Women in Colonial America Were More Powerful Than We Give Them Credit For
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During the first act of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, Aaron Burr remembers his mother, the late Esther Edwards Burr, with intense, almost apotheotic fondness:
“My mother was a genius
My father commanded respect.
When they died they left no instructions.
Just a legacy to protect.”
In a world where women were seldom regarded for their intelligence (and in a musical where women are celebrated yet largely defined by their relationships to men), the word “genius” pierces through the song like a clue to be solved. Who exactly was Esther Burr? it compels us to ask. And how did she seemingly leave her son with such a life-altering inferiority complex?
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In February 1732, Esther was born just as her father, the theologian Jonathan Edwards, was preparing to lead one of the greatest evangelical revivals of the First Great Awakening. Growing up in Northampton, Mass., she witnessed thousands of “unconverted” souls flock to her father’s church, where he sermonized on the need for repentance and God’s power to “cast wicked men into hell.”
As the third of Edwards’s 11 children, Esther was hailed as a “great beauty”—the so-called “flower of her family”—though her allure extended well beyond the cosmetic. According to Samuel Hopkins, a frequent visitor to the Edwards parsonage (and Jonathan Edwards’s future biographer), she was not only an engaging conversationalist who “knew how to be facetious and sportive,” but also a highly intelligent woman who possessed a “sprightly imagination” and “an uncommon degree of wit.”
Raised by his erudite mother and four older sisters, Jonathan Edwards treated Esther very much as a pupil, as did her forward-thinking husband, Aaron Burr, Sr., whom she married in 1752 at the age of 20. Yet even so, Esther’s schooling only went so far. Per Calvinist doctrine, Edwards prioritized Esther’s education primarily as a means to save her soul, believing all children to be “heirs of hell” who must be “born again”…
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Source : time
