Saints and Sisters: Congregational and Quaker Women in the Early Colonial Period

go to church. The implication is that the church, or even religion, is in some way more necessary to women than to men, although women are submissive to the men who dominate the priesthoods. But how and why this gender differentiation develops in respect to religion is imperfectly understood; we are not certain that it is inherent in Christianity itself; we do not know why it becomes part of a social-religious order, what functions it might have in that society, nor what conditions produce the dichotomy. American experience in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries offers the historian two Protestant cases to investigate and contrast, the Puritan Congregationalists and the Quakers. Puritans and Quakers pursued different routes to settlement in America, with different results for women.1 The religious intensity and excitement in England prior to and during the Civil War gave rise to both Puritanism and Quakerism, and provided a