IN NORTHERN NEW ENGLAND a “neighbor” might be a woman living thirty feet away on a definable street in a well-developed group of dwellings clustered around a village meetinghouse. She might also be a housewife within shouting distance in the garrison house at the top of the next rise. Settlement patterns varied, but most folks had neighbors. It was dangerous to live alone. But beyond that, neighborliness was a cultural norm in all the New England colonies. When young Constance Oliver of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, opened the door one morning, she found her neighbor Mary Richards asking to borrow a kettle. Since her mother wasn’t home, she asked Goody Richards to wait awhile, in the meantime going herself to another neighbor’s house to fetch a coal of fire.1
Borrowing was part of the rhythm of life at all social levels. Families not only shared commodities. They shared the work which produced them. Not wanting to appear too interested in a friendly weaver, Faith Black of Topsfield sat down by his loom and began to shell peas. Only when she spent too much time at his house did her behavior become suspect.2 Gadding was discouraged, but socializing was not. Johannah Green counseled her married daughter to become more involved with her neighbors, telling her “that she might better do her work an go to another bodys house than they that have a great family can go to hers.”3 Shared work in this form derived from the same needs and offered some of the same rewards as the more visible “huskings” and “quiltings” common to village life. Berrying, washing, spinning were female specialties which might bring neighbors together. Sharing work, women shared other responsibilities as well. When a little girl named Hannah Hutchinson was finishing her mother’s wash at a neighbor’s house, two other housewives were on hand to catch her in a lie.4
By twentieth-century standards, even the largest colonial towns were small. In 1754 Salem, Massachusetts, the most populous town north of Boston, had 3,462 people.5 The average town population in 1750 has been estimated at 1,280 for Massachusetts (including Maine) and at 640 for New Hampshire.6 Obviously, men and women who spent all their lives in a village of a few hundred persons knew their neighbors’ names and probably their life histories and their personal idiosyncrasies as well. But it is a mistake to romanticize the concept of “neighborliness,” to assume that material interdependence and physical proximity automatically ensured “meaningful personal relationships, a sense of participation, and a feeling of collective caring.”7
Guides in historic houses in New England love to display the “latchstring” in seventeenth-century doors. When the string was out, so the story goes, visitors were welcome; when it was in, no company was sought. Such a subtle but commonly understood language may have been used. Surviving records show that at least some housewives employed even more colorful methods. An Ipswich woman snubbed her neighbor by hanging a dishclout out the door when she saw her approaching. A Hampton, New Hampshire, wife attempted to trap her neighbor, whom she suspected of being a witch, by draping the doorjamb with bay leaves.8 As these women knew, a neighbor could provide commodities, household help, friendship—or aggravation.
Contention among neighbors has been a central theme in the recent social history of New England, yet most studies have concentrated on the political and institutional development of towns and have consequently had very little to say about women per se. This chapter will isolate themes of neighborliness of particular importance to women by examining the compact center of one town in one period—Ipswich, Massachusetts, circa 1670.
Settled in 1639 under the leadership of such pre-eminent Puritans as Thomas Dudley, Simon Bradstreet, Richard Saltonstall, and John Winthrop, Jr., the town gave intellectual, religious, and military leadership to New England in the seventeenth century.9 But there are more important reasons for choosing it as a subject of study. Because Ipswich was the seat of one of the quarterly courts of Essex County, its citizens—including a number of housewives who might otherwise never have bothered to enter a suit—had easy access to formal justice. As a result, an unusual number of the petty squabbles and mundane struggles of housekeeping in this seventeenth-century community have been preserved to history. And because Ipswich was blessed at the turn of the twentieth century with an intelligent and energetic town historian, Thomas Franklin Waters, many of these events can be traced to a specific neighborhood.
LIFE IN IPSWICH was characterized by interdependence—and inequality. Although all of the original inhabitants of the town had land, some had a great deal more than others. One scholar has classified three-quarters of the population as “small landholders,” whose allotments ranged from twenty poles to ninety acres. Among the remaining quarter, fifty-six men owned from 100 to 400 acres; eleven men owned more than 400 but fewer than 1,000; and five men owned 1,000 or more.10 Three of these five largest landholders—Samuel Symonds, Daniel Denison, and Jonathan Wade—were still living in Ipswich in 1670. William Hubbard, one of the two ministers in the town, was a son of the fourth.
