Women’s sleeves were not to be more than half an ell wide.  There were to be no ’immoderate great sleeves, immoderate ... knots of ryban, broad shoulder bands and rayles, silk ruses, double ruffles and cuffs.’  The women were complained of because of their ’wearing borders of hair and their cutting, curling, and immodest laying out of their hair.’"[13]

Petty details that would not receive a moment’s consideration in our own day aroused the theological scruples of those colonial pastors, and moved them to interminable arguments which nicely balanced the pros and cons as warranted by scripture.  One of John Cotton’s most famous sermons dealt with the question as to whether women had a right to sing in church, and after lengthy disquisition the preacher finally decided that the Lord had no special objection to women’s singing the Psalms, but this conclusion was reached only after an unsparing battle of doubts and logic.  “Some,” he declares, “that were altogether against singing of Psalms at all with a lively voice, yet being convinced that it is a moral worship of God warranted in Scripture, then if there must be a Singing one alone must sing, not all (or if all) the Men only and not the Women....  Some object, ’Because it is not permitted to speak in the Church in two cases:  1.  By way of teaching....  For this the Apostle accounteth an act of authority which is unlawful for a woman to usurp over the man, II, Tim. 2, 13.  And besides the woman is more subject to error than a man, ver. 14, and therefore might soon prove a seducer if she became a teacher....  It is not permitted to a woman to speak in the Church by way of propounding questions though under pretence of desire to learn for her own satisfaction; but rather it is required she should ask her husband at home.”

Thus we might follow Cotton through many a page and hear his ingenious application of Biblical verses, his carefully balanced arguments, his earnest consideration of what seems to the modern reader a most trivial question.  To him, however, and probably to the women also it was a weighty subject, more important by far than the cause of the high mortality among both mothers and children of the day—­a mortality appallingly high.  It would seem that the fevers, sore throats, consumption, and small pox that destroyed women and babes in vast numbers might have claimed some attention from the hair-splitting clergyman and his congregation.  We must not, however, judge the age too harshly.  It is utterly impossible for us of the twentieth century to understand entirely the view point of the Puritans; for the remarkable era of the nineteenth century intervenes, and freedom from superstition and blind faith is a gift which came after that era and not before.