Damned Women: Sinners and Witches in Puritan New England » (1st Edition)

In her analysis of the cultural construction of gender in early America, Elizabeth Reis explores the intersection of Puritan theology, Puritan evaluations of womanhood, and the Salem witchcraft episodes. She finds in that intersection the basis for understanding why women were accused of witchcraft more often than men, why they confessed more often, and why they frequently accused other women of being witches. In the process of negotiating their beliefs about the devil's powers in practical ways, both women and men embedded womanhood in the discourse of depravity. Women and men feared hell equally but the Puritan culture encourage women to believe that it was their vile natures which would take them there rather than the particular sins they may have committed. Following the Salem witchcraft trials, Reis argues, Puritans' understanding of sin and the devil changed. Women and men took more responsibility for their sins and became increasingly confident of their redemption, yet women more than men continued to imagine themselves as essentially corrupt, even after the Great Awakening.

Sandra F. VanBurkleo

"[Elizaeth Reis'] Damned Women....seeks to understand, first, how gender system cut across religious belief, both during and after the trials; in the process, she is able to draw the history of witchcraft trials into the intellectual history of Puritanism....[She] shows clearly the Puritan obsession with evil and demonic influence, and how gener proscriptions shaped interpretatins of virtuous or sinful behavior.....In a particularly cogent chapter, Reis interprets the confessions less as a pragmatic way to avoid execution....than as evidence of the internalization of prevailng ideas about woman's sinful natures and her special propensity for faithlessness...." -- The Women's Review of Books