"A Funeral Eulogy, upon that Pattern and Patron of Virtue, the truly pious, peerless and matchless Gentlewoman
MRS. ANNE BRADSTREET, RIGHT PANARETES,
Mirror of her Age, Glory of her Sex, whose Heaven-born-Soul leaving its earthly Shrine, chose its native home, and was taken to its Rest, upon the 16th Sept. 1672."
All of which strikes us as a little hyperbolic, while the phrase "Patron of Virtue" does not appear as very happily chosen, and the reference of the reverend gentleman in the body of his "poem" to the
"Black, fatal, dismal, inauspicious day"
would be a little overdone if applied to a general catastrophe. Yet even this balderdash is of interest as showing us the estimate in which was held America's first woman of letters the first at least to attain note and thus worthy, in that respect at least, to be held as patron saint by all the lady writers of our day and country.
There were a few other women writers during the period of settlement; but they were very few. As may be gathered from the tenor of the quoted lines from Anne Bradstreet's prologue, the spirit of Puritanism was opposed to literary pursuits by a woman, at least to the degree of a profession. Indeed, it is probable that there was widespread sympathy with the sentiments of the chronicler of the following incident, in which is to be seen the regard in which were held feminine litterati:
"The Governor of Hartford upon Connecticut came to Boston, and brought his wife with him (a godly young woman and of special parts) who was fallen into a sad infirmity, the loss of her understanding and reason, which had been growing upon her divers years by occasion of her giving herself wholly to reading and writing, and had written many books. Her husband being very loving and tender of her was loath to grieve her; but he saw his error when it was too late. For if she had attended to her household affairs, and such things as belong to women, and not gone out of her way and calling to meddle in such things as are proper for men, whose minds are stronger, she had kept her wits and might have improved them usefully and honorably in the place God had set her."
It was Governor Winthrop whose domestic affliction arose from such a strange cause; and it is not unlikely that he inspired the words here set down. At all events, the comments are amusing. If all the women now writing books were to suffer like penalty with Mistress Winthrop the insane asylums would have to be considerably enlarged; but authorship seems to have grown less fatal to the fair sex of late years.
For the rest, we must regard these mothers of the country in the mass rather than as individuals; and this is in accord with their true natures. They were not given to "brawling in the streets" or to "contention upon the housetops," these women of the old Puritans; they did their duties in their household and left the management of the weightier affairs of the young colony to the men. Yet they guided these same men in ways which they hardly knew; and they were in all ways fitted to be the mothers of the nation which was even then beginning to stretch its infant arms in growing strength. They were grave, decorous, and terribly strong, those wives and daughters of the Pilgrims. They took upon themselves the cares of the household, and these were not slight in those days when all provision must be garnered by the sweat of the eater's brow. There were then no shops to which one might send in search of luxuries or even necessities; the Puritan woman usually brought with her on her ship some store of household goods, some chests of clothing, some plate perhaps to furnish forth her table; for all the rest she depended upon the energy and skill of her husband, the work of her own hands, and the blessing of that God to worship whom in freedom she and hers had sought the wilderness as their home. And the spirit of that wilderness entered into her as she dwelt in its boundaries; she drew from its breast some of its quiet and strength and truth, even as the aborigines had imbibed these qualities in their long communion with nature at her best. There was to come a time, and that right soon, when the reclamation of the wilderness should have so far progressed that there would be town life, on its borders at least, and the Puritan woman would lose some of the qualities which had been imparted to her by the land to which she had come as an alien and where she remained as a daughter; but until the coming of that time she was true to the inspiration of the country in which her lot was cast. America was then a land of mystery; back from the Atlantic stretched miles upon miles of untrodden, unknown wood and plain and hill and lake and river; and the power of the unknown was felt over that little strip of coast which acknowledged though not in entire subjection the control of the white race. So the Pilgrim Mother had ever the sense of the mysterious, the unfathomable, pressing upon her, ever ready to whisper new secrets in her ear; and though she was as a rule stern and unimaginative, she was more profoundly affected by this mystery than she knew. It was to bear terrible fruit in after time in the horrors of Salem witchcraft; but for the present it only tried and proved and hardened the courage of the women who faced it with confidence in the strength of their husbands and in the protection of their God.