New England was a male-dominated Puritan society in which women could not vote, own property or hold a post in religious or governmental bodies. Men were inferior to God and women lesser than men. But the lived experience varied according to background and education.
Despite restrictions, some women did make themselves heard and challenged communal norms. Anne Hutchinson (1591-1643) and Deborah Moody (1586-1659) battled for the right to speak out. Demanding inclusive debate, they were accused of undermining the authority of the Colony’s patriarchal structure.
Church & Monarchy
Deborah Dunch was born 1586, either in London’s Gray’s Inn where her father Walter acted as a barrister or at her parents’ country estate outside the city. Her grandfather William Dunch had been a prominent figure in government, serving as an Auditor of the Royal Mint, overseeing work at the Tower of London from 1546 onward.
Her mother was the daughter of James Pilkington, Bishop of Durham. Deborah’s ancestors were loyal supporters of the British Crown and the Church of England.
In 1605/6 Deborah married Henry Moody who was knighted shortly after, making the couple Sir Henry and Lady Deborah. They settled at Garsdon Manor, Wiltshire, which had come into the family’s possession as a Royal gift.
Henry’s grandfather was a court footman who had saved Henry VIII’s life after the King suffered a riding accident on Hounslow Heath, West London. He was rewarded with a grant to the estate.
The couple had two children while Moody served as the Sheriff of Wiltshire and later as a Member of Parliament. By 1628 he fell ill and was restricted to remain at his London residence. Faced with mounting debts, the family began to sell off land in order to stave off ruin.
When Moody died in April 1629, Deborah and her son were forced to leave their Wiltshire estate altogether. Henry Moody Junior served as a courtier and subsequently joined the side of the Royalists during the English Civil War. After the death of her husband, Deborah made a radical decision by becoming an Anabaptist.
Baptist Tradition
Puritans set out to rid the Church of England of all remaining traces of what they considered to be Roman Catholic practices after its break with the papacy. Protestantism had to be “purified.”
The movement soon splintered into various sects, members of which refused to conform to the worship of the Church of England. Their opponents lumped these factions together under the label of “dissenters,” although Quakers, Anabaptists, Independents and Presbyterians had little in common.
Anabaptists argued that baptism should not occur until a person was mature enough to consent. The English Baptist tradition grew out the merging of religious tenets in the Netherlands during the first decade of the seventeenth century. Primary to this development was the Lincolnshire separatist preacher John Smyth who, in 1608 had escaped persecution in England.
A physician by profession, he was in close contact with Dutch Mennonites (followers of Menno Simons, the Frisian parish priest who had joined the Anabaptists in 1536) and joined the refugees of the so-called “Ancient Church” in Amsterdam, an offshoot of which would return to London in 1612 to form the General Baptists. The first English Baptist Church was born in exile.
Anabaptism was considered as an unacceptable deviation from Reformed orthodoxy. Repression was intense as dissent was not merely a religious issue, but associated with radical politics and subversion.
As the Church of England was headed by the King, separatists were considered a danger to the stability of the nation. There was, moreover, real anxiety that Mennonites from the Low Countries would cross the Channel and spread their message.
King Henry VIII regarded the prospect with horror. As many as two dozen Dutch intruders were rounded up and burned alive on the charge of dissent under his reign of “savage Reformation.” Anabaptists were reduced to small communes and some of their descendants would find refuge in North America.
Puritan Women
In the summer of 1630, a fleet of eleven ships carrying more than a thousand Puritan settlers landed in Massachusetts. Their Governor, John Winthrop, preached a sermon in which he announced that their errand was to establish a “City upon a Hill” to serve as an example of a purified Church and Christian society.
These Puritans strongly believed that the survival of the Massachusetts Bay Colony depended upon a shared vision. Unity was essential and diversion not tolerated.
Anne and William Hutchinson were followers of the Puritan preacher John Cotton in the port of Boston, Lincolnshire. In 1633, the latter was forced to move to the Bay Colony. The couple and their fifteen children followed him a year later.
William was a wealthy textile merchant who had served in various government and church positions. Anne, a midwife, was the daughter of a Puritan clergyman who had run afoul of the authorities of the Church of England and was arrested for his dissenting views. They settled in Boston.
Puritan women fulfilled essential roles in the Bay community. They cooked meals, made household goods and candles, tended kitchen gardens, raised cattle, produced cheese and ran the family.
As wives under “coverture” (a doctrine in common law which placed a woman’s legal status under control of her husband) they were expected to be submissive. Women were barred from trading, they were not entitled to appear in a court of law, request a divorce or interact with local government officials.
Widows were exempt from these restrictions. They were entitled to discipline servants in their households and sue (or be sued) in a court of law. Importantly, they could own land or run a business.
As was common in the colony, Anne began to hold small religious meetings for women in her home. These gatherings grew in numbers and she soon clashed with the authorities for allegedly expressing ideas that differed from those preached from the pulpit.
In the summer of 1637, she was summoned to discontinue her meetings. Religious harmony and social obedience were at stake. She ignored the order.
By November, aged forty-six years and pregnant, she was arrested and put on trial before John Winthrop and his deputies. She was accused of spreading heresy.
As a rebellious woman, her presence was considered particularly perilous to the maintenance of socio-religious cohesion. In the words of John Winthrop, her activities were “not tolerable nor comely in the sight of God nor fitting for [her] sex.”
Convicted of sedition and impiety, Anne was excommunicated, briefly jailed, and banished from the Colony as a person “unfit for our society.”
