Meanwhile, images of the divine in clerical writings were sometimes explicitly maternal and reproductive. Willard referred to “the womb of providence” and spoke of the world as “a sucking infant depending on the breasts of divine providence.” Nehemiah Walter urged his readers to “lay” their “lips unto the breasts of the gospel” so as to take from it “spiritual food.” Clergymen, the congregations over which they presided, and the colleges at which they trained also assumed maternal, reproductive personas. William Adams referred to ministers as “travailling in birth with souls till Christ be formed in them.” Samuel Danforth, reminiscing about the early years of settlement, recalled the “pious care” taken of “sister churches, that those that wanted breasts might be supplied.” John Wise described Harvard College as “our dear mother,” producing “fair, and numerous offspring.” Contemporaries endowed body parts and the physical processes associated with them with clearly gendered attributes (the breast and womb representing maternal nourishment and fecundity, the penis connoting virility). Yet men, women, and even institutions could acquire male and female organs, along with their functions and the cultural significations that they carried.17
Men adopted a bride-like posture not only as Christians but also in other contexts. They made sense of situations in which they deferred to male-identified authority by assuming in those contexts a female persona. John Cotton, in whose Boston congregation John Winthrop was a member, declared that the relationship between rulers and subjects in a commonwealth was equivalent to that between “husband and wife in the family,” so that men who became empowered as voting citizens on election days should then defer to those whom they elected, as wives should obey their husbands.18 Meanwhile, women could assume masculine roles in particular circumstances and be treated as if male figures by men and women around them. If a husband was ill or absent, a wife could step into his shoes and expect male neighbors to engage with her as if they were dealing with her husband. As household mistresses, women routinely exercised authority over male servants and other dependents. Their doing so might seem incompatible with patriarchal assumptions, but as the historian Phyllis Mack reminds us, a subordinate male was “functionally feminine in relation to his female superior,” who in turn was “functionally masculine in relation to her apprentices or dependents.” By no means all women had the opportunity to embody patriarchal authority as household heads, but hierarchies of age and status routinely placed women in positions of precedence over men. Rank or status often outweighed biological sex in deciding who had authority in a given position; whoever had that authority became male-identified. Dominance and subjection found expression through gendered language, but social and political order rested just as firmly on male as on female submission to those placed above them. Gendered power operated more in terms of situation than with regard to the sex of those involved: it did not belong exclusively to any one sex.19
That measure of flexibility in gender roles depended in part on biological assumptions that made a much less absolute distinction between men and women than later conceptions of the body would claim to exist. Most contemporaries believed that four fundamental fluids or humors (blood, choler, melancholy, and phlegm), present in all human bodies, governed physical functions and emotions. The humors were in constant flux, which led to a never-ending struggle against disequilibrium. (Contemporaries believed that humoral imbalance caused disease, thus the use of bleeding and purging to restore a healthy balance between the four fluids.) Men and women differed from each other to some degree because they had a distinct combination of these four fluids; the physical and moral frailty of women resulted from their distinctive humoral makeup. Yet those differences between men and women were as unstable as the humors themselves. From this perspective, there could be no clear-cut distinction between the sexes. Equally significant in its implications for gender was Galen’s still-influential “one-sex” model of the body. This model assumed that female reproductive organs were nothing more than male organs inverted (the uterus an internal version of the scrotum, the ovaries resembling male testicles, and the penis appearing in women as the cervix and vagina). According to Galen, a failure of heat prevented female organs from thrusting outward, so that women, according to this model, were beings who had failed to develop fully into men. This denial of any clear-cut boundaries between male and female bodies, in humoral and one-sex models, would have legitimated and facilitated the flexibility of gender roles in early modern culture.20
That Puritans could envisage for each believer, including men, two intensely passionate marital relationships, one with an earthly spouse and the other with a heavenly bridegroom, was due, then, to specific conceptions of gender and even of anatomical sex that the colonists brought with them across the Atlantic. There is no evidence to suggest that Native American traditions and practices influenced English settlers’ understanding of gender or sexuality. Early reports from the New World had described a category of Native American men, often referred to by Indians as “half man / half woman,” who lived as women, dressed in female clothing, and engaged in sexual relations with other men. There were also Indian women who assumed male clothing and roles, though this phenomenon seems to have been less widespread. From a Native American perspective, the “half man / half woman” seems to have embodied and promoted a harmony that resulted from reconciling opposites within the physical and spiritual realms. The composite identity of these individuals enabled them to mediate between the polarities of male and female as well as between those of spirit and flesh. Yet European explorers and settlers neither understood nor respected the assumptions underlying Native American conceptions of gender: that Indians revered men who lived as women and who made themselves sexually available to other men in their communities exemplified for Europeans the immorality and savagery of Indian culture. Indeed, Europeans used the word “berdache” (an Arabic word meaning “male prostitute”) to describe such men. English and Indian conceptions of gender did share an assumption that men and women could combine male and female attributes, but whereas the “half man / half woman” tradition conferred on particular individuals a gender identity that combined male and female components, English and specifically Puritan conceptions of gender involved everyone adopting a range of gender roles and attributes in particular contexts.21
The performance of these gendered roles within Anglo-American society proceeded according to a complex and strictly regulated protocol. Whether colonists considered an individual’s adoption of male or female roles appropriate depended entirely on the context. Yet a clear commitment to order and regulation within early modern society should not blind us to the degree of flexibility in gender roles and categories that contemporaries used to make sense of their lives. Moreover, that “fluidity of self-perception” (to quote Phyllis Mack) framed all interactions because contemporaries used gendered and familial metaphors to describe social, political, and religious relationships. Puritans inhabited a world in which earthly bridegrooms could anticipate eagerly becoming heavenly brides, in which both men and women embraced a polymorphous sexuality through which they would bear “the babe of grace” even as they rejoiced in their phallic credentials as “members of Christ.” Thus, John Winthrop could refer to Christ as “my love, my dove, my undefiled,” praying that he might be “possesse[d]” by his savior in “the love of marriage,” and recommend that romantic union to his third wife, Margaret Tyndal, as a “pattern” for their own loving relationship. In ways that may seem bizarre and alien to us, Winthrop became both husband and wife, alongside his effusively loving friendship with William Spring.