The town had been laid out as an open-field English village with most settlers living on small plots in the center and traveling to tillage land on the periphery. The “homelots” of Symonds, Denison, Hubbard, and Wade were distinguished less by their size than by their proximity to important public institutions. Denison and Symonds—when they were not attending General Court or visiting one of their large farms in the outlying countryside—lived near the meetinghouse green. Hubbard and Wade built their houses near the schoolhouse green on the opposite side of the river, as did John Rogers, the eminent first minister of the town. In each neighborhood the greater houses of the gentry stood near the lesser houses of craftsmen and small farmers and the cottages of the poor.11
The meetinghouse at the center of the village gave tangible form to the social conservatism as well as to the Utopian idealism of its builders. Rejecting popish ornament and ritual for the plain word of God, the saints nevertheless perpetuated the Anglican custom of “seating” the congregation in ranked order, according to sex, wealth, and age. Gender was the first distinction among God’s children. The gospel of damnation and grace intoned from the pulpit was the same for all Christians, but men and women heard it from different sides of the room. Although women predominated among covenanted members of the church, men did the preaching, bore the titles of elder and deacon, and collected the tithes. Their wives sat on the opposite side of the room or in the gallery, and wrestled with small children—and sometimes with each other. Not until late in the seventeenth century were family pews constructed, and these were reserved for a few of the most prominent citizens of the town.12 Women could not walk into the meetinghouse without being reminded of their separateness, of the primacy of their gender identity.
The meetinghouse green was the focal point of village life, but it was hardly the grassy oasis of nostalgic memory. Strewn with horse manure and rutted with cart tracks, it was set with such rude reminders of human and animal cussedness as the whipping post, the pound, the watchhouse, and the jail. Around the meetinghouse itself were the remnants of a stone fortification never used and always out of repair but not officially abandoned until 1702, when the town declared itself free of Indian danger by selling the rock and using the proceeds to buy a town clock.13 Women—like men—were subject to the civil authority symbolized in the jail and the whipping post, but they did not participate in town meeting or serve in such offices as constable or keeper of the pound. Nor did they experience the military order of training day or the often drunken disorder at the tavern afterward when, for a few hours at least, social rank dissolved in a common maleness.14
There was hardly an aspect of life untouched by public authority in Puritan Ipswich. The same court which issued tavern licenses and enforced school law admonished Goodwife Brabrook for carrying a half-bushel of corn or peas with her when she went to meeting, and fined old Goodman Lee for swearing by his salvation. For women’s history, the court’s intrusiveness in daily life had important consequences.15 Scraps of testimony collected in the parlors of Major-General Denison or Deputy-Governor Symonds, the two magistrates in town, tell us much about ordinary life in Ipswich. Beyond that, the depositions demonstrate that women, though excluded from formal authority, played a central role in the communication networks which bonded or sundered neighborhoods.
In the early 1670s, in a period of about eighteen months, almost two dozen actions originated in William Hubbard’s neighborhood on the south side of the Ipswich River. Although only five of the twenty-six defendants in these cases were female, 85 of the 240 depositions were delivered by women.16 In these actions it is almost impossible to distinguish private from public issues, sexual slander from economics, or the entanglements of women from the feuds of their spouses. The evidence presented in court merely hints at the complexity of interaction within the neighborhood itself. The chains of innuendo become almost ludicrous, as when Margaret and Elizabeth Boarman deposed that Laurence Clinton said that Goody Abbot told Goody Howard that … or when Goody Hunt testified that Thomas Knowlton came to her house and said that Joseph Lee had told him that he had heard that Knowlton had said that Goody Hunt had accused Betty Woodward of …17
A young man named Nathaniel Browne, who had set up a soap-boiling business in the neighborhood, learned at first hand the power of talk. He inadvertently returned the wrong pair of sheep shears and was accused of stealing. His wife, Judith, applied for admission to the church and found herself in a clamor of gossip (none of which was specifically reiterated in court). In his own testimony Browne blamed their troubles on the shoemaker Knowlton, another young man and relative newcomer to the neighborhood. Knowlton had “set neighbors together by the ears,” Browne complained. He and Judith had tried to handle their grievance privately, but it had done no good. He had “asked Goody Leigh’s advice, also Goodwife Rust,” but when Goodwife Rust remained “as intimate as ever” with his enemy Knowlton, he was forced to petition the court.18
Goodwives Lee and Rust are barely visible in formal records from seventeenth-century Ipswich. They neither owned property nor held public office, yet in the world of Nathaniel Browne they obviously occupied a position of eminence. The chains of hearsay which reverberated in Daniel Denison’s parlor cannot be dismissed as idle gossip, certainly not as a mischievous outlet for otherwise powerless women. Gossip was an effective mechanism used by both sexes in the intimate arena of this Puritan town. When women talked, men as well as other women listened.