With her husband, children, and a group of loyal followers, she relocated in 1639 to Rhode Island which had become a haven for dissenters ever since the expulsion from Massachusetts of London-born Puritan minister Roger Williams (founder in 1636 of the Providence Plantations).
In 1642, after the death of her husband, Hutchinson and her children moved to the colony of New Netherland, settling near what became the Hutchinson River in the Bronx.
During the period of Willem Kieft’s “war,” the indigenous Long Island Siwanoy people launched a retaliatory raid against several outlying settlements in August 1643 and killed Anne Hutchinson and all but one of her seven children.
The Year 1639
When news broke that Deborah Moody had turned to Anabaptism, she was called to London and appear in court. Fearing a life of pressure and persecution in England and unwilling to face trial, she gathered what was left of her former wealth and set sail for the Bay Colony.
The year was 1639: two years previously, the colony had expelled an outspoken woman only for another one to arrive on its shore. Moody followed in the footsteps of Anne Hutchinson.
Deborah was fifty-four when she arrived in Massachusetts, hopeful to find a haven where she could practice her beliefs unhindered and in peace. She first settled in the town of Saugus, before moving to a farm in Swampscott, less than a mile from the Ocean.
She also maintained a small house in nearby Salem, but she soon found that the religious climate there was as hostile of Anabaptism as it had been in England.
Her interactions with other “difficult” Nonconformists in the area were reported to the authorities and her questioning of the validity of infant baptism angered local Puritans. In 1643 Deborah was brought before the court for spreading dissent.
During the trial, Governor John Endecott labeled her a “dangerous woman.” Moody was given the choice to change her beliefs or be excommunicated.
Strong in her convictions, she gathered fellow Anabaptists, chartered a ship and sailed south, leaving Swampscott in the care of her tenant and Anabaptist convert, Daniel King.
At the time that Deborah stood trial in Massachusetts, Director-General Willem Kieft was recruiting settlers to New Netherland. His reckless policy of expansion had broken the delicate peace between Mohawk communities and early settlers and he had become engaged in a brutal war with local Wappinger and Lenape people.
He needed incomers to farm Long Island, secure food supplies, and help protect the area from intrusion.
Not particularly concerned about their Anabaptist beliefs, he provided Lady Moody and friends with the use of land in the southwest tip of Long Island where they set out to build small homes and plant crops. Its inhabitants were allowed to follow whatever religious practices they chose as long as they abided by the laws of the Colony.
For the colonial authorities toleration (rather than our understanding of the more abstract notion of “tolerance”) was a practical concept: togetherness in the face of a major threat, just as a similar affiliation had withstood the overwhelming Spanish military might during the Dutch war of independence.
Gravesend
In the fall of 1643, the settlement was targeted by local Native American enemies. Residents fled to the fort at New Amersfoort (establish in 1636 as a farming community; later renamed Flatlands, it became part of the City of Brooklyn in 1896). Once a peace agreement was reached between the warring factions in 1645, settlers returned and rebuilt the site with additional fortifications.
Having petitioned Willem Kieft personally, Lady Moody became the first woman in the Colonies to be formally granted a land patent (the so-called “Gravesend Patent” was issued on December 19, 1645). She planned Gravesend’s town layout herself by using a block grid system (one of the earliest applications of such outlines in the New World).
Her design included a church, school and town hall in addition to ten lots surrounding a public square. On its outskirts there were triangle pieces that made up hundred acre farms or boweries. Unique in colonial history, Gravesend was founded by a female settler.
In 1647 Willem Kieft was summoned back home by the directors of the West India Company (WIC). His replacement Peter Stuyvesant was instructed to restore stability in the region. Lady Moody joined members of the Colony’s elite to welcome the incoming Director-General as he disembarked in New Amsterdam.
An able and titled English woman, she exercised considerable influence in New Netherland. At times, Stuyvesant called upon her for advice or settle local disputes, although she never officially held a political position. Once again, religious controversy intervened.
Ever since his arrival, Stuyvesant had resisted the colony’s “liberal” climate which brought him in conflict with New Amsterdam’s Jews, Lutherans, Baptists and Nonconformists. He had a particular dislike of Quakerism. The Director-General introduced ordinances mandating the confiscation of vessels bringing Quakers into New Netherland. Anyone sheltering a “Friend” would be fined. All gatherings of the Society were banned.
It did not repress Moody’s passion for religious debate. In 1657 she invited the newly arrived Quaker missionary Robert Hodgson to address a congregation at her house (in England he had been imprisoned for preaching his faith and refusing to remove his hat for a magistrate). It is thought to be the first ever Quaker meeting held in America.
The stand-off deepened when local residents John and Mary Tilton were arrested for organizing “illegal” meetings at their home. The Gravesend Patent had laid down in black and white that settlers would “enjoy free liberty of conscience” – that pledge was not upheld when it concerned Quaker residents.
Moody lived in Gravesend until her death in 1659. Now part of Brooklyn, the original town square is still evident in the street layout.
It is named after Lady Moody in honor of a woman who, driven by sheer intellectual courage, stood up to male bullies and managed to upset the narcissistic pride of English zealots, Bay Colony Puritans and religious hardliners such as Peter Stuyvesant – some achievement and what an example.
Illustrations, from above: Author unknown, “A Catalogue of the Severall Sects and Opinions in England and other Nations,” a broadsheet denouncing English dissenters from 1647; Drawing of Anne Hutchinson based on a 1620 portrait made in England. (Schlesinger Library); Lithograph of Governor Willem Kieft’s peace talks with the Indigenous people in 1646 (private collection); and Lady Moody’s town plan for Gravesend Brooklyn, 1645 (copy produced circa 1867).
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