I. Introduction
In a letter written around January 1746, Hannah Edwards (1713–1773) found herself labeled “a bold and arrogant old maid.” In opposition to the “general opinion of mankind,” Hannah had argued that a wife was “no proper subject for correction or private government” and had denied any “propriety in a husband’s commanding his wife.” The labels did not bother Hannah and gave her an opportunity to comment on the duties and prerogatives of women in eighteenth-century Massachusetts. Hannah grounded her opinions in the Puritan divines and the “law of self-preservation.” Her brother Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) invoked the same law in his fragmentary writings on marital duties, arguing that when a husband cast off the fundamental duties of marriage, “the great law of self-preservation” obliged the wife to depart.Footnote 1 This article examines how “self-preservation” functioned as a natural and theological category in the elite colonial New England family by honing in on writings and letters the family exchanged about importunate suitors, the status of women, divorce, and marital abuse.Footnote 2 It argues that the Edwards family rooted their defense of women’s autonomy and right to divorce in Puritan notions of a natural right to self-preservation and an expanded definition of “desertion.”
Historians have mostly overlooked self-preservation and its role in Puritan and eighteenth-century New England disputes over sexual ethics and discipline. This article connects self-preservation as a theological category in the Edwards family to the broader transatlantic Puritan thought on divorce, companionate marriage, and natural obligations. The conflicts tell us about the shift away from Puritanism to new societal norms and Protestant configurations.Footnote 3 Instances of divorce and discipline expectations illuminate the construction of new disciplinary and sexual standards in eighteenth-century New England.Footnote 4 Starting in the 1680s, sexual double standards became stronger, discipline became weaker, and the private increasingly subsumed the public.Footnote 5 The Edwardses were caught in the cross-hairs of these shifts. They had also felt the pain of marital abuse, infidelity, and divorce and sheltered others who underwent the same.Footnote 6 Though the Edwardses were instrumental to the changes that led to “New Light” theology and began to move away from some received Puritan traditions, their sensibilities on marriage and gender roles remained firmly ensconced in the “long argument” of Puritanism.Footnote 7 While one cannot discount their family history and the influence of revivalism on the family, the family’s views on marriage and divorce were not inspired by a New Light embrace of “femininity” in religion.Footnote 8 Rather, the grammar underlying their language relied on continental Reformed theology mediated through Puritan notions of companionate marriage, natural duties, and communal discipline.
This article also contributes to our understanding of how some eighteenth-century elite women related to Puritan theology by excavating Hannah and her family’s frustrations with gendered double standards during the so-called “Great Awakening.”Footnote 9 It first reconstructs the shifting gender norms of eighteenth-century New England by looking at Jonathan Edwards’s tempestuous relationship with his congregation at Northampton during the infamous Bad Book Case and the Eleanor Gray divorce. Second, it discusses the theological content of the Edwards family’s ideology by looking at Jonathan’s notes and Hannah’s correspondence with her siblings and their advice on how to avoid unworthy suitors.Footnote 10 Third, it situates this ideology within the longer Reformed and Puritan tradition on companionate marriage and natural law arguments for the necessity of self-preservation. The uproar that greeted the Edwardses’ beliefs was not due to the theological innovation in defending spiritual equality.Footnote 11 Rather, it tells us more about the shifts in New England society that rendered the Edwardses’ Puritanism so distasteful. Additionally, Hannah and her family’s writings gesture to a broader argument about the theological acumen of colonial women and the culture of the Edwards family.
II. New England’s Shifting Gender Norms
Generations of Edwardses were caught in the transformation of New England’s gender norms while also feeling the destructive power of marriage breakdown. Their family had not always exhibited the characteristics of upright Puritans. Infamously, Hannah’s grandfather Richard Edwards had divorced his wife, Elizabeth Tuttle, after decades of strained marriage and six children. The recriminations were contested – Richard claimed Elizabeth was lascivious and mad; Elizabeth insisted Richard was unfaithful – but violence and sexual misbehavior saturated the case.Footnote 12 Nothing in their marriage had been easy. Elizabeth and Richard were hauled into court in 1668 after Elizabeth gave birth a mere seven months after the wedding. In 1676, Elizabeth’s brother Benjamin murdered their sister Sarah with an axe after she severely scolded him. Likewise, on a June morning in 1691, Elizabeth’s sister Mercy also axed her son Samuel.Footnote 13 Historians have used this salacious backstory to construct a narrative that contrasts the “crazy-grandmother” with the “good-wife,” exemplified by Jonathan Edwards’s wife Sarah Pierpont.Footnote 14 But the story had another use in the Edwards family. Through the efforts of Richard Edwards and his son Timothy, it functioned as a cautionary tale about marital compatibility.
Paradoxically, the same arguments that Richard Edwards put forward to defend his divorce from Elizabeth became central to Hannah and Jonathan’s arguments about self-preservation. In late seventeenth-century New England, male petitions for divorce were rarely accepted. Richard argued, however, that “Scriptures seem to allow a Husband some (limited) personal power in putting away his wife.” Several passages of the New Testament (which Jonathan would later reference) demonstrated that God allowed divorce for “Any Esencyall Breech of the marage Bond.”Footnote 15 The court was not initially swayed by his arguments, but after he pushed the grounds of adultery, his petition was granted in 1691. Richard was no scion of virtue, and his petition may have been self-serving, but it utilized a vein of Puritan thought on companionship and marital duties that was to become important for the later Edwardses. Richard and Elizabeth’s messy divorce came near the start of a shift in New England’s attitude toward divorce.Footnote 16 Amid the societal transformations, the Edwardses’ approach remained a consistent barometer of the surrounding changes.
Nancy Cott has demonstrated that the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries saw “unrest and change in patterns of sexual and familial behavior,” seen clearly in divorce records.Footnote 17 It was already easier to obtain a divorce in Massachusetts than in England during this period.Footnote 18 Massachusetts had no codified divorce practices. Rather, the policy combined elements of English common law, Puritan theology about divorce, and seventeenth-century Massachusetts precedents with its own innovations.Footnote 19 Unlike in England, where divorce was only allowed on the grounds of sexual infidelity, bigamy, or consanguinity, New England civil courts dissolved marriages also on the grounds of absence or neglect.Footnote 20 Bed and board divorce (legal separation or living apart while remaining married) and absolute marital divorce were allowed. The determining factor of whether a divorce case would succeed was who initiated the proceeding.Footnote 21
The legal system became prejudiced in favor of husbands who sought a divorce, even as more wives initiated the procedure.Footnote 22 The success rate for male petitions between 1692 and 1744 was about 75%, compared to 50% for women.Footnote 23 In contrast, before 1692, male petitions were rarely accepted and, as in the case of Richard Edwards, controversial.Footnote 24 Cott argued that it was increasingly easy to obtain divorces in the eighteenth century; the shift disproportionately favored male petitioners.Footnote 25 Cornelia Dayton has shown how the legal system in Connecticut increasingly skewed toward men’s interests while also countenancing an asymmetrical approval of male sexual licentiousness.Footnote 26 The Edwardses were ground by the tectonic shifts and responded by reinforcing the Puritan model of sexual discipline. Two examples illustrate the reception their efforts received: the so-called “Bad Book Case” in 1744 and the divorce cases in 1746–48.
