i Within Patriarchy: Gender and Power in Massachusetts’s Congregational Churches, 1630-1730 Deborah Colleen McNally A dissertation Submitted in partial fulfillment of the Requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2013 Reading Committee: Richard Johnson, Chair John Findlay Mary O’Neil Program Authorized to Offer Degree: Department of History ii ©Copyright 2013 Deborah Colleen McNally iii University of Washington Abstract Within Patriarchy: Gender and Power in Massachusetts's Congregational Churches, 1630-1730 Deborah Colleen McNally Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Richard Johnson Department of History This dissertation explores the relationship between gender and power in the religious culture of Massachusetts’s Congregational churches during the seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries. It contributes to the fields of women’s history, church history, and colonial American history by complicating both the static concept of patriarchal New England society and the historiography, which largely portrays Puritan women as either saints or disorderly sinners. It addresses questions of the average Puritan woman’s religious experience, something that is lacking despite the plethora of studies on Puritan culture, and demonstrates that women’s place in the church was not fixed and immutable but fluid and varied geographically from congregation to congregation. This study charts the gendered dimensions of changes in church practices, such as giving public confessions of faith and worship singing, which had the effect of temporarily silencing women’s voices within the meetinghouse and reveals how women and men responded to those changes. It demonstrates how despite the ambivalent nature iv of Puritan culture—women joined the church as full members, for example, yet the meaning of that membership was restricted— church membership and affiliation afforded women a position of influence with their husbands, their ministers, within larger society, and with each other and that women benefited in tangible ways from church association such as during times of domestic discord and during the Salem Witchcraft Crisis. Although these women left few extant documents, church, court, and probate records, conversion narratives, ministerial diaries, sermons, and essays, and letters reveal that they acted both as independent religious agents, changing churches apart from their husbands, for example, and corporately in political solidarity, as in the case of the women of Boston Third church, even challenging the civil authorities on occasion when a church/state conflict impinged on their practice of religion. Within a decidedly patriarchal culture, women were both key participants in and patrons of their individual congregations and shapers of both their and their family’s religious experience throughout the seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Writing a dissertation is a solitary endeavor, yet one does not complete such a project without the guidance, support, and encouragement of others. Primary among those who have given freely of their time and talents is the chair of my supervisory committee, Richard Johnson, to whom I owe a substantial debt. Richard has been a true mentor and friend, exemplifying all that is best about academia. He has patiently read and commented on more drafts of this dissertation than I care to recall, always with the same sense of humor and generosity of spirit for which he is well-known. I could not have completed this work without his support. Committee member John Findlay read the dissertation in its later stages, and his keen editorial eye made it a more polished document than it would have otherwise been. Stephanie Camp supervised chapter six as a seminar paper, provided practical suggestions on chapters one and four, and influenced my thinking on gender analysis, methodology, and language usage. The convivial members of the Pacific Northwest Early Americanists read portions of chapter one as a seminar paper and provided insightful critique of chapter four. In particular, comments from Bill Breitenbaugh, Lori Hochstetler, Johann Neem, Eric Nellis, Paul Otto, and Bill Rorabaugh helped advance my work. I am especially grateful to Mary O’Neil who agreed to serve on my committee when serious illness forced another member to resign at the last minute. I am also grateful for the financial support provided by various institutions including the University of Washington’s Department of History, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, and the National Society of The Colonial Dames of America in the State of Washington. At the University of vi Washington, graduate advisors Suzanne Young and Lori Anthony helped shepherd me through the program. The staff of the Massachusetts Historical Society, where I spent a month in dissertation research, welcomed me warmly, as did the staff of the Congregational Library in Boston. Jane Hennedy, director of the Old Colony Historical Society in Taunton, Massachusetts, provided materials on Elizabeth Pole and the history of Taunton for chapter five. Michael Zuckerman, who attended the Colonial Society of Massachusetts’s Graduate Student Forum, took time to email me after the conference with suggestions for additional readings. Glenda Goodman, whom I met while attending the Huntington Institute’s Women in Early America Workshop, did likewise. I reserve my most profound gratitude for the constant love and support of my friends and family. My parents, Paul and Pamela English, prayed me through every step of the process. My sister, Danna VanDusen, provided a sympathetic ear and made me laugh. To my husband, Dan, and to our three sons—Justin, Brandon, and Brian—you have supported me in more ways than I could possibly count since I made the decision to return to school. I lovingly dedicate this work to you. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Chapter 1: Women and the Puritan Church: An Overview ……………………….. 1 Background Visible Sainthood, Spiritual Equality, and Public Confessions Gender Imbalance in Church Membership: “All the Rest Are Women” An Ambivalent Culture: Debates about Women in the Church The Debate Over Singing: An Introduction Conclusion Chapter 2: Women’s Spiritual Power: Its Basis and Manifestation …………….. 46 Women: “Experienced Christians” Widows and “Gentlewomen” Healers Goodwives: “He That Would Thrive Must Ask His Wife” Sisters and “Pious Women” Conclusion Chapter 3: Church Membership and Association: Its Benefits for Women …….. 89 The Case of “Dorcas the Blackmore” and the Dorchester First Church Marital Discord and the Church: “No Man Shall Strike His Wife” Witchcraft Trials and the Church Conclusion Chapter 4: Wives and Sisters in the Boston First Church Schism, 1669-1674 …. 136 The Origins of the First Church Schism Wives & Sisters Petition to Leave Boston First: “to provide for our own peace and spiritual comfort” Wives & Sisters Join Boston Third: “wee ly under the same rule of Joyning” Conclusion Chapter 5: Puritan Women: Shaping Religious Experience and Legacy ………. 176 Elizabeth Pole: Patroness—“I give unto the Church of God at Taunton” Female Patrons: “I do hereby also Give” Women Vote With Their Feet: Multi-Church Households The Malden Women and Church/State Debates: “friends of the meek preacher Marmaduke Matthews” Women and Meeting House Politics Conclusion Chapter 6: Women and the Singing Controversy of 1720 ……………………….. 214 The Singing Style of the First Generation The Turn Toward Lining-Out The Return of Regular Singing or Singing by Note Ministerial Appeal to Women: “the Handmaids of the Lord” Conclusion viii Epilogue: ……………………………………………………………………………. 243 Bibliography: ……………………………………………………………………….. 251 1 Chapter One Women and the Congregational Church: An Overview In a patriarchal society such as Puritan Massachusetts, women were under the political, legal, and familial authority of men. Yet fundamental to the workings of that society was one’s relationship with God, and here, the average woman could attain a place of influence and power through membership in and affiliation with the established Congregational church that was unavailable to her in civil society. As historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich has remarked, church membership offered “one of the few public distinctions available to women” during this era. Indeed, for the English nonseparating Puritans who founded the Massachusetts-Bay colony in 1630, the very public act of being received into church membership, or “joined in full Comunyon,” was the culmination of a process that by its very nature recognized a woman’s personal power— that is the ability to make decisions based on one’s own spiritual beliefs, knowledge, and desires— even as she placed herself under the authority and governance of the congregation.1 As extant church records make clear, church membership not only mattered to women in the early decades of settlement, it mattered more to the daughters and grand- daughters of first generation goodwives than it did to their sons and grandsons. It mattered to Anglo women and to women of African ancestry alike. As the seventeenth 1 Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England 1650-1750 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 216; Richard D. Pierce, ed., The Records of the First Church in Salem Massachusetts 1629-1736 (Salem, Massachusetts: Essex Institute: 1974), 5; On the definition of personal power, or personhood, see Marilyn J. Westerkamp, “Puritan Women, Spiritual