American Jezebel: The Uncommon Life of Anne Hutchinson, the Woman Who Defied the Puritans

AMERICAN JEZEBEL is a compelling and fast-paced work that offers a colorful close-up on life in colonial America. Eve LaPlante has masterfully created a detailed sense of place and manners in early New England, allowing us to fully engage in the Puritan world of the confident, literate, ever-pregnant and heroic Anne Hutchinson. I have to ask... whose idea was it all these years to hide the story of Anne Hutchinson from the grammar and high school American history student? Anne's biography of conscience and faith is very important and should be celebrated in our schools. The image of Anne, articulate and self-assured, standing up to the array of 40 male judges should be as ingrained as the image of honest Abe Lincoln walking back several miles to a store when he noticed he'd been given one penny too much in change. Read this book. Tell others to read it. And let's get Anne Hutchinson into the school curriculum in the US. LaPlante has done a great service here, so effectively shedding light on Hutchinson's struggle for women's rights and freedom of expression, as well as her outspoken defense of the natives' rights. AMERICAN JEZEBEL of the 1600s has the ring of a modern feminist story, as the issues Hutchinson faced are not so different from issues we face today. Anne Hutchinson's vision, courage and accomplishments are astonishing. I've been thoroughly captured by this book.

As Founder of "The Friends of Anne Hutchinson" on Aquidneck Island (Newport,Portsmouth, Rhode Island)I read "American Jezebel"with the knowledge that most of what we know about Anne Hutchinson were first or second-hand accounts from the men she disturbed and quarreled with. What more could the author glean about this woman who dared to challenge Puritan Boston? On Anne Hutchinson Day (April 27,an annual gathering at Founders' Brook Park in Portsmouth RI, the settlement she co-founded) Our "Friends" group asks -where is the history of the women who came here in 1638? Even their names seem erased. Our mission is to find, collect and record the lost history of women who left Puritan Boston and followed Anne Hutchinson to this Island as wives, sisters, in-laws or servants. Incredibly, 366 years later, many proud descendants are found here with stories to tell of Anne Hutchinson, Mary Dyer(a Quaker martyr)and the women Hutchinsonians. (14 names to date and adding) Many in our group have read everything we can on the life of Anne Hutchinson and her era. We believe this new book is an important addition to the few good, older books that are available on her. Eve LaPlante's "American Jezebel" delivers an account that throws us into the action and weaves us carefully into Hutchinson's world in England, Boston-old world and new- Pocasset(Portsmouth RI) and New York with new detail. Finally an author has given us a meticulously-researched guided tour with maps to the places she lived. I know LaPlante did it well because some of us attempted to research the same areas, including her birthplace in Alford, Lincolnshire England. LaPlante did it right and thoroughly. She seemed to know the interest out there. In this book the early 1600's come alive with the details we want to hear: describing the locales, the living habits and the obsession with religion. Thank you, LaPlante,for clarifying the long civic and church trials of Anne Hutchinson, making them lively and readable for a change. The book provides us with a unique account of how a feisty, literate mother of 16 children leaves the comforts of low-gentry English life, moves to the edge of a wild continent, works as a midwife and counselor to women and evolves into a charismatic spiritual leader who dares to challenge the Boston Magistrates. There is much more after that. I will never again pass "split rock" off the Hutchinson Freeway on the way to Manhattan without a thought to Susan Hutchinson, the seven-year old who hid and waited..that's for the reader to continue. "American Jezebel" is the book a filmmaker should readsigned Valerie Debrule, Founder,The Friends of Anne Hutchinson

As America faces continuing constitutional questions over such matters as the display of the Ten Commandments in government buildings and the daily pledging by children to acknowledge a God over their nation, it is good to be reminded that there has never been religious unanimity in our country, not even in its beginnings as a religious haven for the Puritans. It was Anne Hutchinson, a Puritan immigrant, who caused the first political (and necessarily religious) crisis in the colonies, and her story is told in detail in _American Jezebel: The Uncommon Life of Anne Hutchinson, the Woman Who Defied the Puritans_ (HarperSanFrancisco) by Eve LaPlante. It is a stirring story of conscience and faith, and a refusal to buckle under to men and to the overwhelming religious majority. Hutchinson was truly a hero, and in many ways a founding mother of the republic that would be born more than a century after her death.Hutchinson, wife to a prosperous tradesman who plays little role in her story, immigrated to the Puritan Boston, and within two years caused controversy by holding women's meetings to discuss the weekly Bible reading and the most recent sermon they had heard. LaPlante is very good at describing the sources of Hutchinson's heresy, although Christian churches are quite different now and the tempest then seems very much one in an ancient teapot. The actual heresy matters little; what troubled Governor Winthrop and his fellow leaders was that she was acquiring a following, and that she threatened the status quo by the emphasis on individual conscience. (It was Winthrop who labeled her "American Jezebel;" it is incorrect to say the book has a misleading title since this is how she was known.) Thus in 1637 she was put before a colonial court (which will remind readers of the far more famous ones that condemned the witches in Salem a half century later) to pressure her to recant her heresies. Astonishingly, she conducted herself with such self-confidence (and she was in her sixteenth pregnancy at the time) that she won an acquittal, but she refused to go home quietly. Instead, she started lecturing her accusers, giving them more ammunition. Her profession of direct revelations from God was the basis of a second trial; it really isn't possible to think that such a gathering of men were going to let her go for long. She was excommunicated and banished in 1638. In the unforgiving words of one of her accusers, in Christ's name "... I do deliver you up to Satan, that you may learn no more to blaspheme, to seduce, and to lie!" Thirty families voluntarily went with her in banishment to the new settlement Rhode Island. There they drafted the Portsmouth Compact, which said that "no person within the said colony, at any time hereafter, shall be in any wise molested, punished, disquieted or called into question on matters of religion - so long as he keeps the peace." This revolutionary and tolerant idea is the direct ancestor of the First Amendmen

AMERICAN JEZEBEL is an excellent work, giving us a glimpse into the life of an extraordinary woman. In a world nearly four hundred years ago, that continues to echo into our own, the life of Anne Hutchinson has much to teach us still about women, religion, government and faith.Highly readable and meticulously researched, I especially appreciated the maps and descriptions of the world Hutchinson lived in and also the details on how to find the footprints of her world in ours today.A must for anyone interested in feminist scholarship, American history or religion.

A great portrait of the colonial rebel Anne Hutchinsonthat resonates with issues faced by women today,starting with how to balance home life and work.AMERICAN JEZEBEL also gives us a vivid depiction of17th century Puritan life in Elizabethan England andMassachusetts. The book opens with Hutchinson's trialfor heresy, which is beautifully described andexplained, as a result of which she was banished fromBoston and went on to found the colony of RhodeIsland! This book shows how extraordinary AnneHutchinson was and that, as the first PERSON inAmerica to espouse religious freedom and individualrights, she should be considered our founding mother.What a character! She raised 15 kids, was a midwife,AND could debate theology with the founders of HarvardCollege and make them look foolish (while pregnant forthe 16th time)! The maps of 17th century Boston,Portsmouth, Rhode Island, the Bronx, and Lincolnshire,England alone, along with Laplante's excellent guideto touring these sites of Hutchinson's life, are worththe price of the book.