Cotton Mather and the Women He Loved

History has judged Cotton Mather harshly when it comes to women, perhaps with good reason. His first published sermon was preached on the execution day of Elizabeth Emerson, convicted of murdering her illegitimate newborn twins. And Mather’s writings are littered with numerous assertions reinforcing the deeply entrenched puritan notion of the subordination of women. Then, of course, there was the debacle of the witchcraft trials. For these reasons, when people think of Mather today, the word most likely to come to mind is “complicated.”

But who was Mather at home, without the wig? Who was he as a husband and father? From the reputation that has come down to us, one would assume Cotton Mather to have been a tyrant over his wife and a strong disciplinarian who ruled his children with a rod. Certainly, few would suspect that between wives, he was shamelessly sought after as a highly eligible widower.

On Valentine’s Day 2024, we looked at Mather’s relationships with the women in his life: his three wives, his daughters, his sisters, and his life-long pursuit of the one woman he strove to understand perhaps more than any other, that prototype of all women, Eve.

The Congregational Library & Archives' 2024 Cotton Mather Lecture was presented by New England’s Hidden Histories’.

SPEAKER BIO

Helen Gelinas is Director of Transcription for New England’s Hidden Histories. She holds a Bachelor of Music degree from The Hartt School in Connecticut and a BA in English and an MA in American Studies from the University of Tübingen, Germany. In Tübingen, she was selected by The Mather Project to be a research and editorial assistant for Volume 5 of Cotton Mather’s Biblia Americana. Following the presentation and publication of her essay, “Regaining Paradise: Cotton Mather’s Biblia Americana and the Daughters of Eve,” she earned a Research Fellowship to the Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale Divinity School. She is currently a PhD candidate in Early American Studies at the University of Heidelberg, completing her dissertation entitled, “’The Spirit and the Bride’: Female Parity, Prophecy, and the Power of the Pen in the Works of Cotton Mather.”