On one level, then, the Essex County court records demonstrate the intermeshing of male and female concerns. But on closer examination they also point toward a separate world of women, one which had rules and conflicts of its own. Housewives in colonial Ipswich can be divided into three social groups—the mistresses of the big houses (often the wives of magistrates or ministers); their near neighbors but social inferiors, the wives of small landowners and craftsmen; and an indeterminate but growing group who lived in rented houses or in semi-dependence upon employers or parents. The difference between the second and third groups was often determined by age as much as by wealth. Interacting with these housewives was a fourth group—the unmarried girls who worked as servants. Although there were a few indentured servants and slaves in New England in the seventeenth century, most household helpers were neighbors or neighbors’ daughters. Families with more children than work to do exported maids; families with big houses or no children or very young children took them in. Interconnections among these four groups are apparent in the case of Sarah Row, a young woman accused of sexual misbehavior.
Sarah was one of eight daughters of the carpenter Ezekiel Woodward, but she had lived and worked for many years in William Hubbard’s house, which stood just across the schoolhouse green from her parents’ home. Before she was eighteen, Sarah married a fisherman named William Row, who spent much of his time at the Isles of Shoals in Maine, but who seems to have rented a house somewhere in Ipswich for at least one winter. Sarah’s status after her marriage remained somewhat fluid. She maintained friendships with the servants in the Hubbard house and remained close to an unmarried girl named Sarah Buckley, who worked in the kitchen and cowyard of Nathaniel Rust, the glover. But she was also in and out of Judith Browne’s house, and she was friendly with Hannah Knowlton, the twenty-five-year-old wife of the shoemaker.19 Both groups of friends—the servants and the craftsmen’s wives—had something to say when Sarah’s case came to court.
In contrast, Sarah’s former mistress, Margaret Hubbard, remained aloof from the squabbles which rocked her neighborhood. Although the Reverend Mr. Hubbard testified on Sarah’s behalf, any opinions which his wife had were expressed in private. Mistress Hubbard was insulated less by the seven-acre homelot which surrounded her house than by her dignity as a minister’s wife and a gentlewoman. The mistresses of the big houses moved in a social—and often familial—circle of their own. Margaret Hubbard’s mother, the widow of the Reverend Nathaniel Rogers, lived beyond the schoolhouse on the other side of the green. So for a time did her brother John, soon to be president of Harvard College. John’s wife, Elizabeth, was the daughter of Major-General Denison.
Eminence did not mean independence, however. The houses of the Hubbards, the Rogerses, and the Denisons were distinguished by books, pictures, gilt looking glasses, and rich textiles (Margaret Hubbard’s father had even owned “a treble viol”), but their floors were swept and their beds were made by the young daughters of the small landowners of Ipswich. Just as Mistress Hubbard had employed the carpenter’s daughter, Sarah Row, her mother, Mistress Rogers, had for years depended upon Mary Quilter, the daughter of a small farmer whose houselot was on the other side of the river. Patience Denison, the Major-General’s wife, had engaged a number of servants over the years, including Sarah Roper, whose father, Walter, owned a house, barn, and homestead worth £80 on the High Street.20
Thus, relationships among female neighbors could form in a number of directions. They could be both vertical and horizontal, involving economic links between servants and mistresses as well as close friendships among women of comparable position. The rules which governed social intercourse cannot be fully reclaimed at this distance, but female testimony in a number of cases provides some vivid clues. The cases of Frances Quilter (an ordinary wife) and Patience Denison (a gentlewoman) clearly reveal what we might call the Rules of Industry and of Charity as they affected self-definition in this seventeenth-century village. A cluster of cases involving Elizabeth Hunt (the wife of an aspiring freeman) demonstrates the problems involved in maintaining the Rule of Modesty.
