Massachusetts Bay Trial Analysis

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Tobin argues that the Massachusetts Bay trial of Anne Hutchinson in 1637 was as much about gender as it was about differences in religious theology. Tobin explains that the colony’s leadership (powerful male ministers and magistrates) gathered to “pass judgment on a woman who threatened their vision of society and themselves” (253). Hutchinson was not the type of woman that would humbly and quietly assimilate into an expected gender role. According to Tobin “she dared to raise fundamental questions about authority and worship” (253). In a Puritan society this was not acceptable behavior for anyone but the fact that she was a woman intensified the outrage. Hutchinson wasn't on trial only because of her views which were seen as antinomian but …show more content…
Societal norms positioned women in a subordinate role. They were prevented from holding positions of power and expected to be completely obedient and receptive to the teachings of their husbands and leaders. This sexist and misogynistic way of thinking that existed amongst the men in the colony was on full display during the debates. They expressed themselves in an angry, hateful, demeaning, and fearful manner. She was told that she had been a husband instead of a wife and referred to as “just a woman” and the governor insinuated that women weren't worth debating. The dominant Puritan male leadership perspective, maintained a hierarchy in which Tobin states, “God is father to elite males [leadership] who in turn are fathers to the rest of the Puritan community” (257). This male domineering belief system was expressed often metaphorically to explain that God is the head of a man and that man is the head of the woman (wife). This belief proved and secured the Puritan male’s place as the head of all things natural as well as spiritual. Any woman that failed to simply blindly follow was viewed as committing heresy. Hutchinson’s ideology and the large following that she was developing were in their eyes disruptive to their society. They were fearful of the spreading of her teachings because it challenged their authority and as Tobin states, “comfortable patriarchal order of things”
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