Introduction:
Legal scholars have shown that attitudes about women’s status in colonial British America had their roots in English legal traditions and social customs and in religious views of the respective power and roles of men and women in families and in the larger society.  Laws about domestic relations and family life – in particular, the authority of husbands over wives – were significantly shaped by religious ideals. Published in London, this 1632 tract on women’s rights presents the religious arguments for women’s position in families and in public life. 

In these two excerpts, the author emphasizes the Biblical accounts of Eve’s connection to Adam, her sin in the Garden of Eden, and the repercussions of the fall of humanity. While God punished both Adam and Eve with exile from the Garden of Eden, mortality, and labor, Eve received extra punishment because of her role.

For more on this tract, see Sylvia R. Frey and Marian J. Morton, eds., New World, New Roles: A Documentary History of Women in Pre-Industrial America (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), 92-94.

For definitions of unfamiliar terms please see our glossary.

Document excerpt:
“Sect. II: The Creation of Man and Woman” (referring to the creation of Eve in Genesis 2:22-23 in the Bible)

“...Then when God brought woman to Man to be named by him, he found straight way that she was bone of his bones, flesh of his flesh, giving her a name, testifying that she was taken out of man, and he pronounced that for her sake man should leave father and mother and adhere to his wife which should be with him one.”

“Sect. III: The Punishment of Adam’s Sin”

“Return a little to Genesis, in the 3rd Chapter whereof is declared our first parents' transgression in eating the forbidden fruit: for which Adam, Eve, the serpent first, and lastly, the earth itself is cursed: and besides, the participation of Adam's punishment, which was subjection to mortality, exiled from the garden of Eden, injoined to labor, Eve because she had helped to seduce her husband has inflicted on her an especial bane. In sorrow shall thou bring forth thy children, they desires shall be subject to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.

See here the reason of that which I touched before, that women have no voice in Parliament, they make no laws, they consent to none, they abrogate none. All of them are understood either married or to be married and their desires are subject to their husband, I know no remedy though some women can shift it well enough. The common law here shaketh hand with Divinity.”