All three Rules are expressed in Proverbs 31. Bathsheba was involved in many discrete tasks, as we have seen, but behind all her effort was the Rule of Industry: “She looketh well to the ways of her household, and eateth not the bread of idleness.” Because women’s work was essentially supportive, tied not to products but to people, it was by nature often invisible. Women did not build houses or rig ships or preach sermons; they fed and clothed the men who did. As a consequence, “work” could never be isolated from the larger relationship of which it was a part. Nor could it often be directly measured. Because a day’s effort was quickly swallowed, the measure of productivity was often in the worker herself—a good wife kept busy.
Like the virtuous woman of the Bible, she also “stretcheth out her hand to the poor; yea, she reacheth forth her hands to the needy.” In the larger sense, this Rule of Charity meant neighborly concern, a general willingness to extend oneself to meet the needs of others. During the witchcraft uproar of 1692, for example, one suspected woman was saved by a petition of 116 residents of her town, who testified that she “was allways, readie & willing to doe for [her neighbors] w[ha]t laye in her power night & day, though w[i]th hazard to her health or other danger.”21 For wealthy women, however, it meant hand-to-hand relief of poor neighbors.
The Rule of Modesty was keyed to the concept of hierarchy in a somewhat different way. Because her husband was “known in the gates” and sat “among the elders of the land,” the virtuous woman of Proverbs was entitled to dress in “silk and purple” and to make herself “coverings of tapestry,” but she did not take these visible emblems too seriously, knowing even as she adorned herself that “beauty is vain.” In towns like Ipswich, ordinary women violated the Rule of Modesty by wearing clothing above their status. Silk scarves, for example, were reserved for women whose husbands were worth at least £200. It was not just the threat of sexual impropriety which made modesty a female virtue, but the secondary position of women in the public world. They were to reflect but never to assert status, demonstrating a supportive demeanor in speech, in manners, and in attitude, as well as in clothing.
Because the boundaries of authority and responsibility were largely defined by custom rather than law, casual watching-and-warding by neighbors was far more significant to most women than the power of magistrates. The close association of women in the premodern world was both conservative and supportive, reinforcing the traditional distribution of authority even as it guarded against its abuse. For colonial women, having the “character” of a good wife was as valuable as having a good lawyer might be today—as the stories of Frances Quilter, Patience Denison, and Elizabeth Hunt show.
FRANCES QUILTER’S HUSBAND, Mark, had a reputation in Ipswich for drinking and losing his temper and, as a result, had been the butt of roisterous humor in the tavern on training days. His own lapses in public dignity may have made him overly conscious of his authority at home.22 In March of 1664 he was fined for striking his wife and for hitting a neighbor. The incident with the neighbor occurred on a morning when Rebeckah Shatswell had come to the house to “sit and work” with Goody Quilter “to bear her company.” Quilter came into the room and demanded something to eat. The exchange which followed emerges vividly from the court record as a triangular dialogue between husband, wife, and neighbor.
“Why are you so hasty?” said the wife.
“It may be that he had not his breakfast,” said the neighbor.
“Yes, two hours before he ate meat,” the wife countered, but the husband merely groaned, “A poor deal.”
“Thus, look here of my pottage,” said the wife to the neighbor. “[See] whether I did not boil a good deal of meat.”
“It may be you boil a good deal and eat it up yourself,” the neighbor answered, whereupon the husband turned upon her.
“Hold your prating,” he said.
