I N the spring of i649, the Massachusetts Bay Colony's Court of Assistants tried, convicted, and imprisoned Mistress Alice Tilly, a prominent Boston midwife. During the course of the legal proceedings, which lasted for over a year, large groups of women submitted six petitions on her behalf, causing the authorities to modify their initial negative judgment. What offense had Alice Tilly committed? On what evidence was she convicted? Neither of those questions can be definitively answered because the court's records for the years between i644 and i673 are lost. Consequently, the outlines of the story of Mistress Tilly and her many female supporters must be pieced together from fragments. The most important sources are located in the Massachusetts State Archives: a deposition (the only dated manuscript); a brief petition from a small group of men and women asking the authorities two questions about the case; and five longer petitions presented to either the General Court or the Court of Assistants by Mistress Tilly's devotees. A total of 217 women, drawn largely from Boston and Dorchester, contributed 294 signatures to the six petitions. Those documents are printed here, followed by a combined, alphabetized list of signers. The episode is worth reconstructing in as much detail as possible because the petitions drafted in i649 and i650 represent American women's first collective political action-by far the largest such group activity undertaken prior to the creation of the Philadelphia Ladies Association in the sum-