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Creators: This episode was created by Smith College students Cara Meyer, Rehana Nazerali-Ruddy, Elisabeth Sinclair, and Rowan Wheeler.
Transcript:
ROWAN: How would you feel if the only record of your life was written by your ex? Welcome back to Forgotten Scandals. This week we’re in Puritan New England talking sex, insanity, and Elizabeth Tuttle. Historians refer to Elizabeth as the crazy grandmother of the famous preacher Jonathan Edwards. She’s been called perverse, psychotic, and even downright evil. But does Elizabeth Tuttle really deserve her bad reputation?
ROWAN: I’m Rowan Wheeler
CARA: I’m Cara Meyer,
REHANA: I’m Rehana Nazerali-Ruddy,
ELISABETH: I’m Elisabeth Sinclair, and we’re about to find out.
ROWAN: Elizabeth Tuttle was the grandmother of preacher Jonathan Edwards, famous for his role in the Great Awakening, an evangelical Protestant movement that swept across America in the 1730s. To some historians, Elizabeth Tuttle is the foil to Edwards’ sterling reputation. Other historians take a more nuanced approach, such as Ava Chamberlain, whose book The Notorious Elizabeth Tuttle is our main source for this podcast episode. So who was Elizabeth, and how much of her reputation is warranted?
ELISABETH: Well, she was born in 1645 in New Haven Connecticut. In 1667 she married Richard Edwards and moved to Hartford, Connecticut. The last record we have of her is from 1691, when Richard divorced her.
ROWAN: And these are the only records we have? Do we have anything that she wrote?
ELISABETH: No, we only have her ex-husband’s side of the story. In his divorce petition, he states that:
CARA: “I could noe Longer Indure what I mett with from her… I tra[v]illed Abroad for Som Time Hopeing by my Absence that Shee might Relent and Turn from her perverseness”.[1]
ELISABETH: And that Elizabeth had deserted him, as…
REHANA: “[by] Deserting my bed… [she] Deserted mee”.[2]
ROWAN: So, in Richard’s words, Elizabeth was argumentative and unfaithful. He claimed she gave birth to another man’s child seven months into their marriage and refused to have sex with him.
ELISABETH: Right, but how does that make her insane?
ROWAN: Well, that’s what we’re here to find out.
Section two: the trial and its implications
CARA: Let’s take a look at the divorce trials of Richard and Elizabeth. In Richard’s first set of divorce papers he argued that Elizabeth refused to partake in the sexual services expected of a “goodwife” at the time. In 1688, right amidst the divorce proceedings, Richard was implicated in a public sex case, an accusation that compromised his trial, and the divorce failed. After, he refiled his petition, and on his second try Richard argued that Elizabeth had deserted him by abandoning her marital duties because she didn’t want to have sex or have any more children. He claimed she was mentally unwell and used her siblings’ criminality as a way to present Elizabeth as violent and erratic. After his second attempt Richard got what he asked for and was granted his divorce from Elizabeth. The next steps for Richard and Elizabeth were very different.
REHANA: The record presents two contrasting stories of life post-divorce. Richard was remarried within six months of the divorce to Mary Talcott, the woman who had implicated him in the public sex case during the initial divorce trial. He recovered quickly from the divorce and was able to lead a relatively normal life. Elizabeth, on the other hand, disappears from historical records after the divorce, left only with her bad reputation. Why was this?
CARA: Well, there was a huge gender divide in the implications of a divorce for men and women in Puritan New England. Since Richard argued that he was the damaged party in his divorce filings, he and Elizabeth had far different stakes in its ruling. Chamberlain clarifies this point by saying, quote, “Elizabeth was left after the divorce with nothing but her unhappy and tragic past. Richard could name a better future for himself. Being a man, of course, helped him move forward… The right to remarry, however, was contingent not upon gender but upon guilt. Guilty men, who forfeited only a third of the marital property, fared better than guilty women, who lost everything. But when a man was declared the injured party, his future was bright,” unquote.[3]
REHANA: So essentially, because Richard presented himself as the victim, the trial permanently tarnished Elizabeth’s reputation while Richard was able to retain his “honour”. This case exposes the biases in the judicial and social systems that dole out such severe punishment to a woman for failing as a wife, and no punishment at all for the failed husband . While both Richard and Elizabeth were responsible for the downfall of their marriage, only Elizabeth suffered under Puritan social conditions. Richard’s reputation remained intact in his remarriage, and the divorce didn’t hinder his reputation as an honorable man in his family and community.
CARA: Elizabeth was basically punished for a divorce that she did not ask for, and her legacy in Connecticut history boiled down to her relationships with men and her image as a crazy ex-wife, and later the crazy grandmother.
