Puritan Gender Roles

Introduction
Early Puritans established many small towns in the new frontier which came to be known as New England. In these new towns, small commonwealths, otherwise known as families, created the framework for everyday life. The basic structure of a Puritan family was patriarchal. This type of structure creates very defined gender roles in a society. All of the governmental, ideological, and social values of a society must mirror the structures of each other in order for the society to function. The gender roles created at this time had a major effect on the way that a society is organized. In this paper I want to explore those gender roles and the effects they have on Puritan New England. Therefore, to explore these affects I ask the question, …show more content…
The bible provided the only framework for what Puritans practiced and believed. Before Puritanism, Catholicism was the main religion of England. Catholic mass and ideologies included traditional practices that had been passed down throughout the ages such as the idea of purgatory. Puritanism separated from Catholicism because the idea of purgatory is not discussed in The Bible. The idea that a person could work towards salvation and be forgiven for whatever sins they had committed even after they are dead was not something Puritans believed. The belief that Puritans held was that all people were predestined to either be saved or be eternally damned. This emphasis on only textual information as well as the total depravity that existed in the values of Puritans, made the messages relayed by Puritan ministers more specific as well as more severe. The idea that saints were saved while most of the general population was not, made the Puritan rules and regulations of these early settlements regarded close to law. If a person, especially a woman, did not obey their minister’s sermon, it was clear that they were surely …show more content…
Understanding that the body and the soul were separate entities was essential to understanding the logistics of the physical realm being separate from the spiritual realm. This dichotomy of body/soul closely mirrored the already obvious relationship between male/female relations. Therefore, the soul, which was considered weak and susceptible to the influence of the devil, was associated with the femininity. The body was considered the vessel that hold the soul; women had weaker bodies and could not resist Satan’s temptations as easily as men who had stronger bodies and souls. Elizabeth Ries writes in her book, Damned Women, “Although theoretically they (women) were no more inherently evil than men, the process of defining the soul and the body in the context of Puritan New England, made them seem so.” Women’s feeble minds, weaker bodies, and easily influenced souls, made them easy targets for witchcraft