this american jezebel
Watch this exciting presentation by Eve LaPlante, delivered at First Congregational Church, Bristol, Rhode Island, as part of the Bosworth Lecture Series, on November 21, 2024. Nearly 400 years after Anne Hutchinson’s trial and expulsion from the Massachusetts Bay Colony, she remains a highly controversial figure. Was she troublemaker bent on defying all Puritan norms and convinced of the righteousness of her own religious convictions? Or was she a dissident, shedding light on our modern concepts of religious freedom, equal rights and free speech? Author and Hutchinson descendant Eve LaPlante gives the case for Hutchinson as freedom fighter.
In a period when a woman could not vote, hold public office, or teach outside the home, Hutchinson showed remarkable political power, hosting women at her house, providing commentary on recent sermons, and prompting Governor John Winthrop to deride her as ‘this American Jezebel’ and have her removed to Rhode Island. Thus award-winning writer Eve LaPlante sums up, in the video posted above, the life and legacy of Puritan Anne Hutchinson. (See also Eve’s superb blog for us, here, on Hutchinson’s trial and Puritan men’s insistence on women’s subordination.)
In her talk, Eve discusses her research for her book American Jezebel, including visits to the sites of Hutchinson’s life, and recounted Hutchinson’s dramatic courtyard battles in colonial battles, her banishment and exile in what is now Portsmouth, and her path to becoming the only woman ever to found an American colony.
Hutchinson, her husband, and most of their fifteen children settled on land at the west end of Island Park Cove near the Boyd’s Lane entry ramp to Route 24. The community created around her in 1638 is marked by Founder’s Brook Park, a pastoral spot maintained by the town of Portsmouth, Rhode Island, in tribute to Hutchinson. After four years here and the death of her beloved husband, Hutchinson moved to the Bronx, where she and six of her children were mistakenly killed by members of the Siwanoy tribe in a battle with the Dutch.
A descendant of Anne Hutchinson, Eve LaPlante has written two other biographies of her ancestors: Marmee & Louisa, about Louisa May Alcott and her mother; and Salem Witch Judge, about colonial diarist and judge Samuel Sewall, the winner of the Massachusetts Book Award. Of her books American Jezebel and Salem Witch Judge, one critic wrote, “LaPlante offers praise for her forebears who testified against Puritan repression. Anne Hutchinson and Samuel Sewall were not the dark Puritans many imagined. They remain living presences, even models of rectitude, into the 21st century.”
Her new book, coauthored by Margy Burns Knight and illustrated by Alix Delinois, is Who Needs A Statue?, a picture book about statues of people of color and women, including Anne Hutchinson. For more, see www.evelaplante.com.