The Bad Book Case in spring 1744 was a revealing illustration of the changing standards around sexual discipline that were partly at fault for souring the relationship between Jonathan Edwards and his congregation in Northampton. The “bad books” were midwifery manuals that the Northampton congregation’s youth – young men up to twenty-six years old – clandestinely circulated. While the boys derived juvenile pleasure from the book’s detailed anatomy, Edwards was outraged and saw their behavior as a manifestation of Northampton’s worldly youth culture. The book promoted obscene and lascivious discourse among the “young People” and led the young men to taunt and ridicule adolescent girls with their newfound knowledge.Footnote 27 Jonathan Edwards, upon learning of this, put the matter to the church for disciplinary hearing. Ten years earlier, during the Connecticut Valley awakening, Edwards had preached with great success against adolescent boys and girls who were “very much addicted to night-walking, and frequenting the tavern, and lewd practices,” the practice of “frolicking.”Footnote 28 The church leaders initially supported disciplining the boys, but some of the boys’ high social positions squelched the leaders’ appetite and Edwards’s efforts to discipline the boys. His inability to prosecute the boys and the lack of respect shown to him in the maelstrom demonstrated how the privatization of discipline strengthened the congregation’s growing dissatisfaction with their old-fashioned parson.Footnote 29
As the Bad Book Case progressed, it became clear that Jonathan was out of step with the Northampton congregation, as the debate centered more on whether the boy’s “private” sins or indiscretions merited public censure. He remained committed to Puritanism’s conviction in the church’s expansive authority in every part of life while even pious New Englanders were moving on from this model.Footnote 30 According to Edwards’s notes, the parishioners argued that his position encouraged church meddling while closing recourse to “complaint” so that church members might defend themselves from inordinate church interference. The right of self-preservation meant that any injured party could litigate their cause, no matter the power differential.Footnote 31 Jonathan’s critics argued that “to deny any power without a complaint is to deny any power of authoritative inquiry. To deny this is to deny the power of self-preservation common to all societies.”Footnote 32 Rejecting the decision was thus justified as a rightful act of self-preservation aimed at protecting the cause of the powerless. The church’s task was not to litigate private matters, but, referencing Ezekiel 33, was to be a watchman for the entire body to deal with matters that are for the “preservation of a town or land.”Footnote 33
The Bad Book Case generated debate because Jonathan’s position was symptomatic of passè Puritan mores and changing attitudes toward sexual purity. There was little appetite to communally discipline the boys for their crude behavior, but Jonathan insisted that their actions were public: the midwifery book was a “scandalous offense” since “tis uncovering and viewing women’s nakedness…For they do [it] in their imagination.”Footnote 34 Edwards managed to convince his relatives that the young men’s prurience was a public scandal, but not the general populace. Rather, the congregation was upset that a pastor would involve himself in such matters and bucked against disciplining the boys. Indeed, the Bad Book Case and the use of self-preservation to defend the boys’ and church’s actions show how the growth of a rights discourse and the sharper demarcation between the public and private coalesced into new sexual standards that, perhaps inadvertently, more and more marginalized women.Footnote 35 His traditionalism made him obnoxious to the Northamptonites. His “extended campaign” to hold men publicly accountable on matters “increasingly considered matters of private morality” was doomed to ultimate failure.Footnote 36 The extent to which the Edwardses were out of touch was only further proven in the upcoming years.
Conflict over how to manage sexual discipline continued to perturb Edwards’s pastorate. Two prominent divorce cases exacerbated the fault lines between the church leaders, known as the brethren, and the Northampton congregation. Two years after the Bad Book Case, a messy divorce in Pelham, Massachusetts, resulted from an extramarital affair that led to a pregnancy. Eleanor Gray initiated a divorce from her husband Samuel due to his infidelity – an easy case, since marital unfaithfulness had always served as sufficient grounds for divorce in New England.Footnote 37 Yet shifts in the law, particularly new stipulations that required two witnesses to prove adultery, made it increasingly difficult to prove fornication. Unsurprisingly, adultery could rarely be confirmed by two or more witnesses. Thus, Samuel was neither at pains to hide his affair nor seemed concerned about being responsible for financially supporting Eleanor. His shock, therefore, when the Governor’s Court and the nearby justices of Pelham (spearheaded by Jonathan Edwards’s future son-in-law Timothy Dwight) granted the divorce and informed him of his financial obligations, was somewhat understandable.
Samuel made the generally safe assumption that the legal system favored his interests but profoundly misread the situation in Pelham.Footnote 38 His wife Eleanor’s case had caught the interest of the powerful Edwards-Stoddard clan in neighboring Northampton. As a result, Samuel bitterly carped that Eleanor’s need could not be so great that she required his support, since Eleanor lived in the household of the “reverend Mr Edwards” who supported her with spinning and “such like Easy Worke.”Footnote 39 Indeed, Jonathan Edwards’s own daughter Jerusha signed Eleanor’s divorce petition alongside his uncle John Stoddard. Samuel’s arrogant assumption of invincibility and disingenuous use of the law to protect himself grated against the sensibilities of the Edwards-Stoddard clan, and his breezy confidence that his sexual exploits were nearly impossible to prosecute failed to consider the considerable weight of the Edwards-Stoddard interest. Unfortunately for Samuel, the unexpected arrival of the Edwardses and Stoddards undermined his case, but it also slowly undermined their families’ prestige.
Two years after the Gray divorce case, the Northampton congregation faced another fornication case that provoked the same conflicts. In February 1748, Martha Root gave birth to twins and named Elisha Hawley, a son of a wealthy and prominent Northampton family, as the illegitimate father.Footnote 40 In the past, the testimony of a woman in labor sufficed to prove paternity since a woman in labor would presumably not lie about the father’s identity. However, by the 1740s, the two-witness precept ruled out the testimony of a woman in labor. Thus, Elisha avoided criminal prosecution and ecclesiastical discipline. Martha brought a civil suit against Elisha and was awarded 155 pounds payment for upkeep of the child, yet was not forced to marry Martha. Jonathan was unsatisfied with the legal cop-out, and at his behest, the church brethren “proceeded to excommunicate Elisha for the sin of fornication and to determine it his duty to marry Martha.”Footnote 41 The prominent Hawleys appealed the judgment to a broader council of ministers by charging Martha with having a “lascivious character” that justified his fornication and rendered him innocent.Footnote 42 In response, the council simultaneously accepted his guilt yet rejected Jonathan’s insistence on his need to marry Martha and argued that his discipline and excommunication be suspended after a confession of sin – like in the case of the Bad Books.
