American Jezebel: The Uncommon Life of Anne Hutchinson, the Woman Who Defied the Puritans [Hardcover]

Eve LaPlante (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0060562331 | ISBN-13: 978-0060562335 | Publication Date: March 2, 2004 | Edition: 1

Anne Hutchinson, a forty-six- year-old midwife who was pregnant with her sixteenth child, stood before forty male judges of the Massachusetts General Court, charged with heresy and sedition. In a time when women could not vote, hold public office, or teach outside the home, the charismatic Hutchinson wielded remarkable political power. Her unconventional ideas had attracted a following of prominent citizens eager for social reform. Hutchinson defended herself brilliantly, but the judges, faced with a perceived threat to public order, banished her for behaving in a manner "not comely for her] sex." Until now, Hutchinson has been a polarizing figure in American history and letters, attracting either disdain or exaltation. Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was haunted by the "sainted" Hutchinson, used her as a model for Hester Prynne in "The Scarlet Letter." Much of the praise for her, however, is muted by a wish to domesticate the heroine: the bronze statue of Hutchinson at the Massachusetts State House depicts a prayerful mother -- eyes raised to heaven, a child at her side -- rather than a woman of power standing alone before humanity and God. Her detractors, starting with her neighbor John Winthrop, first governor of Massachusetts, referred to her as "the instrument of Satan," the new Eve, the "disturber of Israel," a witch, "more bold than a man," and Jezebel -- the ancient Israeli queen who, on account of her tremendous political power, was "the most evil woman" in the Bible. Written by one of Hutchinson's direct descendants, "American Jezebel" brings both balance and perspective to Hutchinson's story. It captures this American heroine's life in all its complexity, presenting hernot as a religious fanatic, a cardboard feminist, or a raging crank -- as some have portrayed her -- but as a flesh-and-blood wife, mother, theologian, and political leader. Opening in a colonial courtroom, "American Jezebel" moves back in time to Hutchinson's childhood in Elizabethan England, exploring intimate details of her marriage and family life. The book narrates her dramatic expulsion from Massachusetts, after which her judges, still threatened by her challenges, promptly built Harvard College to enforce religious and social orthodoxies -- making her midwife to the nation's first college. In exile, she settled Rhode Island (which later merged with Roger Williams's Providence Plantation), becoming the only woman ever to co-found an American colony. The seeds of the American struggle for women's and human rights can be found in the story of this one woman's courageous life. "American Jezebel" illuminates the origins of our modern concepts of religious freedom, equal rights, and free speech, and showcases an extraordinary woman whose achievements are astonishing by the standards of any era.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

*Starred Review.* LaPlante, an 11th-generation granddaughter of Hutchinson, provides a fast-paced and elegant account of Hutchinson's life and work, including the reasons that Hutchinson's teachings threatened the fabric of Puritan theology. By the time she was born, her father, Francis Marbury, had already been in and out of jail for challenging the religious authority of the Anglican priests in England. His continuing nonconformity, according to LaPlante, had a lasting impact on Hutchinson's own views of religious authority. Hutchinson also learned from the Reverend John Cotton that God's revelation to individuals occurred mystically as a kind of inner light and did not require a formal religious setting. After she moved to the colonies with her husband, William Hutchinson, she began to teach that men and women could attain salvation not through performing religious works but through this inward grace. The Puritans, who emphasized that the covenant of works was the only guarantee of salvation, charged her with antinomianism (an attack against the law of God) and with violating God's commands that a woman should not teach. LaPlante offers a stimulating account of Hutchinson's eloquent self-defense at her trial. Knowing that the magistrates had no religious or political grounds to convict her, since a woman was not a subject of the law, Hutchinson stymied their questioning. LaPlante's first-rate biography offers glimpses into the life and teachings of a much-neglected figure in early American religious history.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Much ado is often made over the contributions of the founding fathers to the liberties Americans enjoy today, but with rare exceptions, such as the achievements of Abigail Adams and Betsy Ross, the roles women played in formulating our national philosophy are very little known. Moreover, the stories that are known include only scanty information about the players' personal history and their words. Thanks to LaPlante, at least some of Anne Hutchinson's words are preserved in this well-researched account of her testimony against charges of heresy and sedition before the Massachusetts General Court in 1637. Declared an American Jezebel by Massachusetts' first governor, John Winthrop, Hutchinson is portrayed here as a feminist and a fighter for religious freedom, who eventually was banished to Rhode Island. As LaPlante paints a fascinating portrait of this complex mother of 15 and delineates her heresy by clarifying the distinction between her beliefs and those of her Puritan adjudicators, she deftly depicts the gritty world of colonial New England, too. Donna Chavez
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: HarperOne; 1 edition (March 2, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060562331
• ISBN-13: 978-0060562335
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (34 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #324,233 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Eve LaPlante, a New Englander with degrees from Princeton and Harvard, has published articles, essays, and three nonfiction books.