“I prate no more than you,” she replied, when, to her great surprise, he struck her and threw her out the door.23
We see the neighbor’s role in this family argument changing rapidly. Rebeckah Shatswell had come to the house as a friend; but as the bickering began, her position shifted. Goody Quilter appealed to her first as a defender and then as a judge. She perhaps saw herself as neutral, but to Mark Quilter she was simply an intruder. Even though she supported his right to a good breakfast, he became furious that she was in his house at all. To acknowledge her help would have been to accept her right to intervene in the internal relationships of his family. Horizontal lines between housewife and housewife might form a counterweight to vertical relationships between husband and wife. Mark Quilter’s resentment showed that he recognized this—as well he might, for it was the testimony of neighboring wives which eventually brought his conviction in court.
Yet the triangle thus formed was far from simple, as Goody Quilter knew. Attacked by her husband in front of her friend, she became defensive about her cooking. In some sense, neighbors were an informal jury of one’s peers. Only by living up to the cluster of responsibilities dictated by custom did one earn the respect—and the potential support—of other women. Paramount among these responsibilities was Industry. The broth left in the kettle was proof that Goody Quilter had not wasted her morning.
The case of a wayward wife from nearby Topsfield gives additional evidence of the way female neighbors enforced this rule. The clinching point in the case against Faith Black seems to have come from Goody Hobbes, who testified that Faith was away from home so much that she had neglected her washing and failed to feed her swine. When the charitable—or meddlesome—neighbor added the husband’s shirts to her own wash and carried food to the pigs, all the thanks the wife gave her “was to tell her she did not ask her to do it.”24 This foolish wife lost her case long before it reached the court.
Although the Rule of Industry affected all women, the Rule of Charity was especially important for a wealthy woman like Patience Denison, the wife of the Major-General. Mistress Denison was the second daughter of Dorothy and Thomas Dudley and the sister of the poet Anne Bradstreet, but her modest reputation in colonial history was achieved through her struggles with a servant named Sarah Roper. In March of 1665 the Denisons prosecuted Sarah, who had apparently been stealing from family supplies for more than a year. Most of the stolen provisions had found their way into the kitchen of an impoverished young wife of the neighborhood, Mary Bishop. At this time her husband, Job, may have been at sea. She perhaps lived in part of a house owned by Thomas Bishop just opposite the meetinghouse, or she may have rented a small dwelling owned by a fisherman named Robert Dutch in the block behind the Denison property.25
Whatever its location, Mary Bishop’s dwelling was within handy reach of Sarah Roper. When Goody Bishop lacked milk to make a posset, Sarah brought it to her. When her brother came to town, Sarah provided beer for his entertainment. Meeting her at the well, Sarah gave her cider from the Denison cellar and on other occasions apples for her children, suet for pudding, and pork. In return Goody Bishop gave Sarah some mackerel, a common grade of fish which she said they did not have at the Denison house.26 Like friendships between other women in the same community, the bonds between Sarah and Goody Bishop were cemented with small favors. The difference, of course, was that Patience Denison supplied the goods.
Mary Bishop’s defense before the court is revealing, not so much of her own situation as of the community norm of charity which underlay her plea. She begged clemency on account of her low condition, another woman testifying that the Bishop family would have starved on their scanty diet “had not Sarah Roper helped them with provisions.” Such testimony carried a subtle reproach to Mistress Denison. More pointed was the evidence of another neighbor who said she had heard Sarah Roper call her mistress “an old Jew and hobling Joane.”27
What is most instructive about this case is not the thievery of the servant but the reluctance of the mistress to invoke the law. Sarah Roper carried away more than £10 in household provisions and clothing before she was finally prosecuted in Ipswich court. The Denison household was a wealthy one, yet Patience Denison knew exactly what she owned and what was missing. In court she gave an itemized list of everything Sarah Roper had taken from her, from a coif worth one shilling to apple and chicken pies worth ten. Sarah was a brazen thief, not content to fill a teacup or a pocket. In one year she carried away nine bushels of wheat, trading it to neighbors for clothes and shoes.28 Dependent on her servant, Mistress Denison may have found it easier to ignore her misbehavior than to do without her. Yet Sarah’s slander of her mistress suggests that there was more to the story than that.
