October Book Report: The Winthrop Woman by Anya Seton

Several friends had recommended The Winthrop Woman to me before I finally picked it up.  It had all the signs of being my sort of story: a story about a woman, plenty of history, set in England and colonial America…..it’s rather a wonder that I hadn’t found the book sooner.  The novel is story of Elizabeth Winthrop, an early Puritan settler in Massachusetts Bay.  Expertly organized as fictionalized history, Seton has carefully researched all the details of Bess Winthrop’s life and then brought her to life.

And that’s a good place to start, because most women from the 1600s don’t have lives whose history is known and marked, let alone shared.  We know who these women were, but we rarely know how they felt; how they experienced their lives.  A woman’s life in the 1600s was shaped by the men who ruled the society, both at home and in public life.  Women weren’t often in control of their fate and those who pushed against this restriction were often punished for such defiance.  That is certainly the case with Bess, who had three husbands and would give birth to eight children over the course of her life.

I read this novel as I was teaching 7th graders about colonial history.  We spend a great deal of time on the social history of the colonial world both because that’s what the students find compelling and also because it’s the best way for me to introduce all the people whose experiences will form America.  Everyone knows Ben Franklin, of course, but it’s the lives of regular settlers, slaves, and indentured servants who make up the the backbone and story of our nation.

To read the story of a woman whose hallmark is her challenge to patriarchy in the midst of the re-surfacing of allegations against Harvey Weinstein (and others) is to be reminded of the fact that women’s lives have been constricted for years.  It’s also a reminder that our collective strength comes from a willingness to rebel against those constrictions and to stick with one another as we do so.  It’s not often that I can claim that a story set in the 1600s is timely, but this one certainly is.