Prevailing attitudes toward women at the time held that female minds were too weak to tackle complex
thought: Governor John Winthrop once publicly claimed that a woman had committed suicide because she
read and thought too much.
The model Puritan woman, according to Hutchinson’s biographer Eve LaPlante, was “modest, meek,
submissive, virtuous, obedient, and kind” and “solely occupied with supervising and maintaining the home,
cooking sometimes brewing and dairying, and bearing and rearing children. She was expected to suffer all
these in silence. . . .”
Why was Anne Hutchinson punished for being outspoken about religion and politics, while Bradstreet
became a cultural icon? One answer can be found in Bradstreet’s “To My Dear and Loving Husband.” From
our contemporary perspective, it reads like a traditional Elizabethan love sonnet (though it’s composed of 12
lines instead of 14). Compared to Bradstreet’s earlier discourses on science, religion, and politics, it is written
in a relatively plain style and unabashedly declares her abiding love for her husband. Formally and
thematically, it echoes Shakespeare’s sonnet “Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?,” in which the poet
promises immortality to his young lover, and also Sir Philip Sidney’s sonnet “My True Love Hath My
Heart,” which celebrates a perfectly balanced marital union from the woman’s perspective.
Seventeenth-century readers, however, familiar with Puritan theology and the tricks, tropes,
and conceits of metaphysical poetry could read her poem as a rhetorical argument intended to persuade
them of her position on the schism that had threatened to tear apart the colony at Hutchinson’s trial.
Bradstreet’s poem speaks obliquely to the competing beliefs on how to conduct one’s life on earth given the
contradictory nature of Puritanism: even though God had predetermined, or elected, those who would attain
salvation, one still had to conduct one’s life on earth so as to prepare to receive grace, or salvation, in the
hereafter. The early American historian Edmund Morgan coined the term “the Puritan dilemma” to describe
this conundrum:
Puritanism required that a man devote his life to seeking salvation but told him he was helpless to do
anything but evil. Puritanism required that he rest his whole hope in Christ but taught him that Christ would
utterly reject him unless before he was born God had foreordained his salvation. Puritanism required that
man refrain from sin but told him he would sin anyhow.
The extent to which individual Puritans pinned their hopes on being counted among the elect is impossible
to underestimate. Puritans engaged in a continual and exacting introspection in which all personal and
national events were interpreted as signs of their readiness to receive grace. For example, when she was 14
years old, Anne fell in love with her father’s assistant, Simon Bradstreet, whom she married two years later.
Believing such feelings were sinful outside of marriage, she prayed unremittingly to be rid of her carnal lust.
When she fell ill that same year with smallpox, she viewed it as God’s punishment for her sinful ways.
In “To My Dear and Loving Husband,” written many years later, God doesn’t make an explicit appearance.
Instead of painstakingly estimating whether she is worthy to receive grace, Bradstreet
estimates her power to reciprocate love. What’s changed in the intervening two decades? Since her
arrival in America at age 18, she had given birth to all but one of her eight children, buried numerous
relatives and friends, and singly managed a pioneer homestead while her husband traveled on colonial
business throughout New England and across the Atlantic.