While the men in Northampton faced consequences for their actions, the congregation increasingly felt bullied into a belief system from which they had moved on. While the Edwardses’ commitment to Puritan ideals made them ready defenders of women against the predations of men, it also perturbed town relations. Contrary to Roy Carpenter’s claim that the Edwardses’ and Stoddards’ “progressive” attitudes toward women were due to a unique “New Light” embrace of and newfound sensitivity to femininity and women’s spirituality, the controversies of the 1740s show how the Edwardses’ position was a retrenchment of Puritanism.Footnote 43 As Dayton has argued, Puritans’ strict and communal disciplinary practices meant that, paradoxically, Puritanism sustained “unusual opportunities for women’s voices.” The Puritan prohibition on lawyers leveled the playing field in a way unavailable to Martha Root against the Hawleys’ lawyers, while their emphasis on obedience to God in every case “led them to insist on punishing men’s abuse of authority and sinful behavior.” In situations of sexual assault, wife-abuse, and premarital sex, “seventeenth-century magistrates gave credence to women’s charges and meted out swift, severe sentences to men.”Footnote 44 The Edwards family carried this Puritan heritage into the eighteenth century and faced the opprobrium of a society that had moved on.
The Edwardses’ commitment to Puritan norms incensed the congregation while also fostering a sensitivity to the plight of women.Footnote 45 The fiasco over the Bad Books owed much to Jonathan Edwards’s insistence on an old-fashioned communal disciplinary method that clashed with the congregation’s sensibilities about public and private discipline. The same arguments that justified Richard’s divorce also served to defend Martha and Eleanor. They originated neither from nascent progressivism nor reactionary conservatism, but were the fruits of a thorough education in Puritan sexual and disciplinary norms. In contrast, men like Elisha Hawley and Samuel Gray would have had no leg to stand on in the 1640s, but after a 100 years, things had changed. Their confidence and laissez-faire attitudes were the fruits of the mutually reinforcing new discourses on communal and private discipline, legal developments around testimony and lawyers, and a new rights-based grammar.Footnote 46 And while eighteenth-century New Englanders had not become secular, observed historian Douglas Winiarski, they had grown worldly.Footnote 47 The fruits of this were felt acutely by Hannah and her family.
III. The Edwardses on “Marital Duties” and the Rights of a Wife
An array of Hannah’s private writings have survived and provide a fascinating window into the mind of an elite, educated, and brilliant eighteenth-century New England woman. Hannah’s own story was complicated. Not least of her concerns was a rocky courtship history. In the mid-1730s, she was betrothed to a young doctor, Matthew Rockwell, a betrothal she put off for ten years, due to his anger and domineering temperament. Matthew insisted on their marriage, yet Hannah protested against it until 1743, when he grew exhausted from insisting and married another woman.Footnote 48 Hannah’s antipathy to marrying Matthew showed a fiercely independent woman who was also cognizant of the many dimensions that made a healthy marriage – and the perilous position in which unmarried women could find themselves.
Hannah had a bleak view of human nature. Men in particular were indicative of humanity’s lust for domination and tyranny. In a private entry named “On Human Oppression,” Hannah wrote “what a strange thirst for dominion is conspicuous in us all, almost from our birth.”Footnote 49 The moment we achieve strength or power “how universally prone we are to assume unrighteous dominion over another.”Footnote 50 The gospel existed in part to cure this oppressive temper, for did it not “teach us to seek others’ happiness as our own, and to look upon ourselves as one body, even the whole human species of every denomination, whether black or white?”Footnote 51 But as soon as someone “get to be the head, instead of seeking others’ good as our own…we oppress, we distress, and that without regret or remorse.”Footnote 52 Since the husband was the head of the wife, marriage had the propensity to make men abuse their proper authority and instead act selfish or tyrannical. While her “Picture of a Good Man” offered a positive counterpoint of men, her experience with the aggressive Rockwell would have accounted for much.Footnote 53 Given what we know, Hannah had every reason to be wary of Rockwell, and her writings bear witness to a self-awareness about the dangers lurking behind Rockwell’s longing pleas. Time did little to dull her suspicions of the human tendency to domination and its relevance in marriage. Several years later, Hannah expanded her thoughts in response to a fracas ignited by the issue of women speaking in public in a remarkable letter draft called “On the Rights of a Wife.”
The letter was written sometime in the 1740s, just before her marriage, and at issue was the propriety of discipline in marriage. Hannah was clearly willing to express her opinions in public – and with force, which aggravated her interlocutors. She began the letter, written to a male acquaintance, by writing “I understand that our late conversation up[on] the rights and obligations of husbands and wives has given disgust, and I am called a bold and arrogant old maid for setting up my opinion in opposition to the general opinion of mankind and the wisest divines.”Footnote 54 She was unconvinced that her opinions genuinely went against the divines and the Bible, as she explained, but the main issue was correction within a marriage: “I conclude my arrogance appeared in declaring my opinion that a wife was no proper subject of correction or private government, but that the only proper time of life for tuition was past, and further, that there was no propriety in a husband’s commanding his wife.”Footnote 55 To reconstruct the argument, it seems that husbands were arguing that they could correct and discipline their wives – physically and emotionally. Yet she argued that the time for “tuition,” meaning instruction or the act of teaching, was past once one was married. It was perhaps appropriate for children, but not for marriages.
Hannah continued that if a husband took the task of discipline and tuition upon himself, “she was under no absolute obligation to comply, but if she thought obedience was like to procure greater evil than his displeasure, or than neglect of the two evils, she ought to choose the less.”Footnote 56 Any physical actions on the part of the husband were wrong, since it was a “more aggravated, heinous, greater breach of peace, tending more to confusion and every evil work, and therefore a vastly greater and more aggravated crime for a man to whip or any way to distress or pretend to punish his wife than it would be so to distress his neighbor.”Footnote 57 The claims of a wife were much greater than the claims of a neighbor or a servant. And just as any attempt of physical discipline or pretensions to punish a neighbor was an “aggravated crime,” how much more in the case of a wife. While eighteenth-century heirs of Puritanism had a strict understanding of gender relations, Hannah was horrified at the draconian abuse of the Puritan theology, even as she did not reject traditional conceptions of submission between a husband and a wife. Nevertheless, she did reject how it was implemented in her context.
