Damned Women: Sinners and Witches in Puritan New England
- ISBN-10
- 1501713337
- ISBN-13
- 9781501713330
- Category
- History
- Pages
- 240
- Language
- English
- Published
- 1999-01-18
- Publisher
- Cornell University Press
- Author
- Elizabeth Reis
Description
In her analysis of the cultural construction of gender in early America, Elizabeth Reis explores the intersection of Puritan theology, Puritan evaluations of womanhood, and the Salem witchcraft episodes. She finds in those intersections the basis for understanding why women were accused of witchcraft more often than men, why they confessed more often, and why they frequently accused other women of being witches. In negotiating their beliefs about the devil's powers, both women and men embedded womanhood in the discourse of depravity. Puritan ministers insisted that women and men were equal in the sight of God, with both sexes equally capable of cleaving to Christ or to the devil. Nevertheless, Reis explains, womanhood and evil were inextricably linked in the minds and hearts of seventeenth-century New England Puritans. Women and men feared hell equally but Puritan culture encouraged women to believe it was their vile natures that would take them there rather than the particular sins they might have committed. Following the Salem witchcraft trials, Reis argues, Puritans' understanding of sin and the devil changed. Ministers and laity conceived of a Satan who tempted sinners and presided physically over hell, rather than one who possessed souls in the living world. Women and men became increasingly confident of their redemption, although women more than men continued to imagine themselves as essentially corrupt, even after the Great Awakening.
Get the book
Other editions
-
- 1999
- 212 pages
- Paperback
- Cornell University Press
-
- 2000
- 270 pages
- Paperback
- McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Similar books
-
"Keep the Damned Women Out": The Struggle for Coeducation
By Nancy Weiss Malkiel" Focusing on the complexities of institutional decision making, this book tells the story of this momentous era in higher education—revealing how coeducation was achieved not by organized efforts of women activists, but through strategic ...
-
"Keep the Damned Women Out": The Struggle for Coeducation
By Nancy Weiss MalkielSee Patterson report egalitarianism, 18, 506 Eights' Week, 586 Eisenberg, Deedee, 233 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 60 Eliot, Charles W., 33–36 Elizabeth Arden, 128 Elmira College, 313, 347 Emden, Ronnie-Gail, 225 Emmanuel College, ...
-
Spellbound: Women and Witchcraft in America
By Elizabeth ReisSpellbound: Women and Witchcraft in America is a collection of twelve articles that revisit crucial events in the history of witchcraft and spiritual feminism in this country.
-
Hairstyles of the Damned
By Joe MenoIt is the story of the riotous exploits of Brian, a high school burnout, and his best friend Gretchen, a punk rock girl fond of brawling. Joe Meno won the 2003 Nelson Algren Literary Award and is the author of 'Tender as Hellfire' (St.
-
Damned Whores and God's Police
By Anne SummersStereotypes persist to this day, argues Anne Summers in this updated version of her classic book which, in the 40 years since it was first published, has sold well over 100,000 copies and been set on countless school and university ...
-
Damned If She Does, Damned If She Doesn't: Rethinking the Rules of the Game That Keep Women from Succeeding in...
By Howard Fine, Lynn CroninThis perceptive analysis exposes five paradoxes that put women in no-win professional situations and concludes with a new model for business, which the authors call a coed corporation.
-
The Blessed and the Damned: Sinful Women and Unbaptised Children in Irish Folklore
By Anne O'ConnorThis is represented in many different genres of folklore, such as folktales, legends, ballads, memorates, beliefs and belief statements, and exists within the context of rich literary, historical and imaginative parallels.
-
Capote's Women: A True Story of Love, Betrayal, and a Swan Song for an Era
By Laurence LeamerLaurence Leamer re-creates the lives of these fascinating swans, their friendships with Capote and one another, and the doomed quest to write what could have been one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century.
-
Damned
By Chuck PalahniukThis is the afterlife as only Chuck Palahniuk could imagine it: a twisted inferno inspired by both the most extreme and mundane of human evils, where The English Patient plays on repeat and roaming demons devour sinners limb by limb.
-
Women in Early America
By Carol Berkin, Jennifer L. MorganSee, e.g., Pearson and Van Laer, Early Records of the City and County of Albany, 1:279. Todt and Shattuck, “Capable Entrepreneurs,” 183, 207–8. Gehring, Fort Orange Court Minutes, 289–90. A wife needed to have only her husband's verbal ...