SEIZED is a narrative portrait of a common brain disorder that can alter personality, illuminating the mind-body problem and the limits of free will. AMERICAN JEZEBEL tells the true story of Eve's ancestor the colonial heretic and founding mother Anne Hutchinson.

Eve's second ancestor biography, SALEM WITCH JUDGE, about the 1692 judge who became a feminist and an abolitionist, won the 2008 Massachusetts Book Award for Nonfiction.

She is working on a biography of Louisa May Alcott and her mother, Abigail, for Free Press.

Shaun O'Connell, in his new anthology, BOSTON: VOICES & VISIONS, which includes the preface to AMERICAN JEZEBEL, observes, "Just as Nathaniel Hawthorne dug into the dark history of his ancestry, which reached back both to the original Boston settlement of the 1630s and the Salem Witch Trials of the 1690s, so too did LaPlante trace family members who were rooted in the same eras.... Hawthorne took shame upon himself for the misdeeds of his Puritan ancestors, and LaPlante offers praise for her forebears who testified against Puritan repression. As her prefaces to these biographies, a kind of spiritual autobiography, show, Anne Hutchinson and Samuel Sewall were not the dark Puritans many imagined them to be. They remain living presences, even models of rectitude, into the twenty-first century."

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

51 of 58 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Unenthused, July 15, 2007

By 

Beacon - See all my reviews

This review is from: American Jezebel: The Uncommon Life of Anne Hutchinson, the Woman Who Defied the Puritans (Paperback)

I'm mystified by the rave reviews here. Hutchinson is indeed a fascinating figure, but LaPlante's oddly-arranged book obscures more than it illuminates. LaPlante presents Hutchinson as a proto-feminist rather than a zealous religious dissident. Although LaPlante acknowledges that Hutchinson exhibited as much moral certitude as her prosecutors -- she believed, for example, that she could personally identify those chosen for salvation by God -- most of the book either downplays the significance of theological dispute in favor of gender politics (suggesting, e.g., that John Winthrop was principally motivated by a desire to keep women in their place), or twists itself into knots trying to recast arch-Calvinist Antinomianism as a progressive movement. Incredibly, there is no serious discussion of theology until 50 pages into the book.

Gender is naturally central to this story. After all, its protagonist is a woman in seventeenth century Boston who brazenly challenged the city's Cambridge-educated male elite. But the reason for Hutchinson's banishment -- like that of the more influential and sophisticated Roger Williams a few years earlier -- was theological, and the faith of Hutchinson and her slippery mentor John Cotton (grandfather of Cotton Mather) was no more rational and no less fanatical than that of John Winthrop, whose conciliatory tendencies actually marked him as a rather moderate fellow by Puritan standards. Unlike Williams, whose radical separatism led him to become one of the first notable advocates of religious freedom, Hutchinson was primarily concerned not with political liberty but with denouncing those who she believed to be under a "covenant of works." This category included all the ministers in Massachusetts except for Cotton and her brother-in-law, John Wheelwright.

LaPlante does not seem to be an expert on Puritan New England, and she has trouble with theology. To give one example, she employs "orthodox" as a general term of abuse -- using it at one point to describe the Puritans' Anglican opponents in England, and at others to describe the Puritan leadership in Boston. Like Howard Zinn, who blurbs the book, she seems to view underdog status as an indication of righteousness. A reader who is more interested in ideas than identity politics will note that Hutchinson's Antinomian theology was no more enlightened than that of her "orthodox" enemies; she was ahead of her time only in her belief that women are as able to interpret scripture as men (no small matter), and in her relatively humane views regarding Native Americans (which she shared with Williams and Samuel Sewall, among others).

Of course, historical figures should not be chastised for every transgression against contemporary sensibilities. But as someone with no dog in the fight between the varieties of seventeenth century English Protestantism, I was irritated by LaPlante's verbal gymnastics on behalf of her ancestor -- especially after she declares in the intro that her work will avoid the "exaltation" found elsewhere. While the reader gets some sense of Hutchinson's admirable qualities, including her sparkling intelligence and stubborn bravery, critical analysis is limited to the occasional throw-away sentence, and the book contains little psychological insight. LaPlante has thus transformed a strange charismatic figure into a cardboard cutout. LaPlante is not, thankfully, the sort of historian who simply dismisses all Puritans as benighted and backwards, but she makes an equally serious mistake in attempting to transform a proud, complex, and extraordinarily devout woman into a digestible hero for contemporary readers.

