Streams of the American Tradition

Yet John Winthrop was intelligibly a religious zealot level off by the standards of his day. His stopping point to commit himself, for religious reasons, to the New World--with all that implied psychologi squally and symboli telephoney (p. 32)--was indicative of the centrality of his religious preoccupations. The nature of that preoccupation was vividly evince by the famous phrase that he has contributed to the lexicon of American governmental and sociable rhetoric--the "city upon a hill" (p. 24).

While that manner referred to the prude community as a whole, it also reflected the expectations of the Puritan as an individual--that he would be a shining shine to the rest of humanity. The desire to set such an example lies, perhaps, at the root of the paradox of Puritan belief, which is that since the Puritans cogitated in predestination, they did not believe that any human action they undertook could actually ensure, or horizontal make more likely, their salvation. By setting an example, they could only consent to demonstrate to the world (and perhaps to themselves) that they were in fact among the saved.

As Governor of Massachusetts, John Winthrop demonstrated a markedly antidemocratic hail to the task of government, displayed most strikingly (and to us, most unattractively) in his interposition of Anne Hutchinson, whose ultima

Yet it is by no means remarkable, given the century in which she lived, and also by no means solely the consequence of her being a woman, that Abigail Adams is "best known only for writing letters" (p. 92). The 18th century was something of a golden age for letter-writing. In an age of difficult transportation, the exchanging of letters was a vital means of belongings in touch, and letter-writing was also cultivate as a ramify of art form. Indeed, the early examples of what we would call novels, written in the eighteenth century, frequently took the form of exchanges of letters (so-called epistolary novels), with no like a shot narrative, dialogue, or action scenes.

In making her influence tangle primarily through personal letters, Abigail Adams was engaging in iodin of the most characteristic of eighteenth-century activities.

Abigail Adams implicitly accepted the broad social assumptions about the roles of women which prevailed in her day (p. 112). Even her celebrated call for her husband and his compatriots to "Remember the Ladies" was at least as ofttimes an exercise of witty badinage as a call for social change. She did, however, interpret the values she accepted in a way most favorable to the status of women.

The long-term jolt of John Winthrop is even now--perhaps dissolveicularly now, because of controversies regarding the Religious Right--a matter on which opinion may well be politically polarized. That his adjoin on shaping the development of Puritan New England was coarse is not in doubt. Whether that impact is judged to have been for the better or worse, in the long run, must depend in part on whether one identifies with the "godly" or the secularist trends in American values.

Public roles for women were not unknown in her day, or even before. (Anne Hutchinson is an obvious example.) Well before Mary Wollstonecraft, there were women writers on intellectual issues, though not on what we would call women's liberationist issues. Indeed, Abigail Adams met s
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