Hannah argued that the reason the Bible was weaponized to justify discipline was because of the human desire for domination. Men had a common interest in asserting dominion, due to the “great depravity of all for dominion, and their universal proneness to err through the narrowness of their views and great partiality to themselves; which gives rise to a maxim amongst you, that no man must be a judge where he is a party.”Footnote 58 The legal system recognized how conflicts of interest influenced interpretation and the correction application of law. Hannah drew a parallel in this situation: perhaps the reason men found her “a bold and arrogant old maid” was due to a gendered conflict of interests. Since men were a party within the dispute, vested interests to protect their prerogatives shaped their opinion: for “in this case, the wisest of you must be considered as of a party.”Footnote 59 Moreover, Hannah suspected her opponents ignored what the Puritan divines had actually said: “as for my having an opinion that is differing from the wisest divines or divines in general, I am not convinced it is so.”Footnote 60 Even if she did misunderstand some divines, until they are “universally united in sentiment, I may choose on whose sleeve to pin my opinion: and there does not fail to [be] some approved divines, that not only think, but print, their opinions that a husband has no right of compulsion over his wife.”Footnote 61
The divines the Edwardses were familiar with envisioned a much larger role for women than Hannah’s interlocutor accepted. Hannah’s right to speak publicly was not in doubt among the Edwardses, and her own family may have included some of the divines she was thinking of. Her father, Timothy Edwards, had educated his many daughters in the same manner as the local boys, while her mother, Esther Stoddard Edwards, conducted theological classes in her home.Footnote 62 Puritans, such as Increase and Cotton Mather, had exalted women as paragons of piety and left both abstract descriptions of “how women could and should live but also in numerous accounts of actual individuals.”Footnote 63 Her parents and grandparents had encouraged the development of their daughters’ talents. The Edwards children cherished the same ideals and preferred the state of singleness to a mediocre marriage since it allowed greater freedom to exercise their multiple talents. As Hannah observed, singleness was “vacant” and solitary to women whose only thoughts were marriage and domesticity. But “if they can make Religion & knowledge their chief end, it is a life of wonderful advantage, and of Ease compared with wedlock; & if they can have Expectations enough, or their Lives can any ways be diversified enough, to keep their Spirits going—why is it not at least many times to be preferred?”Footnote 64 Comparing her experiences with her detractors and Mr. Rockwell, her outrage over compulsion is all the more understandable.
For Hannah, compulsion was liable to abuse through men seeking domination and ran counter to the purpose of marriage as laid out by the divines. Her disagreement lay in the word “command,” since “I do not very well know what determinate idea to affix to the word command.”Footnote 65 A wife may come to agree and obey her husband, but the manner in which this obedience is enacted is key: “I still think, were I a wife, I should think myself far more obliged to compliance by a mild manifestation of my husband’s will or choice than by any imperious, threatening dictates he could use.”Footnote 66 Hannah’s contention against compulsion mirrored Jonathan’s issue with husbands’ behavior toward their wives, by focusing on the psychological dimension of “putting her away” and rejecting all forms of discipline or “tuition.”
Her opponent’s final barb was that her position was “contrary to many texts of Scripture.”Footnote 67 Hannah’s response was that “I am sensible that the women’s inferiority of strength brings her into some degree of dependence, so that the law of self-preservation, as well as many texts of Scripture, enjoin a great care to please and fear to offend, and so, in a good degree, a respectful, conformable behavior from a wife to her husband.” The wife ought to want to listen to her husband’s desire, yet his advice or desire was purely suasive, not compulsory, for “there is in Scripture neither precept nor example of a husband by any means compelling his wife.”Footnote 68 Hannah admitted no inferiority in worth or intellect, but merely in strength. The law of self-preservation recognized the supposed strength asymmetry between men and women, but, at least for Hannah, the Bible never allowed the physical asymmetry to justify any compulsion on the part of the husband.
The use of the law of self-preservation connects Hannah’s writings to her brother Jonathan’s on marital duties. As discussed previously, the duty of self-preservation was the rationale behind why a wife could leave her husband when he had “cast off the fundamental duties of marriage.” Rather than self-preservation justifying continued marriage, the wife was “not only not scandalous for departing, but ‘tis her duty to depart; the great law of self-preservation obliges her to it.”Footnote 69 Hannah’s use of self-preservation pointed to an obedience to the husband that permitted no abuse or domination but was companionate. Hannah ended our letter fragment with an illustration. Just as a poor man may have some just claim to a rich man’s wealth, “because there is many precepts requiring the rich man to bestow it,” yet the poor man cannot steal or force the rich man to give alms. For “the rich man thinks it is the disposition that is absolutely required, and that it is left to his reason and discretion to determine when alms-giving will interfere with other duties; and so says the wife with respect to the obedience you talk of.”Footnote 70 The wife, in this analogy, determines when almsgiving – obedience – ought to be given, deciding how it fits with her other duties and the inner disposition that causes her actions. Once again, Hannah’s writing seems based on a shared ethos that emphasized the plurality and proper balance of the various duties necessary when considering divorce. The poor man – the husband – may insist on his rights broadly, but in the specifics, it is up to the rich man to decide when and to whom he gives his alms.
Hannah’s acerbic wit and keen attacks against elements of the era’s sexual double standards reflected a broader ideology present in the Edwards family. Her parents, Timothy and Esther Edwards, were lenient in their control over marriage arrangements, leaving the final arrangement to the couple rather than coercing advantageous unions.Footnote 71 Esther Edwards could herself boast of significant intellectual accomplishments, and Esther and Timothy educated their daughters and cultivated an independent attitude that influenced their understanding of marriage. For the daughters, their marriage was not the be-all and end-all, but a journey to be embarked on by willing and equal partners without external pressures.Footnote 72 Yet regardless of the parents’ attitude, pressures arrived for Hannah in the form of Matthew Rockwell. The family exchanges that survive the drawn-out courtship show a family in solidarity with Hannah, committed to Hannah’s right to determine her own marriage.
Rockwell’s interest in the Edwards family began in 1729 when he began to court Jerusha. But Jerusha had directed her attentions elsewhere. Following the disappointment of spurned love – and Jerusha’s death in December 1729 – Rockwell remained dogged in his pursuit. He started to board at the parsonage in 1732 and set his eyes on Hannah. Her parents had a laissez-faire attitude and gave their daughters absolute discretion over their marital choices. Their posture backfired, though. When Rockwell spoke to them about his intentions, their trust in Hannah’s ability to make decisions inadvertently encouraged a notion in him that they approved of the marriage – without his consulting Hannah! Rockwell was elated; he built a physical house and constructed an imaginary future: Hannah was in both. She, on the other hand, continually delayed the marriage until her eventual extrication in 1736. Rockwell, still keen on Hannah, exerted pressure on her and the Edwardses to maintain the engagement. What remains is a series of letters between Hannah and her sister Esther and Esther’s husband, the pastor Samuel Hopkins of Springfield. Throughout the fiasco, Hannah’s family defended her decision to reject Rockwell. The letters grant a new angle on how the Edwardses viewed marriage, compatibility, and the sentiments that undergirded Jonathan’s understanding of divorce.
