Anne Bradstreet is often praised as being one of the first feminist voices in colonial America which, perhaps, is misleading. Her poetry adhered to the standard themes and styles of her male contemporaries, glorifying male-dominated society and never questioning the authority of the men that controlled her life both personally and spiritually. She was content to be the property of her father, husband, and Puritan society as a whole. However, because she worked within the confines of the Puritan era's gender roles and literary techniques, Anne Bradstreet was able to shed light on the oft overlooked existence of women within the society.

By the time Anne Bradstreet was born in the early 1600s, concrete gender roles, enforced by government regulation, church doctrine, and simple tradition, had been firmly in place for centuries. These gender roles dictated that women were little more than extensions of their husbands meant to...