As I was reading some of Anne Bradstreet’s poems and letters, I began to wonder what it was like to be a Puritan woman. All too often we are shown puritan women as sub servants to their husbands, but how did they really lead their lives? To understand the role of women in Puritan society, we must first understand what a Puritan is. The Hall of Church History website, tells us that the Puritans were “were English Reformers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They were frustrated by the slow progress of the Reformation in the Anglican Church. They left a legacy of theological writing that is unsurpassed in church history. Their doctrine tended to be Calvinistic and Presbyterian, and their finest writings were both polemic and devotional treatments of theology.” http://www.spurgeon.org/~phil/puritans.htm Given this information we can see that the Puritans were the radicals of their time, much like the occupy movements of our day. They chose to fight the system for what they believed in, even leaving their homes in order to have religious freedoms. Because of this radicalism, we can conclude that the people who choose to undertake this religious awakening had to be very strong willed men and women.
I believe that the women that chose to undertake the ordeal of familial uprooting, had to be much stronger than their husband and the male leaders of the community, because they had to move to a new land and keep the family unit intact. During the 16th century, the woman was the leader of the home; she would make sure that the home was tidy, safe, spiritually safe, and presentable to the community.
Women were also in charge of all of the responsibilities of the children. Women had to make sure that their children were clean, safe, and educated in the basics of reading, writing, morals, and religious studies. In the home, the puritan woman enjoyed a key role in the family as a vital and respected figure.
The role that women had in the Puritan home differs greatly from the role that the woman played in the community which was a wholly male dominated society. The website U.S. History tells us that “church attendance was mandatory.”(http://www.ushistory.org/us/3d.asp) While this may be fun for some of us in the community, the Puritan church was conducted in a manner that is very different from the way we celebrate god today. In modern times, women play a pivotal role in church society; they can hold priest ships, serve on committees, and most importantly can actually speak on matters in the church building; this is a sharp contrast to the way that the puritan women were made to act in church, which was silent and separate from the men.
At all times the Puritan woman was sub servant to all men, but none more so than her husband. As the website Patches from the past tells us, “A woman was expected to be subservient to her father until she married and then to her husband. Ministers often reminded their flock that women were inferior to men and more inclined to sin and error.”(http://www.historyofquilts.com/earlylife.html)
As one can see, Puritan women held key parts of society such as wife, mother, and homemaker, but because of they were thought to be inferior to men, they were held to sub servant roles in society as whole.
