Out of Sight, Out of History

As we gear up for a season of presidential campaigning, it is obvious, but worthwhile pointing out, that none of America's presidents have been women. Women serve as a small minority on the Supreme Court, in Congress, and on the president's Cabinet, but none has attained the nation's highest office. Most noted women in our political life are first ladies, such as Abigail Adams and Eleanor Roosevelt. Just last year, booksellers attributed the remarkable success of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton's memoir to her "status as a dual symbol of female victimhood and power." During the four centuries since Europeans colonized America, that combination is as far as we've gotten.

But on Independence Day weekend, there is another worthy point, and a more easily remedied wrong, about the place of women in American history: none of the people we recognize as our founders is female.

The colonial rebel Anne Hutchinson, a tenth great grandmother of President George W. Bush, was a Puritan preacher's daughter, midwife, and mother of 15 from Lincolnshire, England. Born in 1591, Hutchinson crossed the Atlantic in 1634. In an era when no woman could vote, hold public office, or teach outside the home, she held meetings at which she interpreted Scripture and critiqued ministers' sermons before growing audiences of women and, eventually, men, including the colonial governor, Henry Vane.

By 1636 Hutchinson's power rivaled that of her next-door neighbor John Winthrop, Massachusetts's first governor. Winthrop derided her as "a woman not fit for our society," an "ally of Satan," and--referring to the ancient Israeli queen widely recognized as the most evil woman in the Bible--"this American Jezebel." Unable to silence her, he brought her to trial before the Massachusetts General Court in 1637 and had her banished as a heretic. A week later, she became midwife to the nation's first college when the court voted to build Harvard to fortify orthodox power and prevent a charismatic radical like her from ever again holding sway. Released from five months of imprisonment in 1638, Hutchinson walked to Portsmouth, Rhode Island, with more than 50 of her followers, becoming the only woman ever to cofound an American colony.

Last summer, as part of an exploration of her life and times, I rented a beach house in that coastal town north of Newport on the island for which the state was named. "Welcome to Portsmouth, Birthplace of American Democracy, established 1638," a road sign announces. The local public library displays household objects--clay pipes from England, Delftware pottery, spoons, thimbles, and a chamber pot--that she and her neighbors threw into a midden, or garbage heap, in the first half of the 17th century, according to Brown University archeologists who excavated the site. Our landlord mentioned that the elderly man who had discovered this site while walking his dog on the beach in the 1950s lived a few doors away.

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