Women and Puritanism: Establishing a Theological and Philosophical Framework for Women's Legal Rights in Seventeenth-Century New England

Using the framework of the modified germ theory, this thesis seeks to discover how the intersection of theology, philosophy, and law reveal the rationale behind the state of women’s legal rights in seventeenth century Puritan New England. The study mostly focuses on 1630-1690, since these sixty years represent the limit of Puritan hegemony in New England. During the 1690s, the Crown forced the northeastern colonies to conform to common law and subsequently expunge their laws of any hints of Puritan biblicism. The conclusion will address the ramifications of this change. The main body of this work, however, takes up Marylynn Salmon’s call for intercolonial comparisons to explain how the major Puritan colonies—Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Haven, Plymouth, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire—addressed women’s legal rights and women’s response to their legal status. Chapter 1 covers Massachusetts, a relatively moderate presence in New England and a dominating influence in the region. This colony modeled foundational Puritan principles concerning gender, marriage, and society, principles that typically characterized the other Puritan colonies. Chapter 2 addresses both New Haven and Connecticut, two radically legalistic Puritan colonies that eventually merged in 1665. Though founded by different groups of Puritans, these two colonies shared a remarkably similar religious and social culture. Finally, Chapter 3 will feature the separatist Puritan colonies—Plymouth and Rhode Island. In these separatist colonies, especially in Rhode Island, the strains of puritanism developed quite differently from Massachusetts and even New Haven and Connecticut. The driving argument of this thesis is that the radicalism of each New England colony’s dominant strain of Puritanism indiscriminately determined the state of women’s legal rights based on the relationship between the particular form of Puritanism and English law.