Roger Williams and Women's Liberation

In 1636, when Roger Williams founded Providence Plantations (now Rhode Island) he created the first purely civil state formed by social contract. It granted religious liberty to every inhabitant, guaranteed that no one "should be molested for his conscience," and ascribed power to the magistrate "only in civil things."

The first case to test Williams' new principle of civil government came in the spring of 1638 when Joshua Verin was disenfranchised at a town meeting "for restraining of liberty of conscience." Williams and others had organized the first Baptist church in America. Attendance at its services was entirely voluntary. Joshua Verin didn't care to attend the settlement's church services. His wife did. She exercised her liberty to attend a preaching service without his permission and, according to town records, "He hath trodden her underfoot tyrannically and brutally . . . with his furious blows she went in danger of her life."

When the settlement disenfranchised Verin, he returned to the Massachusetts Bay Colony and took his wife with him. William Arnold, one of Verin's defenders, is reported to have said "when he consented to that order [liberty of conscience] he never intended that it should extend to the breach of any ordinance of God, such as the subjection of wives to their husbands."

James Ernst, one of Williams' biographers, summarized the significance of this incident saying,

The Verin trial marked a struggle of new-born liberty with ancient law, involving a delicate problem of domestic life. This new liberty gave women an independent status and the right to leave the house without the consent of her husband. She was no longer his chattel, nor subject to his religious conscience. Verin objected to such liberty, and took his wife back to the Bay theocracy where they kept women in their place. Arnold, Winthrop [Governor of the Bay Colony], and others made religious rights a matter of age, sex, and social standing. Providence was the first civil government to recognize feminine rights as a natural and civil right and as a state policy.

James Ernst, Roger Williams: New England Firebrand (New York: Macmillan Co., 1932), pp. 193-94.

One of the things that the Celebration of the New Baptist Covenant hopes to do is to restore pride in this kind of rich heritage in which Baptists were advocates for religious liberty, liberty of conscience and equal rights.

This entry is cross-posted from the New Baptist Covenant weblog.