ABSTRACT

This deposition represents a defining moment in the articulation of competing gender ideologies in seventeenth-century Essex County, Massachusetts. The speaker, Mary Higginson, spurned Joseph Mayo. More, she said, she would expose him “that he might be known from honest men.” Higginson is a true daughter of Zion, a goodwife-in-training. She retained her virtue and outlived three husbands. Hannah Adams, having had sex with Mayo in an upstairs chamber, demonstrated her similarity to Eve. Rhetorically and morally, Mary Higginson held the gender high ground. Massachusetts Bay was settled between 1630 and 1640 by religious idealists intent on creating a society based on Biblical precepts far from the interference of the established Church of England and the temptations of contemporary English society.2 It was an ideal site for a social experiment. Its newly arrived population was isolated, homogeneous, and committed to the religious and social goals of radical Protestantism. Puritans brought to the New World a distinctive religious ideology, which had the potential to enhance the institution of marriage and, consequently, married women, because Puritans viewed their relationship with God in marital terms. This potential, however, remained undeveloped because Puritans retained standard early modern English beliefs about gender, accepting the traditional Judaic-Christian interpretation that posited women as the inheritors of Eve’s characteristics. The idea that women were innately more prone to sin, in turn, affected the ways in which men and women constructed their religious be-liefs and their sexual attitudes. Hannah Adams represented the past: Mary Higginson the hoped-for future.