Section three: Puritan life and gender roles
ELISABETH: So let’s break down those Puritan social conditions that Rehana mentioned before. In order to determine just how and why Elizabeth ended up with her bad reputation, we have to start at the beginning, and I mean the very beginning. Ever since Eve tempted Adam to eat that fateful apple, women have been portrayed as a corrupting force over man. As Chamberlain notes, throughout history women have been characterized as “deceitful, untrustworthy, and prone to sexual sin.”[4] Oddly enough, Puritanism actually attempted to reform this negative image, recasting women as the helpful companions of men. The ideal man in Puritan New England was mature, responsible, courageous and rational, and he now upheld these characteristics with the support of his doting wife, not in spite of her. However, in the case of Elizabeth Tuttle, Chamberlain points out that “the older image of woman as a “necessary evil” persisted, ready to be deployed whenever she strayed from her God- ordained place in submission to men.”[5]As far as we can tell from our limited records of her, Elizabeth appeared to live a pretty ordinary life, if anything it was her husband, Richard, (as well as most of the male line in his family) who seemed to deviate from what was considered “manly” at the time. So my question is this: Was the veritable smear campaign on Elizabeth’s reputation really a result of Richard’s insecurities about his own failures as a traditional Puritan man? In other words, was Elizabeth’s reputation not about Elizabeth at all?
ROWAN: Maybe it would be helpful to first explain what Richard’s failures actually are?
ELISABETH: Yeah, So Richard comes from a long line of men who have had trouble fulfilling their “manly” duties. It’s a complicated story that spans three generations but it basically goes like this: Richard’s grandfather passed away from the plague when Richard’s father was 7 and the man that his grandmother remarried, James Cole, set a less than stellar example. Cole accrued so much debt that he had to leave London to avoid being arrested, abandoning Richard’s grandmother and father. They weren’t reunited until they all left for North America. Once in America, Richard’s father, William, married a wealthy widow who was 14 years his senior. He managed their household so poorly that after a time he actually deeded all of his possessions to his wife, effectively becoming her dependent.
CARA: I imagine that was pretty unusual for the time…
ELISABETH: Extremely. As Chamberlain notes about Richard “he was raised in a disorderly household, governed ineffectively by a failed patriarch. His father had struggled as a boy to acquire the habit of manly self-control from a flawed role model. Richard, in turn, could not wholly escape this intergenerational history of family failure.”[6]
ROWAN: And as we know Richard himself was involved in his own share of scandal: he refused to acknowledge Elizabeth’s first child as his own at the very beginning of his marriage, and toward the end he had an adulterous relationship with the woman he later married.
CARA: Chamberlain herself argued that Elizabeth and Richard alike played parts in the dismantling of their marriage. He wasn’t necessarily the most trustworthy of a storyteller and his own affair shook the legitimacy of his divorce case. However, we can’t ignore the fact that it’s entirely possible that Elizabeth wasn’t the best wife.
ELISABETH: I think that’s a really important point. There’s definitely blame to share, we aren’t trying to paint Elizabeth as a perfect saint. But it’s also important to note that Richard’s reputation has emerged from this scandal remarkably unscathed, whereas Elizabeth’s reputation, while maybe not that of a perfect Puritan wife, was completely ruined.
ROWAN: So it’s not that Elizabeth and Richard didn’t have a bad relationship, it’s that history frames Elizabeth as a villain and Richard as a victim.
ELISABETH: Exactly. Even though Elizabeth wasn’t openly rebellious in any way, in the midst of her husband’s failure she became a convenient scapegoat on which to blame the breakdown of their entire family unit. The reputation that began to take shape followed what can only be called a traditional pattern, framing Elizabeth as a morally deficient, sexually deviant, corrupter of respectable men.
Section four: Insanity
CARA: So, how did Richard’s vague claims about Elizabeth evolve into the “crazy grandmother” narrative?
ELISABETH: Well, we have the eugenics movement and some good old-fashioned misogyny to thank for that!
REHANA: Yes, Elizabeth was a fan favourite among eugenicists, who were drawn to her story by their interest in her famous grandson, Jonathan Edwards. Elizabeth’s bad reputation stuck out like a sore thumb in the family history of the Edwards, which eugenicists often used as an example of a pure bloodline.
CARA: For some eugenicists, Elizabeth’s insanity was proof that just a little bit of “bad blood” could ruin a perfectly good family. For example, one of the leaders of the eugenics movement, Charles Davenport, described Elizabeth as carrying an “evil trait” that predisposed her to “impulsive and violent acts.” He referred to her as an “extraordinarily talented but erotic woman” whose “adultery and other immoralities” destroyed her family.”[7]
ELISABETH: As we know, Davenport’s claims have no solid scientific or historical basis, but at the time he used Elizabeth’s story as successful “evidence” for his theories.
CARA: Another example is Elizabeth Winslow, who wrote a biography of Jonathan Edwards in 1940. She portrayed Elizabeth as a woman “both unfaithful and insane”.[8] She claimed that this insanity was hereditary, citing any dodgy behaviors she could find of Elizabeth’s family members.
REHANA: So if some distant cousin or one of her descendants did something sketchy one time, that’s proof of her insanity?
CARA: It makes no sense, exactly. But historians have often been willing to stretch the truth of Elizabeth’s story to support their historical narrative, claiming that she was “afflicted with a serious psychosis”, and accusing her of “repeated infidelities,” “fits of perversity,” “rages, and threats of violence,” and all manner of other offenses which there is no concrete proof for.[9]
ELISABETH: Another thing to note is that Eugenicists believed that mental deficiency was linked to moral deficiency. So if they could cast a doubt on Elizabeth’s morality by implying she was violent or sexually promiscuous, then they had a basis for the claim that she was insane, too.
