As women’s numbers in the church grew, so did their informal influence. As a community expanded, women who lived on its periphery pressured their husbands to establish a new church. Burdened by infants and toddlers, pregnant or recovering from childbirth, they demanded a church within reasonable walking distance. Thus, although they were forbidden to sign the new church’s covenant, they were instrumental in its birth.

  Ministers understood well the power that women congregants had over their own careers. Gossip created reputation, and New England women often took on the role of watchdog of a clergyman’s behavior both in the pulpit and in his personal life. A minister who could rally women’s support for his tenure or for his side in a controversy enjoyed considerable advantage; a minister who alienated his female congregants faced formidable difficulties.

  The church thus acted as both a conservative force and an expansive one in the lives of Puritan women. Although the equality of souls remained a theological principle, the power of men to mediate between Christ and women was expressed in the all-male clergy and in the silencing of women within the church—and outside its doors following Anne Hutchinson’s trial and conviction for heresy. This subordination of women reinforced the right of husband and father to subsume a woman’s interest. Yet salvation and church membership gave women an independent status, unbreachable by the men who dominated their secular life. The rising number of women in the church worked a subtle but significant change in the values extolled by its clergy. Increasingly, character traits associated with women were transposed as Christian traits, and worldly handicaps became spiritual strengths, for meekness and submissiveness readied the soul for grace.

  Hannah Duston came late to the church, long after she married and produced her family. In this she differed from many of her female contemporaries. She differed as well, of course, in her celebrity, for Indian captivity and her daring escape set her apart from her neighbors. Yet the potential for violence generated by bitter race relations was present in the life of most New Englanders. During the first hundred years of colonization, New England’s white settlers pursued an aggressive policy of invasion, usurpation, and extermination which led to war, bloodshed, and a pervasive sense of insecurity for many. Even the Pilgrims, whose capacity for cooperation and respect for cultural diversity are captured in the Thanksgiving tableau, earned the reputation of “cutthroats” in later dealings with Indians. From the Pequot Wars of the 1630s to the wars against Metacomet or King Philip in the 1670s, Puritans waged brutal attacks in the name of God and their own privileged destinies. These struggles, largely for land, were framed within larger imperial struggles between European powers. French interests led to alignments between Indian confederacies and independent tribes with the Canadian colonial government, countered by English alliances with other Indian groups. Thus, New England women lived in a theater of local and international warfare.

  The consequences of violent race relations were felt most immediately on the frontier, where each settlement designated one home its garrison in case of raid or full-scale attack. But when Massachusetts mobilized for war against the alliance of French and Indians, residents of settled communities and seaport towns were affected as well. It was captivity, however, not death in battle, that became the primary narrative of encounter with alien Indian and French Catholic cultures. Those taken captive during the raids over the end of the century and over the first decades of the next were intended for adoption into the tribe or into French Canadian society rather than death, and thus many stories survive. What is interesting is the gender differences that emerge.

  Age rather than gender was the key factor in determining a captive’s fate. Those over twenty were more likely to be returned than younger colonists. But men were more likely than women to escape or to die. Women were considerably more likely than men to remain with their captors, especially if they were turned over to the French in Canada. As one historian put it, men resisted; women adapted.

  Why did women adapt and survive in greater numbers than their husbands, sons, or fathers? One-fifth of the women seized from their sleep or their household chores were pregnant or were carrying a nursing baby. Two lives, therefore, were at stake, and this may well have made the captive women less willing to behave rashly. But some historians feel there was much in the training and the life expectations of these seventeenth-century Englishwomen that inclined them to manage this crisis through adaptation rather than resistance. Most girls assumed they would be uprooted when they married, leaving their family and perhaps their community to settle where a husband chose. Marrying a Frenchman, therefore, required a degree of adjustment, accommodation, and adaptability that was greater than normal but not wholly unanticipated. As wives within the new community, they were made welcome; women were accustomed to acquiring their status from their husbands, and European society was accustomed to granting it to them. Finally, women were supported in the early period of transition by a female network that was analogous to the networks of initiation and support they found at home. That Catholic nuns rather than Puritan goodwives made up that network was no small difference, but the similarities existed nonetheless. Indeed, some Puritan captives became nuns themselves.

