Although I have studied colonial women for more than two decades, until recently even I was unaware of the remarkable case described herein. While researching my new book on gender relations in seventeenth"century America, Founding Mothers and Fathers (published by Alfred A. Knopf earlier this spring), I came across a sentence that led me to these important documents. A 1965 monograph on the early history of Boston mentioned that a group of townswomen had petitioned colonial authorities "on behalf of midwife Alice Tilly, accused of the 'miscarrying of many wimen and children under hir hand.'" The footnote implied that there was more than one petition but did not say how many, nor did it give any indication of the date(s).
I accordingly wrote to the Massachusetts State Archives, citing the footnote and asking for photocopies of any relevant documents. The response surprised me. There were six petitions in all, four from Boston and two from Dorchester, along with a deposition. Unfortunately, the archivist reported, the originals were now unreadable, but negative photostats made in the 1920s were available; she enclosed white"on"black copies of those. The astonishing aspect of the petitions was the total number of signatures (294), ranging from a low of eight and twenty"one on the first petitions to a high of 130 on the last.
The petitions were not dated, but the deposition was: March 8, 1648 [1649 by today"s calendar]. That explained why no historian had yet studied the case: the records of the Court of Assistants, before which Alice Tilly would have been tried, are missing for the years 1644 to 1673. Accordingly, most of what we know about the trial of Mistress Tilly (the title revealed her high status) comes from the petitions.
Those documents and a few other scattered records allow us to reconstruct at least a partial picture of the first known collective political action by American women. Although no exact account of the charges against Alice Tilly has survived, on May 2, 1649, the Massachusetts General Court (legislature) adopted a law forbidding either physicians or midwives from "exercis[ing] any force, violence, or cruelty upon or towards the bodies of any, whether yong or ould (no, not in the most difficult & desperate cases)." The law, unique among colonial statutes, implies that Mistress Tilly in the course of her medical practice had taken some action that the authorities thought unwarranted. The deposition (offered by another midwife) suggests the same, for it detailed a variety of situations that might arise during childbirth and contended that certain methods of handling them were common rather than unusual or cruel.
The female petitioners vehemently disagreed with the male authorities" assessment of Mistress Tilly. As the second group of Bostonians declared, they thought her "the ablest midwife in the land." The Dorchester women expressed their confidence in her, writing of how they were "affrayd to putt our selves into the hands of any besides our midwife that wee have had experience of," for she had helped them "even in such tymes as in the eye of sence or reason nothinge but Death was to be expected." Indeed, the Boston women insisted that Mistress Tilly "hath through the goodnes of God bin carried through such difficulties in her calling that none of those who are her accusers could Doe but have either sent for her or left the work undone."
The implication of the petitions, therefore, is that Alice Tilly was the preeminent Boston midwife, the one most likely to be summoned in "desperate" cases. That conclusion is borne out by the circumstances that elicited the six petitions, which fall into three groups. The first set of three, submitted before her trial, asked that she be permitted to leave jail to attend her patients. Evidently that request was rejected, because the fourth petition, written after she had been tried and convicted, renewed the request and alluded to "sad events" that had occurred in the interim, presumably because of her absence. Led by the wife of the chief pastor of the Boston church, twenty-six female Bostonians begged the judges to "heare the cryes of mothers, and of children yet unborn." This time the court acquiesced, allowing Mistress Tilly to leave prison whenever she was needed at childbeds. But her husband eventually threatened to move the family elsewhere "unless her innocencie may be cleared." Consequently, in spring 1650, the women of Boston and Dorchester again submitted two petitions on her behalf, entreating the General Court to free her from custody absolutely.
That angered the officials, who accused her of seeking "nothinge but a compleat victory" and testily asserted that there was "as much need to upphold magistracy in their authority as Mris Tilly in her midwivery." Yet the women pointedly reminded the General Court that they wrote not just for themselves but also on behalf of "the security of your children." That the 130 signatories to the final petition intended that phrase to be taken literally is demonstrated by the fact that included among their number were several relatives of the legislators. Apparently the petitions were successful; at least, the Tillys still resided in Boston fifteen years later.
I have identified all but twenty of the petitioners, and will soon submit the edited documents to a scholarly journal. Research conducted by my assistants A. Paige Shipman '94 and Cathy Simpson '96 proves that most of the signatories - as would be expected - were women in their prime childbearing years or, occasionally, the mothers or mothers-in-law of such women. These remarkable petitions demonstrate the centrality of reproductive issues in women's lives from the earliest years of the English colonies and thus provide a striking backdrop against which to interpret such currently contentious subjects as abortion rights, in vitro fertilization, and research on human embryos. They also reveal that the "gender gap" has a long history in American politics: the petitions leave no doubt that the verdict in the trial of Mistress Alice Tilly would have been quite different had women comprised the Bay Colony"s Court of Assistants in the spring of 1649.
This article is Copyright © 1996 Mary Beth Norton. All Rights Reserved.