As a wealthy and socially prominent member of her community, Patience Denison—like her mother, Dorothy Dudley—was expected to be “a friendly neighbor pitiful to poor.” Sarah Roper suggested that she was in fact stingy, “an old Jew” insensitive to the serious distress of her near neighbor Mary Bishop. As a household administrator, Patience Denison was supposed to be in firm command of her establishment, “to Servants wisely aweful, but yet kind.” According to Sarah, she was really little more than a “hobling Joane” incapable of dealing with flagrant misbehavior in her own kitchen and pantry. Thus, to prosecute Sarah Roper—to reveal the full range of her servant’s manipulations—was to expose her own inadequacies. Measured by the ideal, she had failed. Had she really been “charitable,” “wise,” and “kind,” none of this would have happened.
Patience Denison eventually prosecuted her servant and collected damages. But as long as Sarah Roper remained in the neighborhood—in fact, as long as her reputation survived in the memories of Ipswich housewives—Patience could never be entirely rid of her. Nine years later an Ipswich busybody named Elizabeth Hunt suspected Sarah of stealing her bodkin* after it fell to the floor during church. Although the bodkin was retrieved, Goody Hunt continued to press the grievance. Standing by the gate of the Denison house, she told another neighbor that she had been inside to talk to the Major-General about it, but that he would have nothing to do with it even though he was a magistrate. Sarah Roper could not come there to be examined, Goody Hunt reported, because Mistress Denison was “afraid of her.”29
Patience Denison’s troubles with Sarah Roper not only demonstrate the importance of the Rule of Charity, they also reveal the difficulties experienced by the New England gentry in maintaining a system of deference inherited from the Old World. Even in a town like Ipswich, which was probably as stratified as any in New England, status was never assured. Men and women knew each other too well. Within a few hours conversations held in the big houses could find their way across the back fence to the smaller houses nearby.30 Pushy folks in some of those smaller houses—women like Elizabeth Hunt—were ready to exploit the weaknesses of their betters.
Elizabeth Hunt’s own story is closely linked to her husband’s resentment of the Ipswich gentry. When Daniel Denison ordered the troops to clear brush on the militia field on training day, Samuel Hunt led a small rebellion, insisting that the Major-General had no right to demand such common labor. He picked a fight with another gentleman, Samuel Appleton, over the ownership of a horse. In the court actions which resulted, a rumor surfaced that Nathaniel Browne had boasted he would soon down Appleton because he worked for Hunt, who “kept them like lords for they wanted neither for meat nor drink.” Similar pride was evident a few years later when Hunt, negotiating the marriage of his daughter, boasted that he would give her “as good a portion … as any man In Ipswich should give any of their daughters Except four or five.”31 Samuel Hunt was laying the foundations of a prosperity which in the next century would give his section of the neighborhood the name Hunt’s Cove.32
The Rule of Modesty prevented Elizabeth Hunt from such direct and open competition. She had clear ideas about what was appropriate for a woman in her position, as well as obvious insecurities. She knew what was happening in every house in the neighborhood and she testified in almost every case emanating from her section of the town, but she was careful to tell the court, with some officiousness, that a certain bit of information had come from a housewife named Margaret Lambert who had appeared quite unexpectedly in her kitchen “on a sleeveless maid’s errand, which was to get some scouring sand.”33 She wanted the court to know that she was above the common tale-carrying of an ordinary wife.
When Elizabeth lost her bodkin, she imagined the servant Sarah Roper “picking her teeth” with it.34 She recoiled from contact with the now ignominious Sarah, yet the social structure of colonial Ipswich, which put Sarah’s father, Walter Roper, on the same level as Samuel Hunt, placed the two women within a few inches of each other in the meetinghouse. Struggling to keep her baby quiet during the sermon, Elizabeth had given him the bodkin much as a mother today might hand a child her car keys or a bracelet. When it dropped to the floor at an awkward angle, she was unable to retrieve it. She said Sarah picked it up. Sarah said it fell into the wide cuff of her sleeve, that she didn’t find it until she got home, and that she sent it back promptly the next day. What might have been an innocent accident became in Elizabeth’s mind an affront to her dignity.