  Other historians read the adaptation of these women as acts of rebellion against their prescribed place in Puritan society. Those women who, on ransom and release from their Indian captors, pleaded to remain or stole away from the campfires of their “rescuers” to return to their Indian families and friends may support such an interpretation. Despite the Puritan’s sure sense of the superiority of his culture over Indian society, some women found the gendered division of labor and of rights and duties within the Abnaki world more desirable than those of colonial Haverhill or Deerfield.

  Whatever their motives, at least one-third of the women taken to New France chose to remain, and at least 40 percent converted to Catholicism and married French husbands. Yet other women resisted captivity and acculturation. They refused conversion to Catholicism, risking beatings and threats and imprisonment at the hands of their captors. Whipped, struck with rods, pinched black-and-blue, one such captive would not even cross herself.

  Hannah Duston was silent on the matter of her own experience. She let her trophies—the scalps she took—and her Puritan superiors—ministers and magistrates—speak for her. But others preferred to bear witness to their trials and their triumphs. From Mary Rowlandson, the minister’s wife who took her knitting needles into captivity with her and practiced a groveling subservience along with feats of housewifery in order to survive among her Indian captors, we have a long narrative whose theme is not simply survival but selection for trial and travail by her God. Rowlandson carried the experience with her long after she was returned to her family and friends. In Rowlandson’s insomnia, and in the hallucinations of another captive, Mercy Short, of “tawney” specter-devils who bit her and slashed her skin, the cost of living among enemies can be measured.

  Although Puritan magistrates and ministers sought to create and sustain a stable, ordered community, circumstances subverted their aims. Dissent racked the earliest decades. And between 1665 and 1689, war with local Indians disrupted community life. Tax rates rose to finance King Philip’s War, and in 1675-76 alone, the aggressive policy of the Puritan governments to seize Indian lands and eliminate Indian settlements led to a bitter warfare that left 600 colonists dead and 2,000 homeless. During these same decades, Massachusetts experienced a population explosion, its 24,000 colonists in 1665 more than doubling in number by 1690. Boston had 25 percent more people than any other English mainland colonial city by the 1690s, with over 5,000 inhabitants. The population growth wreaked havoc on the Puritan ideal of homogeneity; Huguenots, Quakers, Anglicans, and Anabaptists settled and did business in the port city of Boston, and commercial activity led to growing divisions in wealth. Rich merchants, poor dockworkers, black slaves, indigent widows, younger, propertyless sons of farmers—such diversity of rank and circumstance among Massachusetts’s population generated considerable social tensions as well as new demands that political rights be wholly divorced from church affiliation. Signs that “the decadence of Old England” had crossed the Atlantic could also be found: men in fancy dress and wigs and women in low-cut gowns paraded city streets. Political crisis also made its way across the Atlantic. The English began to restructure the Northern colonies, creating, for a brief period, a Dominion of New England that swallowed up Connecticut and Massachusetts. By 1692 the charter of Massachusetts Bay Colony had been reexamined and revoked, and the laws of the colony were brought into conformity with the laws of England. By 1700 the Puritan experiment was formally dead; and historians have charted the shifts in community values and mores that mark the transition from Puritan to “Yankee” cultures.

