Anne Marbury was baptized on this date in 1591. She married Wiiliam Hutchinson when she was 21, and they had 15 children. The family emigrated to Massachusetts in 1634.
Serving as a skilled herbalist and midwife in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Anne Hutchinson began meeting with other women for prayer and religious discussion. Her charisma and intelligence soon also drew men, including ministers and magistrates, to her gatherings, where she developed an emphasis on the individual’s relationship with God, stressing personal revelation over institutionalized observances and absolute reliance on God’s grace rather than on good works as the means to salvation. Hutchinson’s views challenged religious orthodoxy, while her growing power as a female spiritual leader threatened established gender roles.
Called for a civil trial before the General Court of Massachusetts in November 1637, Hutchinson ably defended herself against charges that she had defamed the colony’s ministers and as a woman had dared to teach men. Her extensive knowledge of Scripture, her eloquence, and her intelligence allowed Hutchinson to debate with more skill than her accusers. Yet because Hutchinson claimed direct revelation from God and argued that “laws, commands, rules, and edicts are for those who have not the light which makes plain the pathway,” she was convicted and banished from the colony, a sentence confirmed along with formal excommunication in the ecclesiastical trial that followed.
Anne Marbury Hutchinson and five of her six children living with her were killed by Siwanoy Indians in New Netherlands (in what is now Pelham Bay Park, The Bronx, New York City) in 1643.
Among her descendants are Franklin Roosevelt, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Stephen A. Douglas and Mitt Romney.