What evidence is there in the primary source documents illustrating female agency in the shaping of Christianity?
Women occupied an always essential but usually subordinate role in shaping Christianity in early America. The different denominations of Christianity were not only the biggest driving forces that brought colonist to the Americas, they also shaped the social structure, interaction and inter-colonial trade of the colonies that formed. Without women, however, this tenuously established social structure of Christianity would have broken down. Important influences on Christianity by women during this time find dramatic expression in examples of women such as Anne Hutchinson. But overall, the affect of women on early American colonial society was derived directly from their subordinate role prescribed by their faiths. The different Christian denominations produced the first colonies in early America. When the Puritans fled religious persecution in England and established the Massachusetts Bay colony, they sought a place to practice their new religious experiment unhindered. The Quakers on th