Three final points: (1) LaPlante has a habit of substituting her own language for that of her subjects, making it hard to determine who is saying what. Quotes sometimes end abruptly, replaced by LaPlante's paraphrasing. I suspected at several points that her summaries were generous to Hutchinson (facilitating Hutchinson's transformation into a Puritan Susan B. Anthony), and less than charitable to her prosecutors. The book is at its best when LaPlante isn't speaking at all, since her commentary adds little to the natural drama. (2) The general tenor of the book is hagiographic. Many of the quotes that LaPlante culls from other histories of the era seem to have been included only because they are complimentary of Hutchinson. LaPlante defends her subject in an almost lawerly fashion, informing us, for example, that "Harvard University" credits Hutchinson with its founding (in fact, one Harvard professor!), and that Hutchinson founded Rhode Island (only technically true, since Williams had established Providence Plantations a year earlier). These are minor details, but combined with the suspicious paraphrasing, they undermined my trust in the author's intentions. An honest defense of Hutchinson would have been fine, but this book seems to lionize its subject using sleight of hand. (3) I learned some things from "American Jezebel" that I had not found in other books on this period. Particularly interesting were LaPlante's discussions of Lincolnshire and Boston, England.

For better books on pre-Revolutionary New England, I recommend Philbrick's Mayflower, Morgan's Puritan Dilemma (on Winthrop), Gaustad's Roger Williams, Lepore's The Name of War (flawed, but erudite and beautifully written), and Richard Francis' wonderful book on Samuel Sewall. American Jezebel isn't worthless, and may be a decent intro to this subject for younger readers, but it would be unfortunate if anyone picked up their whole education on the Puritans here -- as many of the other Amazon reviewers seem to have done.

26 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Friends of Anne Hutchinson" review American Jezebel, May 20, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: American Jezebel: The Uncommon Life of Anne Hutchinson, the Woman Who Defied the Puritans (Hardcover)

As Founder of "The Friends of Anne Hutchinson" on Aquidneck Island (Newport,Portsmouth, Rhode Island)I read "American Jezebel"with the knowledge that most of what we know about Anne Hutchinson were first or second-hand accounts from the men she disturbed and quarreled with. What more could the author glean about this woman who dared to challenge Puritan Boston?

On Anne Hutchinson Day (April 27,an annual gathering at Founders' Brook Park in Portsmouth RI, the settlement she co-founded) Our "Friends" group asks -where is the history of the women who came here in 1638? Even their names seem erased. Our mission is to find, collect and record the lost history of women who left Puritan Boston and followed Anne Hutchinson to this Island as wives, sisters, in-laws or servants. Incredibly, 366 years later, many proud descendants are found here with stories to tell of Anne Hutchinson, Mary Dyer(a Quaker martyr)and the women Hutchinsonians. (14 names to date and adding) Many in our group have read everything we can on the life of Anne Hutchinson and her era. We believe this new book is an important addition to the few good, older books that are available on her.

Eve LaPlante's "American Jezebel" delivers an account that throws us into the action and weaves us carefully into Hutchinson's world in England, Boston-old world and new- Pocasset(Portsmouth RI) and New York with new detail. Finally an author has given us a meticulously-researched guided tour with maps to the places she lived. I know LaPlante did it well because some of us attempted to research the same areas, including her birthplace in Alford, Lincolnshire England. LaPlante did it right and thoroughly. She seemed to know the interest out there. In this book the early 1600's come alive with the details we want to hear: describing the locales, the living habits and the obsession with religion. Thank you, LaPlante,for clarifying the long civic and church trials of Anne Hutchinson, making them lively and readable for a change.

The book provides us with a unique account of how a feisty, literate mother of 16 children leaves the comforts of low-gentry English life, moves to the edge of a wild continent, works as a midwife and counselor to women and evolves into a charismatic spiritual leader who dares to challenge the Boston Magistrates. There is much more after that. I will never again pass "split rock" off the Hutchinson Freeway on the way to Manhattan without a thought to Susan Hutchinson, the seven-year old who hid and waited..that's for the reader to continue.

"American Jezebel" is the book a filmmaker should read

signed Valerie Debrule, Founder,The Friends of Anne Hutchinson

28 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Work, March 18, 2004

By 

Gretchen Laskas "Author" (Virginia) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: American Jezebel: The Uncommon Life of Anne Hutchinson, the Woman Who Defied the Puritans (Hardcover)

AMERICAN JEZEBEL is an excellent work, giving us a glimpse into the life of an extraordinary woman. In a world nearly four hundred years ago, that continues to echo into our own, the life of Anne Hutchinson has much to teach us still about women, religion, government and faith.

Highly readable and meticulously researched, I especially appreciated the maps and descriptions of the world Hutchinson lived in and also the details on how to find the footprints of her world in ours today.

A must for anyone interested in feminist scholarship, American history or religion.