Anne Hutchinson was the first famous European-American woman, and after Matoaka/Pocahontas, only the second still-famous woman in the lands now encompassed by the United States. She appears in most histories of the United States and its first colonies, including George Brancroft’s History of the United States of America, first published in the 1830s.

Mrs. Hutchinson is famous because she disrupted the community of the Puritan church in Boston in the mid-1630s by attracting most of its congregation to an extreme interpretation of Calvinist theology, for which she was tried, convicted, excommunicated, and expelled, just as Roger Williams had been. An enormous amount of ink has been spilled over Anne Hutchinson over hundreds of years. Older interpretations regard Hutchinson as an extremist and deeply disruptive to the Puritan project in Massachusetts. In more recent years, there has been a lot of sympathetic writing about Hutchinson as the study of women in early America has become more popular, and the Puritans of early Massachusetts decidedly less so. In some circles she is seen as a victim of oppression. Her monument at the Massachusetts State House upholds Hutchinson as a “courageous exponent of civil liberty and religious toleration.”

My own take is that her story is interesting in part because it is something of a Rorschach test – each of these interpretations are defendable to some degree, and the emphasis one or another historian puts on a given interpretation in lieu of others says as much about the author as it does about Mrs. Hutchinson. This makes the complex story of Anne Hutchinson very much a story about ourselves.

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Selected references for this episode

Francis J. Bremer, John Winthrop: America’s Forgotten Founding Father

Eve LaPlante, American Jezebel: The Uncommon Life of Anne Hutchinson, the Woman Who Defied the Puritans

Edmund S. Morgan, Roger Williams: The Church and State

Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop