ABSTRACT
Elizabeth Due was, indeed, a poor wench. A recent immigrant, with no relatives in Massachusetts, she worked in the Salem household of Governor John Endecott in 1654. She complained of persistent attempts by Endecott’s eighteenyear-old son, Zerobabel, at intimacy. When she became pregnant, the Endecott family acted quickly to free her from her indenture and marry her to a fellow servant. When Due persisted in claiming that the teenage Zerobabel, not Cornelious Hulett, had fathered her child, she was whipped 13 stripes for slander in June, 1654. When that failed to quiet her, she was whipped again in December, this time 20 stripes, a punishment of unprecedented severity, for continuing to slander Mr. Zerobabel Endecott.2 Cornelious Hulett, whom she testified had never so much as kissed her, was sentenced to 10 stripes, the sentence to be carried out “some lecture day in seasonable weather.” Due’s sentence was harsh, and exacerbated by her unwillingness to accept release from her indenture, a husband and a father for her child in return for her silence. She fits the profile of women prosecuted for fornication in Essex County prior to 1665. She was a servant, her partner was part of her employer’s household, and her punishment was more severe than that of her male partner, whether Zerobabel Endecott or Cornelius Hulett. In the 25-year period between 1640 and 1665, an average of one woman per year was prosecuted for illegitimate fornication in Essex County. Even as the number of female defendants quadrupled between 1666 and 1685 to four illegitimate pregnancies per year, they comprised a tiny portion of Essex County women. Clearly Puritans demanded and got sexual discipline from the majority of single women and men. The successful repression of extramarital sexual intercourse
placed a severe burden upon bastard-bearers who were punished not only by the patriarchal system but also by isolation from the majority of women who managed the difficult transition from adolescence through courtship to marriage. Their successes enabled them to view the few women who bore illegitimate children as contemptible failures and provided the women’s community with the moral authority to police the behaviors of single women.
