Anne Bradstreet Day

Today is Anne Bradstreet Day, dedicated to someone I never heard of:

She was one of the first colonial poets to be published in the New World, the first Englishwoman to publish a book of poems and the first published American poet. While her early works were more rooted in the traditional poetry structure at the time, her writing became increasingly inspired and original and covered a wide range of topics such as beauty, death, society, and her Puritan faith.

Of course, when a woman from the distant past does anything, you’ll hear rustling in the bushes all around as modern critics, armed with rhetorical paintball guns, must pelt all over to color her as a feminist trailblazer:

Because writing was not considered to be an acceptable role for women at the time, Bradstreet was met with criticism. One of the most prominent figures of her time, John Winthrop, criticized Ann Hopkins, wife of prominent Connecticut colony governor Edward Hopkins. He mentioned in his journal that Hopkins should have kept to being a housewife and left writing and reading for men, “whose minds are stronger.” Despite heavy criticism of women during her time, Bradstreet continued to write which led to the belief that she was interested in rebelling against societal norms of the time.

What may not get mentioned was that Bradstreet was very wealthy, and so could afford customized education and help (slaves and servants) to give her enough free time and ability to actually write. A woman of lesser means—just about every other woman—would have been too busy with their main missions of Push Out Babies to Create the Next Generation, and Keep Family From Starving and Freezing to Death, to be bothered with the optional and impractical Write in Book sidequests.

Winthrop was correct, whether or not you believe women’s minds are equal to mens’, because most women weren’t primed to write the way Bradstreet’s was. Calling them “weaker” rather than “untrained” or “uneducated” is a matter of word choice. Likely, the real barrier was one more of longstanding custom rather than Very Mean Men Acting Sexistly, not Feministingly towards those endless gray lines of longsuffering women. Spitballing here: the general tradition of the time was that the publishing system wasn’t set up to accommodate women, because women just didn’t write. Combine that with the tradition of keeping the sexes separate, physically and culturally, and you have a paradigm favoring highly educated men…no women and no hapless poors allowed of any sex, because they were preselected out in an earlier stage. Yes, there’s room for the Unreasonably Mean Husband to clamp down on the helpless but somehow also powerful wife, but how common are we going to claim it was? Were those husbands all spending the time and energy making sure their wives weren’t secretly writing, making a science-ing, or doing otherwise White Christian Man-Only things?

Some Japanese restaurants and shops might not allow non-Japanese to patronize them because of the language barrier. If something goes wrong while a tourist is on the premises, dealing with all of it is too big of a hassle and liability. The ban on foreigners is not one based on race but more of practicality. Alternatively, there’s no real barrier to me taking up knitting; I just don’t hold enough interest to overcome the opportunity cost. It may also be prohibitively expensive or impractical for whatever reason. Justifiably so, I would probably get rejected from a few knitting circle groups for reasons I don’t have to explain here. That’s just the current state of things, Japanese shop owners and grumpy retired ladies notwithstanding.

Some things in history are a result of systems of habit that grew in scale over long periods of time, rather than stark, unthinking cruelty. Those who relentlessly push the latter are the ones who are trying to sell us on something.