The Great and Sore Affliction

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Article Review: This Great and Sore Affliction 1-Introduction In the controversial article, This Great and Sore Affliction by William Sterne and Nancy Nahra: discusses the way a women named Anne Marbury Hutchinson expresses her beliefs and opinions with others in the 1600s. I think the author wrote this article to express how abnormal it was for women to stand up for themselves and also to give readers an understanding of the consequences people would face for sharing there opinions back then, especially if you were female. 2-Critical Summary The way women and people in general were treated in the 1600’s differs to how we are treated today. The thesis of this article is that not everyone was treated equally despite the circumstances; most women didn’t have much freedom of speech compared to some male colonists. One of the authors’ major contentions was the sex differentiations and restrictions people had. For example, when John Winthrop was reelected on October 1636, he found out about Anne’s meetings at her house towards the topic of Familism and sponsored a court order forbidding anyone to entertain strangers for more than three weeks, pointing it mainly to new immigrants from England who had similar view points with Anne. They expected everyone to follow the same religion and not have anyone rebel towards that nor influence others. Many women, along with Anne were persecuted and fined for speaking their opinions and being female just gave Winthrop and other male colonists more ambition to persecute them. 3-Conclusion A major strength about this article is the amount of detail it has for each of the story lines about Anne Hutchinson and her journey since she was little. A weakness would be not discussing more on how it differed if you were male or female and how the situation would vary if Anne was a male instead. The information I learned from the

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