounted to £38 8s. 4d. and included: "Mr. Milton's pictures and coat of arms, valued at ten guineas" and "two Books of Paradise," valued at ten shillings.
Well, that’s that, you may say – this time you have really lost yourself in lanes of your boyhood – let’s see how you get back from here to American Womanhood!
ARE YOU NOT ASHAMED TO WALK THUS BETWEEN TWO YOUNG MEN?
Well, it is really not so hard – Elizabeth Minshull was a Quaker.
And, as I pointed out in my article of 8th March ‘Chain Migration from Rural Cheshire to Chester County, Pennsylvania in the 1700s’, the Cheshire Quakers took an important role in the early settlement of Pennsylvania.
In fact there are records for 1663 of a Robert Vernon (22) marrying an Elinor Minshull (15) in Chester County, Pennsylvania. Both bride and groom had been born in Cheshire.
It is highly likely that Elinor and Elizabeth were close relatives.
But there was a world of difference between Pennsylvania and Massachusetts.
As a Quaker historian comments:
‘I have noticed in my years that the more uncertain one is in their unbeliefs, the more threatening opposing beliefs are. Many Puritans left England in an earlier age to escape persecution, fleeing to the American colonies. It is tragic that when the Quaker faith arose, the Puritans were the most violent in opposition.
‘I suggest that their faith, based on an extremely rigid outward observance of rules within the Bible, was so fragile, that when the Truth appeared with the Quakers, they were the most frightened. Therefore they reacted in desperation to put out the Light that said their faith was on the sandy bottom, ready to be washed away by the first storm. They viciously persecuted the Quakers and anyone who dared care for them.
‘The Puritans of New England, specifically Connecticut and Massachusetts, exceeded the persecutions that the Quakers experienced in England, principally by hanging three Quaker men and one Quaker woman. Twenty-three other Quakers were scheduled to die by hanging before the King of England intervened.
‘One would think that the Puritans, after escaping persecutions themselves by fleeing to New England, would have been more tolerant. But, as you will see, their self-righteous spirit, viciously dealt with all conflicting religious opinions; and, since the Quakers were far more convicting than any other sect, with their non-traditional doctrines, they were most brutally persecuted.
One of the main issues between the Puritans and the Quakers was their treatment of women. From the start, Quaker women were allowed to speak at meetings, preach to crowds and even travel alone.
This led to the execution of Mary Dyer in Boston in 1656.
In the previous year the General Court of Plymouth had issued a proclamation denouncing Quakers for "publishing dangerous and horrid tracts," and declaring that any convicted of holding their views should be banished from the colony under pain of death.
‘In obedience to this law four persons were ordered to leave. They were William Robinson, Marmaduke Stephenson, William Leddra, and Mary Dyer, who had "come to Boston to labor for their Lord." Following their decision to return from Salem, William, Mary and Marmaduke were arrested.
‘On the day appointed for their execution a band of two hundred armed men, besides many horsemen, were called out to escort these harmless, unarmed Quakers to the gallows. The prisoners were placed in the center with a drummer next to them, who was ordered to make noise enough to drown their voices, if they attempted to speak to the crowds which followed them. The prisoners themselves were at peace.
‘Observing that Mary Dyer walked between her condemned companions, coarsely and tauntingly said to her:
"Are you not ashamed to walk thus between two young men?"
"No,” answered Mary Dyer, to the repulsive observation, "this is to me an hour of the greatest joy I ever had in this world”.
‘We are told "they went with great cheerfulness, as to an everlasting wedding feast." The men were hung first, and then Mary Dyer ascended the scaffold, but as the rope was placed about her neck a cry was heard: "She is reprieved." Her son had made such earnest intercession that her life was granted him on condition she should leave the colony at once.
‘However, Mary returned to Boston in the spring of 1656 and she was immediately sentenced to death by Governor Endicott. When her life was again proffered, before the hanging, on condition she should leave Boston forever, she replied, "No, I cannot promise. In obedience to the will of the Lord I came, and in His will I abide, faithful unto death."
Six years later Alice Ambrose, Mary Tomkins and Ann Coleman were arrested during their missionary work, under the following warrant:
‘To the Constables of Dover, Hampton, Salisbury, Newbury, Rowley, Ipswich, Wenham, Lynn, Boston, Roxbury, Dedhara, and until these vagabond Quakers are carried out of this jurisdiction.
‘You and every of you are required, in the king's name, to take these vagabond Quakers, Ann Coleman, Mary Tomkins, and Alice Ambrose, and make them fast to the cart's tail, and driving the cart through your several towns, to whip them on their backs, not exceeding ten stripes each on each of them, in each town, and so convey them from constable to constable, until they come out of this jurisdiction, as you will answer it at your peril; and this shall be your warrant.
‘At Dover, dated Dec. 22nd, 1662
'Per me, Richard Walden
Consistent with the warrant, the three young women were stripped naked from the middle up and whipped. Later in Hampton, the constable William Fifield told the women to take off all their clothes. When they refused, he stripped them stark naked and lashed them himself.
But ‘the condition of the prisoners as they passed through Salisbury, fastened with ropes to the cart's tail with their "torn bodies and weary steps," excited the sympathies of the spectators; and one of the inhabitants, after persuading the constable to pass the prisoners and the warrant into his hands as deputy, immediately gave them their liberty’.
When the three young women returned to Massachusetts from Maine, they were subjected to further violence. They were dragged head down through snow and across rocks and tree stumps and Alice was dragged along a freezing river behind a canoe and made to swim for her life. When she was providentially spared, her clothes were frozen as ‘hard as boards’.
THE DOMESTICITY OF FRIENDS
So there you have it – some early American women who really did exert “a power which no king or conqueror could cope with” but they were Quakers not Puritans.
But still, it seems that we are a way short of being able to establish Cheshire and North West England as the provenance of at least one strand of gritty early feminism in the USA. That is unless you are unprepared to take into account the assessment made by Barry Levy in his book ‘Quakers and the American Family: British Settlement in the Delaware Valley’ (1988).
Apparently Levy argues that American domesticity did not originate among 19th Century New Englanders but among middling, north-western British Quakers who spiritualized family life and created an ideology of domesticity in the 17th Century. Habitually poor, according to Levy, ‘north-western middling families from areas like Wales and Cheshire could ‘keep some measure of independence by owning a small business or by securely occupying a piece of land’ and pooling male and female talents and energies.
Consequently, they thrived (like my Darlington Family relatives who were farmers from near Church Minshull, Cheshire) when they settled in the Radnor and Chester areas just west of Philadelphia.
According to reviewers, Levy argues that the Quakers brought a new vision of family and social life to America -- one that contrasted sharply with the harsh, formal world of the New England Puritans. The Quakers stressed affection, friendship and hospitality, the importance of women in the home, and the value of self-disciplined, non-coercive childrearing. This book explains how and why the Quakers have had such a profound cultural impact on America and what the Quakers' experience with their own radical family system tells us about American families.
I might add that it likely was not just a matter of being from the middling sort and coping with 'living on a cinder tip'. There were cultural issues as well - women had always had a higher status and greater independence in the North West.
As for John Milton, back in England, it seems that he knew where his bread was being buttered towards the end of his life. He didn’t stop being horrid to his daughters but he gave up rigid religiosity and went quiet about his beliefs, accepting the reality that every man can really be his own priest. After all, he had a gradely Cheshire wench to fuss him and fother him.
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