Hutchinson’s verbal performance proved that she was the magistrates’ intellectual equal—if not their superior—but it had hurt her case. Prevailing attitudes toward women at the time held that female minds were too weak to tackle complex thought: Governor John Winthrop once publicly claimed that a woman had committed suicide because she read and thought too much.
The model Puritan woman, according to Hutchinson’s biographer Eve LaPlante, was “modest, meek, submissive, virtuous, obedient, and kind” and “solely occupied with supervising and maintaining the home, cooking sometimes brewing and dairying, and bearing and rearing children. She was expected to suffer all these in silence. . . .”