If her husband’s social status gave Elizabeth Hunt little opportunity to become “known in the gates,” she was certainly visible in the house of the Lord. That her struggle with Sarah Roper occurred in the meetinghouse tells us much about the female world of colonial Ipswich. It is difficult for twentieth-century minds to comprehend the custom of “seating” the meeting, yet not until the period of the revolution did the majority of towns in New England abandon this visible ratification of hierarchal values.35 Although a few men—and more women—challenged their own place within this system, they did not challenge the system itself.
Elizabeth Hunt’s loss of her bodkin was one of many incidents originating in the Ipswich meetinghouse, including a number of actions involving seating. One of the first controversies is known only through a slander case which ended in the county court. A group of young blades in the town composed a satire which they circulated among the haymows. Entitled “O ye brave Undertakers & gallery makers,” it apparently referred to a proposal initiated by a few of the solid freemen of the town to build a gallery for their wives. The refrain, which is all that is preserved of the poem, not so subtly slandered the social ambitions of the goodwives on the south side of the river. Although the clerk cautiously left off the names in the first line of the refrain, it is not too difficult to supply appropriate substitutes.
Set aside Mistress [Symonds and Denison]
[For] Goode Rust, mother Woodward & Ann.
Pray find me such three again if you can.36
There is no way of knowing if Symonds and Denison are the missing surnames in the first line, but they fit the crude meter and rhyme as well as the theme of the satire. A town wag who wanted to poke fun at petty pride among the women of the congregation might well invoke the apparently untouchable eminence of the chief gentlewomen of the town.
The predominance of women in meetinghouse controversies can be explained in both psychological and practical terms. Women lacked visible emblems of status. Since the meetinghouse was the one public arena open to them, it is hardly surprising that they acted out their search for position there. On the other hand, their physical position in the building was quite literally an uncomfortable one. In towns like Ipswich, with a young and growing population, they were almost unbearably crowded. Their smallest children sat on their laps or wedged in beside them, while their older daughters perched on improvised benches crammed into the aisles. Their husbands’ benches were surely as hard and perhaps just as narrow, but men did not have to cope with wriggling distractions. It is little wonder that a woman like Elizabeth Hunt might succumb to the temptation to push and shove when her neighbor’s daughter once again jammed her chair hard against the end of the bench. “Take notice of Goody Hunt,” Thomas Knowlton cried aloud from the gallery—as if a dozen of her nearest neighbors had not already recorded both the pattern and the meaning of her behavior.37
In 1681 Samuel Hunt was among eight successful petitioners who sought liberty to “raise the hindmost seate in the norwest syde of the Meeting House two foote higher than it now is, for there wives to sitt in.”38 As the first families of the town began to sit together in pews, the distance between wealthy women and women of ordinary status became even more pronounced. If they could not sit with their husbands in a walled-off space, ambitious matrons like Elizabeth Hunt could at least sit together in elevated dignity.
IPSWICH REPRESENTS one form of community organization in northern New England, a stratified nuclear village with a strong church and a court at the center. Such a setting facilitated friendships among women, but it also undermined privacy, nurtured gossip, and reinforced the patriarchal authority of public institutions. Only further study of the spatial and social organization of neighborhoods can tell us how other forms of settlement affected women. Yet scattered evidence suggests that the underlying patterns of neighborliness which we have found here were not limited to a single time or place.
The Rule of Modesty determined that women elsewhere who became involved in squabbles over the selection of a minister or the placing of a meetinghouse would act by indirection. The Rule of Charity dictated that mistresses of the largest houses in the frontier towns would suffer “garrison crowds” during prolonged Indian conflict. Most widespread of all was the Rule of Industry. Though it may not be so recognized, that Rule still operates in some New England towns three hundred years later in the widespread female habit of knitting in public meetings. Such a practice surely goes back to a time when a woman’s diligence was known and judged by all her neighbors. Carrying her “kniting work” about with her, a maidservant or a fishwife demonstrated the old proverb, “A man works from sun to sun, but a woman’s work is never done.”
* Goody Hunt’s bodkin was probably a large blunt needle used for lacing bodices or pulling drawstrings through clothing. No seventeenth-century bodkins survive in New England collections, though silver bodkins occasionally appear in probate inventories.
