The Puritans Research Paper

The Puritans and Sex

In the 1630s, the Puritans established the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the North to detach themselves from the Church of England, and to pursue religious tolerance. Puritans lead lives that emphasized hard work and discipline, which caused them to be perceived as narrow-minded, and very strict in religion and morals. Despite what early colonists then and citizens of America today believe, some Puritans did not comply with their stereotypical lives of high morals and no sex. “The popular assumption might be that the Puritans frowned on marriage and tried to hush up the physical aspect of it as much as possible…” but the Puritan society endured the troubles of fornication, adultery, and additional sins. (1-7) “Though the Puritans established a code of laws which demanded perfection- which demanded in other words strict obedience to the will of God, they nevertheless knew that frail human beings could never live up to the code.” (4-5) The appearance of fornication, adultery, rape, and illegitimate children were no surprise to the Puritans, yet they still enforced forms of punishment to create some
order within the community.
For example, when the female servant Elizabeth Dickerson complained that her master took advantage of her, the court accepted her claim “and ordered her master to be whipped twenty stripes.” (4) The problem of child care arose with so many cases of fornication and adultery. “In 1668, the General Court of Massachusetts ordered: that where any man is legally convicted to being the father of a Bastard childe, shall be at the care and charge to maintain and bring up the same, by such assistance if the Mother as nature requireth…” (4) This law was among many actions taken to discourage such distasteful decisions; instead the law set the bar to increase temptations to sin among young women. Therefore, women, like Elizabeth Tuft, created false claims of who the father of their child was to have someone who was rich enough to
maintain the child’s life. “…Elizabeth Wells hearing of the sayd law she sayed un to us that if shee should bee with Child shee would bee sure to lay it un to won who was rich enough abell to mayntayne it weather it wears his or not.” (4) “One reason for the abundance of sexual offenses was the number of men in the colonies who were unable to gratify their sexual desires in marriage.” (3). When English settlers came to the colonies, many left their wives behind and continued to stay as more men began to arrive and settle; though the law required them to return back home to their families, and some men, like John Smith of Medfield, who had left their wives for another women “was sent home poorer by ten pounds and richer by thirty stripes.” (5) Precautions to avoid fornication, adultery, and other sexual offenses, such as “to see that children got married as soon as possible” (5), “a whipping or a fine, or both, and perhaps a branding, combined with a symbolical execution in the form of standing on the gallows for an hour with a rope about the neck.” (4) These safety measures did not eliminate these offenses, but it decreased the number of cases largely. Though Puritans sought to enforce the moral principles of God within New England, they soon became accustomed to the nature of humans and knew that humans were incapable of obeying the laws of God perfectly. Therefore, the more one learns about Puritans, the less they appear to be the sad and impossibly perfect society critics have portrayed them to be, and allows one to see the major causes for people to start to break away from the Puritan faith, thus later leading to the Great Awakening.