Societal Superstition Impeding Individual Rights

            From Puritan society in the seventeenth century, to the temperance movement in the nineteenth century, women had very little power in and outside the private confines of the home. Although they steadily gained more domestic authority into the nineteenth century, which lead to collective action through various movements, women were continuously pressured to conform to societal beliefs in female inferiority, religious values, and hierarchical relationships. Instead of using concrete evidence to control domestic violence, as well as the right to divorce, women were consistently impeded by societal superstition and the irrational logic of the church.

            Although Puritan communities were expected to watch their neighbors for any sign of sinful behavior within families, church courts rarely took justifiable action, and instead aspired towards preserving the family unit (21). Family violence was not only considered immoral and sinful, in the Puritan’s mind, but it also, “threatened the individual’s and the community’s standing before God” (17). Although the individual was supposed to have rights before God and within the church, the hierarchical beliefs of society placed women lower than men within their homes, and the church. “In the Puritan mind, only a thin line separated the nag from the woman who covenanted with the devil,” (19) and with multiple accounts of witchcraft being linked to domestic violence within the community, the fear of being suspected pressured many women to conform to their inferior positions in society.

Trialed for witchcraft or not, the pressure to preserve the family, rather than to punish wrongdoing, was the priority of the church court. For example, Lemuel Phelps, who was accused for beating his wife on several occasions, Phelps merely had to go through a process of examination and confession within the church court. His wife was considered to be at fault as well, and was forced to confess that she had “transgressed the Rules and Duties of a Wife towards her husband in some of my past conduct in assuming too much authority over him and controlling him in civil and religious matters” (21). Although Puritan society believed in preserving individual rights within the community, superstition and societal beliefs of female inferiority prevailed.

Even into the nineteenth century, where women campaigned and held greater authority within society, societal superstitions continued to triumph. As women fought for temperance and the right to divorce, the domestic ideology of past times continued to be significant for many members of society. At a woman’s rights convention in 1860, “Stanton argued that divorce ought to be a private matter, unregulated by church or state. If government was to interfere, its proper role in her view was to make divorce easier and marriage more difficult to secure” (61-62). Although Stanton’s views on women’s rights to divorce created awareness, her stance was initially too radical for many people. Instead, the belief in female sexual purity and Christian morality outweighed the rights for women (62).