In a letter written around October 1735, Hannah’s sister Esther Edwards Hopkins wrote that she spoke to her “Unkele Williams” with as much equality and justice as possible about the situation between Hannah and Matthew. Though “the one half was not told” him, nevertheless William Williams of Weston, Massachusetts – married to Hannah Stoddard – said, speaking through his wife, that “he is vehemently against your having anything more to do” with him, and urged Hannah to “cloath your self w th resolution & must Put an end to it & ye Lik.”Footnote 73 Esther’s husband, the Reverend Samuel Hopkins, agreed. Echoing their uncle Williams, Samuel also referenced a decision Hannah had made to definitively break with Matthew: “Keep up ye resolution you had when you left us y t you will be free: and let not ye best man alive abridge you of it if one Comes sniveling and Crying, tell bid him be gone.”Footnote 74 Samuel scorned a sniveling man pressuring Hannah for her hand, and concluded that if her method of resolution failed, she ought to “send me word and I will give you further directions.”Footnote 75
Hannah soon rejected Rockwell, but he remained persistent. Thus, further directions came in March 1736. Samuel wrote a lengthy letter filled with outrage at Rockwell’s presumptions, and he exhorted Hannah to assert her rights. Samuel was overjoyed when Hannah was “set at liberty as a Roe from ye hunter,” but Rockwell’s latest demands made him fear that she would be “Entangled in ye same snare y t you was in before.”Footnote 76 Samuel insisted that Hannah was “duty obliged to Assert your own liberty: And totally to dismiss ye affair that now perplexes you. Let who will say what they will.” Any coercion or pressure on the part of the male suitor was unjust, since it meant “you Can’t freely and of Choice proceed to marriage, and it is inconsistant with ye law of Marriage, and of Nature too, y t you should proceed, if it is not freely and of Choice.” Samuel’s opinion of Rockwell was clear in the ultimatum he placed before Hannah: “part and live, or marry and die.”Footnote 77 Samuel did not, of course, mean literal death, but the slow degradation of married life into incompatibility, resentment, and possibly hatred.
Like his two in-laws, Samuel pointed to nature and natural law as the reason for separation. The law of self-preservation also underpinned breaking off an engagement. Samuel wrote that before the breakup Hannah was exhausted and “appeared like a fadeing flower” but returned to “ye vigor and spriteliness of youth” when Matthew was dismissed: “therefore ye Law of self preservation obliges you to put an End to it.” As with Jonathan, the law of self-preservation was the key that protected women in relationships. The law imposed a duty to separate from an abusive partner. Although one might have argued that remaining in the relationship with Matthew would have been the loving thing to do, Samuel responded that “I think it is your duty to deny him: for you are undone if you have him, and there is no Law, divine or humane y t obliges a man to love his Neighbour better than himself.” Hannah had the agency to avoid a misaligned marriage that would undo both parties. Matthew Rockwell’s “violent passion” was a disqualifying strike against his character, and on the whole, “is there not ten times the danger of your both undone by marrying, than there is of his being undone by beying denied, or rather by his being kept off now he is denyed.”Footnote 78
Samuel Hopkins’s disdain of aggressive men like Rockwell oozed forth in every piece of advice. Hannah was worried what people would say about her firm refusal of Matthew. In a letter to her sister, Hannah was resigned to her possible disgrace: “I am sensible y t I am as I expected severely censure’d and Look’d upon at windsor as very vile with respect to my Concern with m r Rockell.”Footnote 79 The townsfolk viewed her as picky and unreasonable. Yet Hannah’s family could not disagree more. Hannah wrote that if her parents trusted her decision, then “I dont Care what the brawl of the ignorant mob is.”Footnote 80 Hannah’s actions were the height of reasonableness. Samuel acknowledged that Hannah knew Rockwell better than he did but “you must allow y t I am better acquainted with our sex than you be.” His experience with men like Rockwell led to several suggestions “for ye future.” First, if a man claimed he was about to die for love, “you must attribute one half of his malady to Conceit,” a quarter to “dissimulation,” and the smallest quarter left would never suffice to actually cause death. Wrote Samuel: “tho I am Joculer in this passage, yet there is a great deal of truth in it.”Footnote 81 Second, he objected to Hannah’s desire to treat him sensitively and with civility, since Rockwell had foregone this treatment by his aggressive “importunacy.” Rather, if Hannah should “break ye broom staff over his head and bid him never say a word to you more of y t matter, you would not deal with him more Injuriously than he does with you.”Footnote 82 Of course, ill-treatment was never justified: “I dont say this, with any design y t you should treat him ill, but I think you ought to resent his unreasonable treatment of you, and give him no more opportunity to do it.”Footnote 83 Nevertheless, Hannah’s resolute stand against Rockwell was her prerogative and supported by the law of self-preservation.
Her family’s support did not stop the friction of living in a changing culture. Chafing in the small town of East Windsor, she found respite in the summer of 1736 by moving to Springfield to live with her sister Esther and brother-in-law Samuel Hopkins. Her time in East Windsor had been filled with “melancholy and difficult circumstances at home,” but her family provided solace and support.Footnote 84 Her kin were of one mind in the matter of Matthew and sought to protect women’s consent, agency, and safety as Massachusetts became increasingly patriarchal. Many were skeptical of the Edwardses. As Hannah wrote to her sister in August 1736: “I am sincible y t I am as expected severely censure’d and Look’d upon at windsor as very vile with Respect to my Concern with m r Rockell – neither is it Confind to windsor but Let it be as unconfinded as its every Like to be.”Footnote 85 Her attitudes presaged the later disagreement that earned the title of arrogant and bold maid, but the Edwardses could not disagree more. Hannah knew that her decision aligned with her immediate family, the old Puritan divines, and the natural obligation to self-preservation.
Most of the previous themes are found, stripped of their drama, in Jonathan Edwards’s writings. Edwards began by rooting his arguments in a Reformed covenantal doctrine of the church. For example, Jonathan preached an installation sermon entitled “The Church’s Marriage To Her Sons, And To Her God,” which outlined his understanding of marriage as encompassing mutual fulfillment and companionship and set up his understanding of divorce. Marriage reflected the relationship of Christ to the church. It was “a state of great peace, comfort, honor and joy,” not merely aimed at childbearing but also companionship and help.Footnote 86 Marriage was covenantal and so had to be attended to in a “due manner,” not merely with regard to external arrangements but also with “sincere upright aims and intentions, with a right disposition, and proper frames of mind to those that are concerned.”Footnote 87 The covenant required two equal parties. Just as a pastor and congregation cooperated and worked together – perhaps with an autobiographical barb aimed at Jonathan’s Northampton congregation – so too in marriage.Footnote 88
Jonathan spelled out the implications of covenantal marriage for thinking about divorce in a brief fragment entitled “On Marital Duties,” likely written in the 1730s. The English civil union tradition had forbidden all divorce, except in instances of sexual unfaithfulness. However, Edwards embraced the Puritan position and looked beyond sexual sins to include a wider array of justifiable causes: “if it be manifest, whether by words that he speaks or by long experience of his practice, that he will not suffer her to live with him, or, which is the same thing, by his voluntary behavior renders it intolerable and useless for her to live with him, he in effect puts her away, and she in departing from him is to [be] looked upon no otherwise than passive in the affair.”Footnote 89 “Putting away” was synonymous with divorce. He included physical or emotional abuse as “putting away,” equivalent to sexual infidelity. The responsibility fell directly on the husband in this situation, for the wife was “passive,” or non-culpable, if divorce stemmed from “putting away,” which included abuse.
