Note Note 6, page 330 — BOOK III. CENTRIFUGAL FORCES IN COLONY-PLANTING. (continued 2)

Mrs. Hutchinson's character. Mrs. Anne Hutchinson had been one of Cotton's ardent disciples in old Boston. She crossed the sea with her husband that she might sit under his ministry in New England. She was a woman cursed with a natural gift for leadership in an age that had no place for such women. Wonder-working Providence, ch. lxii. "This Masterpiece of Womens wit," the railing Captain Johnson calls her, and certainly her answers before the Massachusetts General Court go to show that she was not inferior in cleverness to any of the magistrates or ministers. Note 6. Winthrop, whose antipathy to her was a passion, speaks of her "sober and profitable carriage," and says that she was "very helpful in the time of childbirth and other occasions of bodily infirmities, and well furnished with means to those purposes." Short Story, etc., p. 31. In the state of medical science at that time such intelligent and voluntary ministration from a "gentlewoman" must have been highly valued. Almost alone of the religionists of her time she translated her devotion into philanthropic exertion. But a woman of her "nimble and active wit" could not pass her life in bodily ministrations. Power seeks expression, and her native eloquence was sure to find opportunity. Cotton's The Way of the Churches Cleared, Part I, p. 51. Short Story, 31. Mrs. Hutchinson made use of the usual gathering of gossips on the occasion of childbirth to persuade the women to that more intimate religious life of which she was an advocate. It was the custom to hold devotion at concert pitch by meetings at private houses for men only; women might be edified by their husbands at home. Mrs. Hutchinson ventured to open a little meeting for women. Short Story, 34. This was highly approved at first, and grew to unexpected dimensions; fifty, and sometimes eighty, of the principal women of the little town were present at her conferences.