The Passion of Anne Hutchinson: An Extraordinary Woman, the Puritan Patriarchs, & the World They Made and Lost by Marilyn J. Westerkamp (review)

Abstract

I gave a talk to K-12 teachers last March broadly and blandly titled “Reapproaching Women’s History Month.” I opened with a collage of “well-behaved women seldom make history” and “notorious RBG” knick-knacks. I then invited those attending to join me in investigating a number of current books aimed at young people, perhaps best represented by the She Persisted series known collectively as the Persisterhood and the “Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls” app and podcast based on the ever-expanding book series by the same name.1 We talked together about the promise and pitfalls of this “shero” approach to Women’s History Month curricula, thinking about what would be gained by devoting just as much attention—even all year round!—to everyday women from the past and how they, and therefore we, make history. This aim, of course, has long been the driving force behind women’s history. Generations of historians have brilliantly illuminated the everyday lives of ordinary women, demonstrating how they shaped and were shaped by the worlds in which they lived. In the process, they have revealed complex identities and societies intersected and ordered by everchanging ideas about race, religion, ethnicity, class, ability, and sexuality—as well as marriage, motherhood, sex, citizenship, and work. My conversation with these educators highlighted the need for diverse and multifaceted stories that, yes, inspired students with examples of strong women doing uncommon things, but that also represented ordinary women who, while perhaps not exceptional, were nevertheless extraordinarily important. So imagine my sheepishness when it took several chapters before I realized what Marilyn Westerkamp was really up to with her excellent book, The Passion of Anne Hutchinson. Despite her clearly stating at the outset she had given up her hope to write “a traditional biography of Anne Hutchinson” (p. 2), I had supposed her work would follow in the tradition of other classic biographies of early American women—Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale (1990), Elaine Foreman Crane’s The Diary of Elizabeth Drinker (1994), Nell Irwin Painter’s