If the wife departed from the abusive husband, even though it was her decision to depart, she was still “passive” since she did not formally cause the separation. Jonathan continued that if a husband “in words should threaten her,” perhaps with abuse, neglect, or even death, “and she on this should depart from [him], should we not say that he had put her away,” since her actions emerged from his failure to live according to the duties of marriage.Footnote 90 Although his words may sound harsh to contemporary ears, the provision for the woman was contextually sensitive. It granted her absolute innocence if she left her husband due to abuse, since his actions amounted to “putting her away.”
Edwards continued by suggesting that the husband’s actions spoke louder than words. Intention “appears by which he says in words or what is rationally judged from long experience of his voluntary practice.”Footnote 91 Jonathan concluded that “he that is said by experience to have cast off the fundamental duties of marriage towards his wife, may justly be looked upon as having put away his wife.”Footnote 92 Therefore, although the husband might not have technically started the divorce, the woman could initiate a divorce since the husband has, in action if not in words, put her away and voided the marriage. As in any covenant, the duties or stipulations of the covenant could be broken and thereby justly precipitate a separation, just as is the case with a minister who fails in his duties toward his congregation.
The duties were not limited to the merely familial or reproductive, but included honor, joy, and companionship – compatibility issues, in other words.Footnote 93 “Such fundamental duties of marriage I suppose they will be allowed to be that are not only necessary to the more special designs and purposes of marriage, but also to the higher purposes of life and subsistence in the world, on which all other purposes of this life, whether of marriage or anything else, so far as they concern that person, do depend.”Footnote 94 What precisely these “higher purposes of life and subsistence in the world” might be was open to a range of interpretations. But that was precisely the point: Edwards was tapping into a broader category Puritan of what constituted “putting away.” If “such duties are cast off by an husband, the wife is not only not scandalous for departing, but ‘tis her duty to depart; the great law of self-preservation obliges her to it.”Footnote 95 Self-preservation bolstered the moral claim of the wife to self-protection.
Jonathan also commented on putting away in his Blank Bible – a collection of notes written in the margins of his personal Bible – entry for Matthew 5. A simple reading of Matthew 5:32 forbade divorce except in the case of adultery. Jesus said, “but I say unto you, that whosoever shall put away his wife, saving for the cause of fornication, causeth her to commit adultery” (KJV). Edwards argued that limiting the passage to adultery was simplistic. Edwards’s comment, as in “on marital duties,” centered on who was active or passive in initiating the divorce. The verse was not a blanket statement: “This can’t be understood that a man or woman can never be free from a wife or husband while living in no other case, but that it is not lawful for either to be active in putting the other away in any other.”Footnote 96 Read without a proper understanding of what “passive” putting-away entailed, one could easily misconstrue Edwards to mean that adultery alone counted as putting the other spouse away. As we have seen, Edwards’s belief that abuse or neglect permitted the injured partner to initiate a divorce shows that even passive putting away could be cause for divorce and reason enough to initiate the legal process.
Edwards developed this thought elsewhere in 1 Corinthians 7:15. The passage spoke of a non-Christian husband leaving his Christian wife: “if the unbelieving depart, let him depart. A brother or sister is not under bondage in such cases” (KJV). Edwards argued that “departure” was equivalent to “putting away.” Again, the language of departure did not only mean the husband physically left the wife, but included turning his wife away through abuse or intolerable behavior: “for when the unbelieving husband departs from his Christian wife, ‘tis not to be supposed that he goes and leaves his house, and leaves his wife in possession, but he turns her away.”Footnote 97 Departure was “when an husband does so, either by declaredly prohibiting her living with him as his wife, or by doing it in effect by making it utterly intolerable for her to live with him, as when she cannot live with him without apparent hazard of life, etc., she is at liberty. Her husband departs from her.”Footnote 98 Jonathan’s willingness to affirm a woman’s right to obtain a divorce and to defend a broader conception of “putting away” was neither idiosyncratic in his family nor in the broader Puritan tradition.
IV. Reformed Predecessors
The Edwardses were not particularly innovative in their use of self-preservation but were harnessing a tradition rooted in Reformed notions of marriage based on companionship, spiritual equality, and mutuality. Since marriage was no longer a sacrament, its indissoluble character lost one of its chief buttresses. Reformed thinkers had an interest in marriage’s relational component and in the many ways sin, the Devil, and human pride and power distorted the marital bond. The Edwards family embraced this older vision of marriage that was becoming out of step with eighteenth-century New England as its Puritan heritage morphed. To disentangle and pinpoint specific influences on the Edwardses would yield only frustration, partly due to a lack of evidence as well as their intellectual curiosity and synthetic appropriation rather than precise restoration of the tradition.Footnote 99 Nonetheless, the contours of the Reformed tradition’s understanding of marriage and divorce are seen in the Edwardses’ use of self-preservation, desertion, and cautious acceptance of abuse as a justification for divorce.Footnote 100
Puritans embraced marriage as a union aimed at mutual support, the proper context in which to raise a family, and a civil ceremony rather than a religious ceremony in which the state had a vested interest.Footnote 101 The concept that came to encapsulate their interpretation of marriage was covenant, a relationship based on reciprocity and love, duty, and obligations. For John Calvin (1509–1564), marriage was a sacred and enduring union. But marriage was also a conditional and breakable covenant; there were “distinct and discernible goods and goals that couples and communities alike had to support.”Footnote 102 The goals included mutual sexual satisfaction, the nurturing of the other, and the spiritual advancement through marriage. The elevation of the covenantal framing opened new ways of thinking about marital duties and gave Calvin and the civil authorities in Geneva new rationales for divorce. While divorce was a tragedy, God allowed it in instances of adultery or desertion – putting away one’s spouse in body or soul.Footnote 103 Moreover, either husband or wife could initiate a divorce, since the “right to divorce belongs equally to both sides for both have a mutual and equal obligation to fidelity.”Footnote 104
Martin Bucer (1491–1551), another early Reformer, more explicitly addressed the grounds for divorce in the covenantal marriage. Bucer had a profound influence on Puritan formulations of compatibility and equality as grounds for divorce.Footnote 105 In 1534, Bucer supported a German couple’s petition to divorce and remarry on the grounds of incompatibility.Footnote 106 The underlying social reasons were complex, but the Strasbourg reformer provided the theological grounds. Marriage, argued Bucer, was not only for procreation and protection against premarital sex. No, marriage was “created for love, mutual service, and companionship.”Footnote 107 When these purposes failed, after many exhortations to reconcile, couples had the right to divorce and remarry, since the compatibility and spiritual dimension of marriages were nullified – once again, because irreparable dysfunction was equivalent to putting the other away. Companionate marriage based on covenantal reciprocity was taking center stage in ways that presaged the arguments previously seen with the Edwardses. This included not only a renewed focus on divorce but also the Edwardses’ sentiments on the rights of women.
