Sarah Palin/Anne Hutchinson follow-up

Mr. Bottum has a point:

Sally Quinn—and what made the Washington Post imagine this gossip columnist was an expert on American religion?—points out the hypocrisy of conservative Protestants both promoting male headship and cheering for Sarah Palin.

To which Helen Rittelmeyer replies the answer is easy: Sarah Palin is Anne Hutchinson reborn. “If even the Puritans couldn’t unequivocally reject the possibility of female public leadership, I don’t know why Sally Quinn thinks that today’s Protestants should have to.”

Um, maybe. One remembers that the Puritan fathers did, in fact, find a way to get rid of Hutchinson (for heresy, as it happens, which also seems to be the charge brought against Palin, though this time from her fellow women rather than the men).

He's certainly right that official hostility to Anne Hutchinson had a lot to do with her gender, but concerns about her gender didn't survive the translation from the governors' internal motivations to their legitimate, publicly stated (the word "legal" isn't quite right here) reasons for exiling her. I didn't mean to suggest that the prosecution of Anne Hutchinson should be understood as a feminist event. However, it's interesting that a trial that should have been a decisive condemnation of feminine leadership ended not quite being one.