REHANA: And this is where the misogyny comes into play.
CARA: One of Richard’s claims against Elizabeth during the divorce trial was that she refused to sleep with him and was therefore an unfit wife. This was a claim of sexual disobedience, and along with Richard’s claim that Elizabeth’s first child, born early, was potentially not his, the general accusation of sexual disobedience became an accusation of promiscuity over time.
REHANA: And then, as Ava Chamberlain puts it, “the sign of her rebellion… became the symptom of her insanity.”[10]
ELISABETH: What all of this shows us is that Elizabeth has not always been thought of as insane, in fact, she may never have been insane in the first place. In a way, history itself has made her mad.
Section five: Conclusion
REHANA: So, in many ways, Elizabeth’s story is about sex and history. She is dubbed the rebellious woman, the historical slut, the crazy grandmother, not because there is solid evidence to support these claims, but because her story was (and still is) subject to the whims of historical narratives, and to gendered expectations.
ROWAN: History has exploited Elizabeth time and time again. Those who have had the power to record histories, to record lives, have relegated her to the role of the “crazy grandmother” and the disobedient woman, without proper cause, but simply because it was convenient.
REHANA: And yet, in the same breath that claims of “insanity” silence Elizabeth, they also give her the only historical voice she has—she lives on nowhere else but in the history of scandal.
ROWAN: From eugenicists who labelled Elizabeth the source of insanity in a family picture in order to prop up their ideology; who exploited her story as proof that insanity was a hereditary flaw that could be transferred to future generations, and mar the purity of a bloodline…
REHANA: From biographers of Jonathan Edwards, positioning Elizabeth as the crazy grandmother to add easily digestible drama to the story…
ROWAN: To all the various other historians who have capitalized on Elizabeth’s alleged sexual promiscuity, writing her off as a damned woman, and once more making her a footnote in a story of men.
REHANA: To us, today, in this podcast.
ROWAN: Exactly, we’re a part of this history, too.
REHANA: The allegedly feminist historians presenting Elizabeth Tuttle once more, anew, in a podcast episode entitled “Bad Reputation”. The irony is not lost on us.
ROWAN: So, how do we justify retelling the same slander against Elizabeth that has already been repeated so many times?
REHANA: I mean, this history is riddled with misogynistic interpretations and assumptions no matter how we choose to tell it. What we have of Elizabeth’s story is made possible largely by the exploitation of her sex.
ROWAN: Yeah, Richard would never have ended up the “crazy grandfather” or the “promiscuous Puritan man”.
REHANA: Exactly, and there are countless other women who have probably lived similar lives to Elizabeth, but who slipped through the cracks of history, never to have their stories told.
ROWAN: As historian Saidiya Hartman has put it, “…the stories that exist are not about them, but rather about the violence, excess, mendacity, and reason that seized hold of their lives, transformed them into commodities and corpses, and identified them with names tossed-off as insults and crass jokes”.[11]
REHANA: Historically, the stories of marginalized women often tell us more about the making of history than the women themselves.
ROWAN: So what do we want to be the legacy of this podcast? What role will this podcast play in Elizabeth’s story, but also in the making of history as a whole?
REHANA: Perhaps we can hope that our retelling of her story can be a way to redeem Elizabeth’s image, to give her justice. We can’t completely erase the claims that have labelled her insane, but maybe we can do something to reform the falsified story of her life that has been legitimized by historical biases, both in the Puritan era, and in the historical work that has featured her since.
ROWAN: We ask the same question that Hartman asks: “Is it possible to reiterate her name and to tell a story about degraded matter and dishonored life that doesn’t delight and titillate, but instead ventures toward another mode of writing?”[12]
REHANA: In other words, can we tell a scandalous story not for the sake of scandal, but for the sake of a woman scorned? Can we retroactively give Elizabeth a little piece of the life that she never had the chance to live?
ROWAN: Well, I think in this episode we’ve tried to! Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next week on Forgotten Scandals.
Works Consulted
Chamberlain, Ava. The Notorious Elizabeth Tuttle: Marriage, Murder, and Madness in the Family of Jonathan Edwards. New York: NYU Press, 2012.
Davenport, Charles Benedict. Heredity in Relation to Eugenics. New York: Henry Holt, 1911.
Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts”, Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008).
Endnotes
[1] Chamberlain, Ava. The Notorious Elizabeth Tuttle: Marriage, Murder, and Madness in the Family of Jonathan Edwards (New York: NYU Press, 2012): 153
[2] Chamberlain, 153
[3] Chamberlain, 146
[4] Chamberlain, 5
[5] Chamberlain, 5
[6] Chamberlain, 53
[7] Charles Benedict Davenport, Heredity in Relation to Eugenics (New York: Henry Holt, 1911).
[8] Chamberlain, 185-185
[9] Chamberlain, 186
[10] Chamberlain, 188
[11] Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts”, Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 2
[12] Hartman, 7