Bucer and Calvin’s arguments made their way into the English Reformed tradition through Puritans’ deep commitment to companionship and spiritual equality in marriage. One such manifestation was found in conduct books, which sometimes defended the prerogative of women to choose their own marriage partners as a natural outworking of companionship. Daniel Rogers (1583–1652), an English nonconforming Puritan clergyman, published Matrimoniall Honour, or the mutual crowne and comfort of godly, loyall, and chaste marriage in 1642 for this very reason.Footnote 108 In this instance, the argument focused on equality between men and women, consent in initiating relationships, and a “good entrance” into marriage. For Rogers, the equality of men and women was spiritual – they were unequal in ability and hierarchy – rather than political or vocational. Rogers went to the apostle Paul’s writings in 2 Corinthians 6:14, where Paul rejects marriage between a believer and an unbeliever since it leads to being “unequally yoked.” Rogers believed this verse cautioned against marriages aimed at the wrong good – be that children alone, familial power, sexual libertinism, and so forth.Footnote 109 True marriage required spiritual equality between the spouses; that is, genuine marriage occurred when you “joyne all circumstances of equality and suitablenesse to religion.”Footnote 110 This language embellished the 300-page text: woman was made “flesh of his flesh, and bone of his bone: woman of man, equal to him in dignity.”Footnote 111 The Edwardses’ shared vocabulary and Rogers’s presence in their library illustrate their Puritan sensibilities around companionate marriage.
Rogers’s discussion of a good entrance into marriage is particularly fascinating when one considers Hannah’s protracted debacle with Rockwell. Rogers argued that “aptenesse or sutablenesse” was nonnegotiable when choosing a spouse.Footnote 112 Marriage required a spiritual synergy: honor, love, and respect made marriage a yoke of equality and joy rather than drudgery. In a sentiment that Hannah, her sisters, and her brothers-in-law joined in, the freedom to choose or reject a potential partner was absolutely necessary when choosing a spouse. Hannah’s parents agreed – which put significant strain on her, since Matthew interpreted their hands-off approach as permission to pursue Hannah. Be that as it may, the emphasis on consent did not end with engagement. Even after marriage, Rogers judged consent a “Iont [Joint] duty of the Marryed”Footnote 113 because consent was connected to chastity. Chastity and control in marriage led to consent, and this “doe grow as springs from the stocke of love.”Footnote 114 Love was the groundwork upon which the “sweet building” of consent was bound. Love and consent made the marriage “to grow to an happy frame and building, which who so behold, can no other judge, but those parties are well met, and dwell commodiously.”Footnote 115 The ideal of mutual respect and shared chastity grounded in consent continued to animate the thinking of the Edwardses and their allies. Indeed, when contrasted with their inherited ideals, one is scarcely surprised that the machinations of Elisha Hawley and Samuel Gray enraged the Stoddards, Dwights, and Edwardses.
Rogers may have presented the ideal, but what to do when reality fell far short of it? Here, too, the seventeenth century offered a compelling and comparatively humane alternative to the new legalistic New England regime. One rather extreme example is found in poet John Milton (1608–1674), himself notorious for a series of pamphlets on divorce. Milton argued that England’s laws were too restrictive and were unfaithful to the Reformed tradition.Footnote 116 Martin Bucer’s permissive writings on divorce stood front and center in Milton’s defense of companionate marriage.Footnote 117 Milton first published The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce in 1643, following his separation from his wife Mary Powell. The publication stirred fierce debate, and the following year he produced a revised and expanded edition.Footnote 118 The crux of the issue was whether the duties of marriage changed when companionship was irredeemably broken; in other words, what faithfulness to the duties of marriage looked like when a spouse proved incorrigible, abusive, or negligent in word or deed.
Milton’s first argument was to expand the range of duties to include more than fidelity and the permanence of the marital bond, but also companionship.Footnote 119 The duties of a husband – and presumably also of a wife – were to “bear himself wisely toward the wife, loving and inciting her to all piety, and to the other duties of this life.”Footnote 120 If one should fail in their duty, being “long absent from the other without just and urgent cause, or giving suspicion of irreligious and impure life,” then an admonition was in order, as befitted any sin. If sin and dysfunction continued, dissolving matrimony could be justified, just as when fidelity was broken. For “it follows, according to the sentence of God, which all Christians ought to be ruled by, that between those, who either through obstinacy, or helpless inability, cannot or will not perform these repeated duties, between those there can be no true matrimony, nor ought they to be counted man and wife.”Footnote 121 The centrality of companionship in marriage meant that to “cast off the fundamental duties of marriage” was to enact divorce through failing in the “higher purposes of life and subsistence in the world,” which marriage facilitated.Footnote 122 Extending the duties to include companionship opened new avenues for broadening the concept of putting away.
Milton’s second argument centered on the law of self-preservation. This law, used controversially in the political realm by Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, had a theological career as well.Footnote 123 Whatever its political provenance and its multiple uses, Puritans and the Edwardses used it to defend the prerogatives of women and strengthen divorce petitions. Milton used the phrase “preservation of life” in the same manner as the Edwardses. Milton argued that where “danger is foreseen, that the life is in peril by living together,” divorce was necessary, since “this is certain, that the preservation of life is more worth than the compulsory keeping of marriage.”Footnote 124 The law of self-preservation was clear: where life and the fundamental duties of marriage were endangered through the other’s action, divorce was permitted. While Hannah and Jonathan focused on husbands, Milton focused on wives: the husband may break his bond “with an unfit and mistaken wife, to the saving of his welfare, his life, yea his faith and virtue.”Footnote 125 In contrast, it was remarkable that the Edwardses focused on protecting women from abusive husbands, showing an awareness of the predations women faced and the universal propensity, as Hannah put it, of men to dominate and oppress when they had the power.
