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Roger Williams, Baptists and Women's Liberation
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.
Roger Williams, Baptists and Women's Liberation | 2 comments (2 topical, 0 hidden)
Roger Williams, Baptists and Women's Liberation | 2 comments (2 topical, 0 hidden)
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