I think this is a great book, and not just because a couple of my ancestors are in it! ( )

This work has an academic tone, but is better written than most books written by college professors. It provides a fascinating insight into the lives of women in early New England. It shows how the society interpreted women and their roles using three prototypical Biblical women models. Bathsheba, whom the Puritans saw as the virtuous woman of proverbs, exemplified the good wife. Eve provides a focal point of a discussion of both sexual misbehavior, married sexuality, and childbirth. And Jael, who welcomed her enemy, fed him, lulled him to sleep, and then killed him by driving a tent peg into his head, gives a focus to a discussion of female assertiveness and violence. These qualities were sometimes necessary for survival in the frontier of 17th century New England. Laurel Ulrich demonstrates how the society accepted these normally unacceptable behaviors when they could see the woman taking the male role in the place of their husband, and them stepping back into a normal feminine role after. Jael typified this. By the 18th century writers viewed these women and their behavior as unnatural. This section analyses Hannah Dustin's experience in detail. She was enthusiastically welcomed when she returned from captivity with ten scalps of the Indian family she killed in their beds. Whittier saw her as having been driven to insanity in the moment of her attack, and Hawthorne reacted even more strongly, wishing the "bloody old hag had been drowned." Only a hag could have acted in this way, not a true woman. ( )