Women's Rights and "Speech Communities" in American Legal History

Abstract

Sandra VanBurkleo's Belonging to the World is part of a co-sponsored series by the Oxford University Press and the Organization of American Historians of Bicentennial Essays on the Bill of Rights. Designed as a synthetic work that covers women's relationship to the law and American constitutional culture, the book begins with a discussion of women's legal rights in the colonial era and moves through to the late 1990s. It provides readers with a comprehensive view of women's public and political attempts to gain their rights. She is interested in when women gain a public voice-what she terms a community-so VanBurkleo investigates the issue of silence and silencing of women's voices throughout American history. She begins by discussing the famous colonial examples of the trials and troubles of Ann Hutchinson and Ann Hibbens, both of whom were condemned for their violations of the norms of proper female speech. Hutchinson's critiques of the ministers' sermons (which took place in her home with large and sometimes mixed sex audiences) placed her outside the boundaries. Hutchinson was explicitly chastised for being a preacher [rather] than a Hearer. As a woman, her role was to be a silent listener. The Puritans expected the male ministers to stand between laypeople and the Bible-they were to interpret it and explain it to them. Ann Hutchinson violated these strictures on female passivity and silence and paid for her offense through banishment, excommunication, and ultimately, her death on the frontier. So too, Ann Hibbens violated strictures on female speech, but this time in an economic realm. She went beyond the accepted role of deputy Husband by being a hard bargainer and challenger of what she suggested was price-fixing by local carpenters. Her church trial emphasized her improper speech and charged her with persisting in her contemptuous speech and behavior. She was excommunicated immediately; when her popular and prominent husband died in 1654, she became vulnerable to witchcraft charges and was executed