Within Patriarchy:
Puritan Women in Massachusetts’s Congregational Churches, 1630-1715

Deborah McNally
University of Washington, Seattle

Abstract:
Throughout the 1630s and 1640s in Massachusetts’s newly evolving Puritan society, men and women joined the Congregational church in fairly equal numbers. By the 1650s, however, a clear shift had begun to take place where female applicants outnumbered male. By 1660, female admissions easily exceeded male. As the Reverend Cotton Mather observed in 1690, “in a church of between three or four hundred communicants, there are but few more than one hundred men; all the rest are women.”  Supported by extant documents such as Thomas Shepard’s important yet underutilized Confessions, this paper argues that despite the patriarchal nature of Congregationalism’s governing structures, and despite the rigorous admissions process for church membership, throughout the seventeenth-century women continued to claim a place for themselves within the church, and by extension in Puritan society, because membership allowed for a degree of agency, authority, and individuality in their relationships with their husbands, their ministers, and with each other.