  And then, as the last decade of the seventeenth century came to a close, as the Puritan experiment unraveled, the Massachusetts Bay Colony was invaded by witches. A drama of suspicion and fear, accusation and counteraccusation, community disruption and eruption of social tensions and conflicts began to unfold, and women were the central actors. Witchcraft was not new to the people of the 1690s. As a tradition of folkways and religious un-orthodoxies, it had a rich and complex history in most European societies. In New England communities, the belief that witchcraft was practiced was attested to formally, by accusations in courts of law, and informally (and often as effectively) by rumor and reputation, and a tacit conviction among the witch’s neighbors of her guilt. In every decade Massachusetts courts tried the cases of men and women accused not so much of collaboration with the devil as of acts that disrupted the natural ebb and flow of agrarian life: the sudden death of livestock or children, the destruction of property, bad luck, and unexpected injury. What is striking is the prevalence of women among the accused. Before the Salem witch-hunts of 1692, 80 percent of the 114 New England colonists accused of witchcraft were women.

  What, if anything, did these women share in common? They were women with histories—formal and informal records of aggressive and assertive behavior—that marked them as deviants within their community. They were argumentative rather than neighborly, and their abrasiveness was felt by members of their own sex as often as by men. They had histories of domestic discord; estranged husbands sometimes began rumors of their wives’ strangeness themselves, and even when the accusing husband was guilty of beating and abusing his wife, their unsuccessful marriage was used as evidence against the wife. So Sarah Dribble learned, when she was accused by a man known for “most inhumane beating of her so that he caused the blood to settle in several places of her body.” Widows were often among the accused, probably because they lacked a husband’s protection from their neighbors’ anger. Anne Hibbens, whose religious dissent led to excommunication from the Boston church in the 1640s, was not tried, convicted, and executed for witchcraft until 1656, two years after her husband died. William Hibbens’s prestige as a merchant and magistrate had shielded his wife for over a decade.

  Women accused of witchcraft were often at the age of menopause—poised, as the Puritans understood it, between the preparatory stages of childhood and youth and the declining stage of old age. Women of this age were in their prime, at the height of their powers and responsibilities, and mistresses of households filled with children and servants. Witchcraft was an abuse of those powers, a malignant rather than a benign application of domestic and maternal roles. And because a woman in menopause was also a woman who was losing, or had lost, her reproductive or generative capacities, her malice was often directed—or so it appeared to the community—against infants and young children.

  For many of the accused, the fertility so valued by the Puritan community had eluded them altogether. One-sixth of supposed witches were childless, and many had borne only one or two children. When children fell mysteriously ill, when a mother’s milk ceased to flow or a healthy woman miscarried, infertile women were held suspect.

  The New England witch violated the boundaries between healing and harming. Many of the accused had shown a special aptitude for healing, using charms, incantations, and herbal potions to cure and to relieve pain. Some, like the widow Hale, took sick men and women into her home for rest and “nursing.” Others, like Anna Edmunds of Lynn, had earned a reputation as a “doctor woman” before she was accused of witchcraft in 1673. Efforts to heal were more suspect if uninvited. Rachel Fuller of Hampton appeared at the bedside of a sick child, her face strangely covered with molasses, eager to attend the boy. When his mother refused her any contact with the child, Fuller performed a ritual that included spitting and tossing herbs into the hearth fire. She then declared the child would recover. When he died, Fuller was accused of witchcraft.

  Women who had suffered or were in danger of suffering a decline in social status were also the targets of accusation. Most witches were among the poor and needy, but women who had fallen from the ranks of the respectable drew attention and suspicion from their neighbors. And the most likely to accuse her were those in positions of greatest vulnerability themselves—men and women whose security of place within the community was still not established: young, unmarried women; young, married men, untried in career or public life.

  Until 1692, most New Englanders charged with witchcraft were never brought to trial. Authorities were reluctant to intervene in the internal conflicts of village life. Instead, communities were left to regulate and resolve such matters themselves, to shun or show approval of their members in the course of daily life. In 1692, however, certain judges and ministers of Massachusetts set aside their usual caution and appeared. to encourage a hunt for witches in Salem. When several young, unmarried women and girls of Salem Village began to experience nightmares, loss of appetite, disorientation, and signs of physical suffering, their small farming community became alarmed. When the young women began to have violent fits, concern turned to fear, and the conviction spread that they were bewitched. Possession by the devil might be cured by a regimen of prayer, fasting, and repentance; victims of bewitchment, however, could not be cured until the guilty were found—and punished or destroyed.

