he Puritan fathers, even though she had no wish to leave the church. In this light, it really is her fault that she was banished from Massachusetts Bay because she knew her beliefs did not always coincide with those of the Puritans. She was aware of the way women were treated and had to be prepared for the inevitable.Women were completely repressed and disregarded for intellectual value by the Puritan church in Massachusetts. The accepted belief was that intelligence and understanding was given to men, not women, so her chief duty as a wife was to her husband and children. (C.M. Andrews, p. 477.) Women were considered morally weak because Eve was the first to sin in the Garden of Eden. (J. Demos, A Little Commonwealth, p. 84-85.) According to the dicta of the day, a woman was supposed to derive her "ideas of God from the contemplation of her husband's excellencies." (C. M. Andrews, p. 477.) Women were not allowed to speak in church, judged openly as inferior creatures. Even though this sounds tyrannical in our day and age, American women actually had more rights than did women in England. Though the basic perception of women as inferior was common to both America and England, in America, a woman could own property if her husband died and she could sometimes own her own property. (J. Demos, p. 85.) However, these issues were mere technicalities that hardly improved the forced submission of women to men that is a common trend evident throughout the written history of the world. This famous quotation from the journal of John Winthrop is often used to encapsulate the male attitude toward women in early America. A young woman had lost "her understanding and reason" because she had given "herself wholly to reading and writing, and written many books." If she had kept her place, Winthrop said,if she had attended to household affairs, and such things as belong to women, and not gone out of her way and calling to meddle in such things as are pro...
