Educated, But Not Equal

We’ve all seen them. They are seemingly everywhere the topic of Puritans is discussed - those 19th-century paintings depicting them dressed in somber, black clothes and white shirts with huge collars and a ridiculously large buckle on their hats.

What if I told you that was a lie?Many of the misconceptions we have about Puritans stem from the 19th-century. Those pesky Victorians loved history for sure. But here’s the catch: they didn’t necessarily care if it was accurate history. That has made it very difficult for all the subsequent generations to decipher fact from fiction until this very day.

The problem wasn’t necessarily that Victorian historians and artists were deliberately lying. They were looking at the past through the assumptions of their own time, just as we do. The difference is that many of the images they created became so familiar that we eventually mistook the interpretation for a historical record.

Our topic in this post is education. For the Puritans, literacy wasn’t primarily about creating a broadly educated population in the modern sense. It was about Scripture. They believed people needed to be able to read God’s word for themselves. That makes the 1647 law The Old Deluder Satan Act especially fascinating because the preamble essentially frames illiteracy as an opportunity for Satan to keep people from understanding Scripture.

Where did their thoughts originate? Here’s the short version: Puritan education was structured with the (Geneva) Bible, the Classics, certain aspects of protestant theology, and the law. Their manners were based upon the Four Virtues: Prudence (Wisdom), Temperance (Moderation), Justice, and Fortitude (Courage). English Printer William Caxton published The Book of Good Manners in 1487.

A compilation in Latin by D. Mancinus in S. Brant's Das Narrenschiff (Ship of Fools, 1494) states that the four virtues are: Prudence, Justice, Magnanimity, and Temperance. “The first place of honesty (that is to say the chief part of wisdom) is to search diligently what should be true or face and which things should be good or what should be bad. This knowledge of truth from falsehood, of good from bad is a thing so apt and meet to the nature and strength of man, that nothing should be more proper for him, nor that nothing should more beseem him.”

Around 1570, The Mirrour of Good Manners was translated into English by Alexander Barclay from a Latin poem, Libellus de quattour virtutibus by Italian humanist Dominico Mancinelli.

And what of reading and writing, the basics of education? The Old Deluder Satan Act of 1647 required every town with 50 households to appoint someone to teach children to read and write. Towns with 100 households were required to establish a grammar school (Salem had one). Would you believe me if I told you that Massachusetts law required children be taught to read? And yes, education included girls. In a society that we often imagine as relentlessly restrictive toward women, literacy wasn’t reserved exclusively for boys.But before we congratulate the Puritans for being early champions of gender equality, there is an important distinction. A girl’s ability to read Scripture did not give her the same political authority as her brother. It did not give her the same standing before the law, the same economic opportunities, or the same authority within the household. But education existed within a larger social structure in which gender mattered enormously.

The Puritans could believe that a girl needed to be educated and that women occupied a subordinate position in society. To modern eyes, those ideas can seem contradictory. But to them, they weren’t necessarily contradictory at all.

Education also reveals something fundamental about Puritan society: the goal wasn’t equality as we understand it today. It was the creation of what they considered a godly, ordered society in which everyone understood their place and responsibilities. 

The emphasis on virtue, wisdom, manners, and learning was hardly confined to the Puritans. By 1693, the English Philosopher John Locke was writing in Some Thoughts on Education about the importance of virtue, wisdom, and learning in the education of young gentlemen. You can find their influence in the following twenty precepts taught to Puritan children in the 17th and 18th-centuries:

1. Fear God.

2. Honor the KING.                                                    

3. Reverence thy Parents.

4. Submit to thy Superiors.

5. Despise not thy inferiors.

6. Be courteous with thy Equals.

7. Pray daily and devoutly.

8. Converse with the Good.

9. Imitate not the wicked.

10. Hearken to Instruction.

11. Be desirous of Learning.

12. Love thy School.                    

13. Be always cleanly.               

14. Study Virtue.                

15. Provoke no Body.        

16. Love thy Schoolfellows.

17. Please thy Master.                

18. Let not play entice thee.                  

19. Restrain thy Tongue.                

20. Covet future Honor, which only Virtue and Wisdom can procure. 

Read together, these precepts tell us quite a lot about the society these children were being prepared to enter: one ordered by God, family, authority, hierarchy, self-discipline, and virtue.So yes, the Puritans taught girls to read. That’s an important part of their story, and one that complicates the stereotype. And that brings us to the next question: what did they believe a woman’s place actually was?

Until next time, keep questioning the past. It usually has receipts.

Notes & Sources

1. Massachusetts Bay Colony, “Old Deluder Satan Law,” 1647 in The Laws and Liberties of Massachusetts, reprinted from the 1648 education, ed. Max Farrand (Cambridge: MA: Harvard University Press, 1929).

2. William Caxton, The Book of Good Manners, Westminster, May 11, 1487. See William Blades, The Biography and Typography of William Caxton, England’s First Printer, which dates Caxton’s printing of The Book of Good Manners to 1487.

3. Dominico Mancinelli, Libellus de quattour Virtutibus, transcribed into English by Alexander Barclay as The Mirror of Good Manners, Containing the Foure Cardinal Vertues, included in Barclay’s 1570 edition of The Ship of Fools, printed by John Cawood, London.

4. Massachusetts Bay Colony, “Old Deluder Stan Law,” 1647. The law required towns with fifty householders to appoint someone to teach children to read and write; towns with one hundred householders were required to establish a grammar school. The Laws and Liberties of Massachusetts, reprinted from the 1648 education, ed. Max Farrand (Caimbridge, MA” Harvard University Press, 1929). 5. Joel Perlmann, Silvania R. Siddali, and Keith Whitescarver, “Literacy, Schooling, and Teaching among New England Women, 1730-1820,” History of Education Quarterly 37, no. 2 (Summer 1997): 117-139. The authors discuss the development of female literacy and schooling in New England and cite earlier scholarship on girls’ education in colonial New England.

6. John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693). P. 70. Lock identifies “virtue, wisdom, reading, and learning” among the principal things a gentleman should acquire through education and elsewhere places virtue as the primary aim of education.

7. Anonymous, The School of Manners, or Rules for Children’s Behaviour: At Church, at Home, at Table, in Company, in Discourse, at School, Abroad, and Among Boys. With Some Other Short and Mixed Precepts, 4th ed. (London, 1701), p. 1.