  Under questioning, the victims named three local women who had revealed themselves in spirit form as their tormentors. Over the weeks and months, the number of accused grew. Salem’s visitation by the devil was no simple case of black magic or individual malice. A conspiracy was implied, a network of women and men who challenged not simply community norms or state authority but God and the godly. The Massachusetts court arraigned all those accused, imprisoned them, and began to hear the cases at once. After some hesitation, the judges agreed to admit “special evidence”—testimony by the victims that they had seen the spirits of their tormentors and could thus identify them in their material form. By summer 1692, nineteen people had been convicted and executed, most of them women who pleaded their innocence to the end. Over one hundred more men and women were crowded into cells, awaiting trial.

  Older patterns of accusation gave way under the pressures of the Salem witch-hunt. If the first of the accused fit the profile of a witch—poor, deviant in behavior or social status, involved with healing, middle-aged—the majority of the newly accused in jail did not. Many were respected members of the community, men and women whose histories showed no taint of disruptiveness, contention, or marital discord. Despite this, few colonists were willing to challenge the proceedings openly. The challenge came privately. Leading Salem merchants were skeptical not only of the trial procedures but of the existence of witchcraft itself. They were disturbed by the disruption to their trade as well. They took advantage of the political situation within the colony, appealing to the new, non-Puritan, royal governor to intervene. By October, Governor William Phips had banned any further arrests and had dismissed the court that tried the earlier cases. A new court, convened in January 1693, acquitted the remaining prisoners. The witch-hunt was over.

  The Salem witch-hunt has fascinated Americans of later generations as much as it disturbed and confused those who lived through it. Many of the participants—judges who heard the cases, young women who made the accusations, and the surviving accused—painfully reviewed and evaluated their roles in the affair. But playwrights and scholars, medical experts and psychoanalysts have tried to explain them as well. Modern medicine would confirm that the victims were indeed victims, not of witchcraft, but of conversion hysteria, which transforms extreme anxiety into physical symptoms. Modern historians remind us that neither the victims’ sincerity nor their suffering holds the key to the witch-hunts; the arrests, the trials, and the executions were the result of decisions and policies made by religious leaders and magistrates, not by the servant girls and the daughters of local ministers who fell to the ground in fits.

  Scholars also remind us to consider the context in which the witch-hunt occurred. The trials took place during the transfer of power from a Puritan to a royal regime and as the fault lines deepened between an agrarian, religious society and the newer, commercial, and secular society of the port cities and towns. The conflict between these two cultures was evident in Salem itself. Salem Village, where the bewitched lived, was an offshoot of Salem Town, and was settled by men and women who rejected the commercial spirit of the larger community. Yet in 1692 that commercial spirit had invaded the village, creating division and dissension. That division was evident in the pattern of accusation: the accusers lived in the western part of the village, where the pious and increasingly poorer families lived; the accused lived in the eastern section, home to the richest and the most entrepreneurial. The victims’ anxieties—centered on their marital prospects—were thus closely linked to the social anxieties of the decade.

  Salem Village was believed to be invaded by witches five years after Hannah Duston’s frontier community was raided by Indians. Duston’s response—violent and seemingly merciless—was praised by Judge Samuel Sewall, who had presided over the Salem trials. The Puritan minister Cotton Mather lauded Duston’s willingness to fight the enemy when the males captured with her would not. In these men’s praise perhaps a wish lingered that the Puritan community could defeat its enemies from both without and within as Duston had defeated hers. And perhaps Hannah Duston, a goodwife of New England, understood this as the true engine of their accolades. Women of a more secular eighteenth-century Massachusetts, like women of the seventeenth-century Chesapeake, probably would not.

 

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