Milton’s writings represented the extreme, but his attention to self-preservation and an expanded understanding of “putting away” and “desertion” tapped into a vein of Puritan thought. Some Puritans recognized the law of self-preservation, often equated with self-love, as a natural good and duty that applied even within marriage. For example, Westminster divine William Gouge (1575–1653) wrote in Of Domestical Duties (1622) that self-love was allowed if its focus was on the preservation of life. Through self-love, people averted danger and preserved their life and welfare: “so the world be better preserved, God hath reserved in man this naturall affection.”Footnote 126 Likewise, Independent minister William Bridge (c. 1600–1670) wrote that “nature in general teacheth self-preservation.” Whether a given act of self-preservation was just or selfish depended on the circumstances, yet Bridge argued that Jesus’ words “If they persecute thee in one City, flee to another” (Matthew 10:23) corroborated the same principle.Footnote 127 Said one Martin Finch (1628–1698), suicide was an unnatural sin because God so fashioned nature that “all creatures indeavour self-preservation.”Footnote 128 Independent academic and preacher John Owen (1616–1683) even acknowledged that “quietly and patiently” submitting to God’s discipline still meant that “we [Christians] are obliged” to use the “honest and Lawful private wayes of self-preservation.”Footnote 129 It was in the area of divorce, however, that several Puritans used the exact arguments around self-preservation, “desertion,” and “putting away” that the Edwardses would use in Massachusetts.
The Reformed heavyweight William Ames (1576–1633) of Franeker, Frieseland, distinguished between passive and active desertion, as Edwards would do later, in order to expand desertion to include abuse and negligence.Footnote 130 Ames’s Conscience with the power and cases thereof, translated into English from Latin in 1639, argued that 1 Corinthians 7:15 justified a broader definition of desertion than physical abandonment. Following the continental Reformed tradition, with which he was more familiar, Ames wrote that “if one party drive away the other with great fierceness and cruelty, there is cause of desertion, and hee is to bee reputed the deserter. But if hee obstinately neglect, that necessary departure of the avoyding the eminent danger, hee himselfe in that playeth the desert.”Footnote 131 This form of desertion “makes a faire cause for the party deserted after the trial of all other meanes in vaine, to suffer a divorce.”Footnote 132 William Perkins (1558–1602) had also opened the door to this interpretation in his Christian Oeconomie, translated into English in 1609. Divorce and remarriage were permissible when there was “malicious and spiteful dealing of married folkes one with the other.” This “malicious dealing” was morally equivalent and “like unto desertion.” For “to depart from one, and to driue one away by threats, are aequipollent,” or alike.Footnote 133 Edwards articulated the argument in a similar manner when he wrote that if a husband, “whether by words that he speaks or by long experience” rendered it “intolerable and useless for her to live with him, he in effect puts her away” and forced her departure, meaning that the husband was the functional deserter.Footnote 134
Hannah and the rest of the Edwardses found in the Puritan divines resources that applied to their lives in myriad ways. When one compares eighteenth-century Northamptonite men to the seventeenth-century Puritans, Hannah’s remark that the divines agreed with her more than them seems irrefutable. Hannah’s conflicts with arrogant men who hoped to deny her a voice, entitled suitors who refused to take no for an answer, husbands insisting on their right to physically discipline their wives, and male adulterers shocked when held for their actions confirmed her convictions. In the Puritan divines, Hannah found voices that “not only think, but print, their opinions that a husband has no right of compulsion over his wife.”Footnote 135 As Richard Baxter (1615–1691) put it, God’s “right of propriety” over all of creation included his propriety over a marriage. Thus a husband had no right of compulsion over his wife, since “man is not capable of such a plenary propriety of any thing in the world.”Footnote 136 Husbands did not govern their wives. Rather, wives were “joint-governours with them [husbands] over” the household.Footnote 137 Likewise, Baxter agreed that a husband had authority over wives in a relative sense, yet he made the same move as Hannah: the divines rejected any form of discipline of a wife, since marital duties “obliged a life of love with her” and because it would make her “contemptible in the family, and diminish the reverence of inferiours…for living so uncomely a life.”Footnote 138 Hannah, along with the rest of the Edwardses, was facing a new legal system and privatized understanding of discipline that undermined women. Their resolute stand against eighteenth-century double standards took the form of a resilient faithfulness to the legal, moral, and communal customs of seventeenth-century Puritanism. While, to many, the Edwardses might strike an inchoate progressive chord in prerevolutionary New England, their beliefs were neither particularly innovative, radical, or “New Light.” The Edwardses were remnants of a socioreligious system that had offered an array of resources to combat moral decay, but that had, in the minds of their New England contemporaries, overstayed its welcome.Footnote 139
V. Conclusion
The Edwards family was out of touch with eighteenth-century sexual double standards. Their Puritan upbringing led to shared familial beliefs about the dignity of women and the importance of female education, as well as a sensitivity to the oppression women were facing in eighteenth century New England. Their opposition to privatized discipline, new testimony laws, and general disregard for male sexual misbehavior reinforced their seventeenth-century sensibilities. Jonathan Edwards’s Puritanism, through the “Bad Book” affair and his advice on divorce, ran afoul of the au courante taste for private discipline and court procedure. The Edwardses’ estrangement is seen with greater clarity when we move beyond their most famous member to consider the “prominent characteristics” of the rest of the family.Footnote 140 Hannah’s intellectual independence earned her the sobriquet of “old maid.” Her suitor assumed he could bully her into marriage. The family, however, circled around her, as her extended relatives argued that the law of self-preservation and consent justified her decisions. Smashing brooms over suitors’ heads was a just response to bullying men. Likewise, the Edwardses protected Eleanor Gray, Martha Root, and others by taking them into their house, providing gainful employment, and using every legal resource available to extract payment from arrogant men who assumed they would face no consequences for their actions.
The Edwardses seem paradoxically progressive when contrasted with their milieu. Their education and beliefs were the fruits of Puritanism. Inherited from the Stoddards and Mathers, carried forward by Timothy and Esther, and forcefully defended by the children, their education in Puritanism gave them a theological vocabulary that appeared progressive in the eighteenth century yet was at home in the seventeenth. They testify to a rich vein of proto-evangelical practice that used categories adopted from Puritanism to broaden the protections afforded women. Influential New England elites used self-preservation and spiritual equality to defend a woman’s right to initiate divorce as well as to choose her own husband free from coercion. They also embraced the Puritan inclusion of oppression and abuse in the definition of “desertion.” Their Puritanism was not a static heritage but a living tradition that gave them practical resources to redress the alternative juristic and disciplinary traditions that were transforming New England.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to the anonymous reviewers at Church History for their helpful suggestions. A special thank you to Ken Minkema for introducing me to the remarkable person of Hannah and the wonderful family sources housed at the Beinecke Library, as well as for many comments and suggestions.
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