But those Puritan colonists had far greater troubles to harass them than the few quiet Quaker women who were moved by Inner Light to speak in the village streets.  One of these troubles we have touched upon—­the Rise of the Antinomians, or the disturbance caused by Anne Hutchinson.  The other was the Salem Witchcraft proceedings.  In both of these women were directly concerned, and indeed were at the root of the disturbances.  Let us examine in some detail the influence of Puritan womanhood in these social upheavals that shook the foundations of church rule in New England.

While most of the women of the Puritan colonies seem to have been too busy with their household duties and their numerous children to concern themselves extensively with public affairs, there was this one woman, Anne Hutchinson, who has gained lasting fame as the cause of the greatest religious and political disturbance occurring in Massachusetts before the days of the Revolution.  Many are the references in the early writers to this radical leader and her followers.  Some of the most prominent men and women in the colony were inclined to follow her, and for a time it appeared that hers was to be the real power of the day; great was the excitement.  Thomas Hutchinson in his History of Massachusetts Bay Colony, told of her trial and banishment:  “Countenanced and encouraged by Mr. Vane and Mr. Cotton, she advanced doctrines and opinions which involved the colony in disputes and contensions; and being improved to civil as well as religious purposes, had like to have produced ruin both to church and state.”

Anne Hutchinson was the daughter of Francis Marbury, a prominent clergyman of Lincolnshire, England.  Intensely religious as a child, she was deeply influenced when a young woman by the preaching of John Cotton.  The latter, not being able to worship as he wished in England, moved to the Puritan colony in the New World, and Anne Hutchinson, upon her arrival at Boston, frankly confessed that she had crossed the sea solely to be under his preaching in his new home.

Many of the prominent men of the community soon became her followers:  Sir Harry Vane, Governor of the colony; her brother-in-law, the Rev. John Wheelwright; William Coddington, a magistrate of Boston; and even Cotton himself, leader of the church and supposedly orthodox of the orthodox.  That this was enough to turn the head of any woman may well be surmised, especially when we remember that she was presumed to be the silent and weaker vessel,—­to find suddenly learned men and even the greatest clergymen of the community sitting at her feet and hearing her doctrines.  It is difficult to determine the real state of affairs concerning this woman and her teachings.  Nothing unless, possibly the witchcraft delusion at Salem, excited the colony as did this disturbance in both church and state.  While much has been written, so much of partisanship is displayed in all the statements that it is with great difficulty that