When pariahs become heroes: the case of Anne Hutchinson

Cover of a 2004 biography

The history books are full of people who were scorned in life but are now idolized in death, because time has shown that they were visionaries, geniuses or gifted artists.

Anne Hutchinson was one such. Born in England in 1591 as Anne Marbury, she and her husband, Will Hutchinson, were Puritans in the 17th-century Massachusetts Bay Colony when she ran afoul of the authorities there.

A headstrong woman in a male-dominated society (strike one), Hutchinson took to preaching at her home, initially for women, but later for men as well (strike two). When she broke with Puritan leaders on theological points (strike three) she was put on trial. A civil court voted to banish her. Then, on this date in 1638, a religious court excommunicated Hutchinson from the Puritan Church.

"You have stepped out of your place," one minister told her. "You have rather been a husband than a wife, a preacher than a hearer, and a magistrate than a subject."

A pariah in Massachusetts Bay, Hutchinson moved on, first to the much more tolerant colony of Rhode Island, where she is admired to this day as a co-founder of the town of Portsmouth, and then to New York, where she was killed by Indians in 1643.

Over time, the tide turned - even in Massachusetts.

In 1922, the state erected a statue of Hutchinson and her daughter Susanna in front of the State House in Boston. The inscription describes her as a “courageous exponent of civil liberty and religious toleration." Sixty-five years later, Gov. Michael Dukakis pardoned Hutchinson and lifted the banishment order that Gov. John Winthrop had imposed in 1637.

Anne Hutchinson statue, Boston, Massachusetts