I'm enjoying a hard lavender lemonade, & drinking always puts me in an early modern lady research mood, so tonight I went looking for info on Elizabeth Eldridge Parris (1648?-1696), wife of Rev. Samuel Parris, my ancestor and the dude who got the whole witchl trial thing going.

Like most early modern women, little is known about her life other than what we can glean from the biographies of her more famous husband. She was born in England, & at some point came over to the American colonies. She was a part of the radical non-conformists known as Puritans.

Puritans by today's standards look like they were out of their fucking minds, but by 17th century standards, they were less so. LOLOLOLOLOLOLOL Just kidding. At first they were seen as wackos too. Like, you had to work super hard to like these guys.

I honestly can't think of a more stressful belief system. They believed that God already decided who was going to heaven vs. hell & there was nothing you could do about it. You spent your whole life looking for a sign that you were saved. You were scared shitless all. the. time.

All men were sinners and auto-damned, save the few on God's honor roll. Women? HAHAHAHAHAHA! You were daughters of Eve, so you were the absolute worst. You were super-sinners. Sin is in your nature. You had twice as much sin than men. Thank goodness men were there to teach you!

So this is the world Elizabeth Eldridge was born into. Now, Puritans did believe in love and family, so I hope that it was for love that she married Samuel. They met, as many the religious do, at church. He was kind of a big deal. He owned plantations in Barbados & had $$$.

He was also a slaver. He enslaved Tituba and John Indian, a married Native American couple he brought up from his plantation in Barbados. Not much is known about them other than their role in the Salem Witch trials. He brought them to Boston where he met Elizabeth @ First Church.

Around 1680/1, Elizabeth & Samuel married. He was a Harvard graduate & had come up from Barbados after a hurricane damaged his crops. She was reportedly the most beautiful woman in town. Together they had three children: Thomas, Elizabeth ("Betty"), and Susannah.

As we have to glean what we can about historical women from the historical record that is predominantly male and white, I start to fill in the gaps with what I know about the daily life of a colonial woman. My professional assessment: Elizabeth Parris was fucking exhausted.

As if having kids wasn't exhausting enough, she would have had to run a household from scratch. I get exhausted just cleaning the bathroom. Imagine having to make the soap, wash the rags by hand, and mop up the daily mud your family tracked in from the dirt roads. It sucked.

As a Puritan colonial woman, violence was probably also a normal part of Elizabeth's daily life. Domestic violence was common & even encouraged...with moderation. A man's role as the head of the house was to guide his wife and children's moral compass....

...which meant corporal punishment when appropriate. Pamphlets of the day cautioned men not to beat wives out of anger or to excess. Rather, as it was a means of correcting behavior and saving the soul, it should be applied with that goal in mind.

Puritans, like most early modern Christians, believed that women were morally inferior, & this inferiority was inherited from her foremother Eve. Misogynist writing suggested that women, as they were made from Adam's rib, were inherently "crooked." Sin was in their flesh.

In addition to widespread domestic violence, Elizabeth probably saw violence on a regular basis as part of colonial life. Clashes with Natives were common, & as a slaver, Elizabeth would have seen extreme violence enacted on others & maybe even participated in it herself.

At the very least, Elizabeth was complicit. She probably had the general early modern white people view of BIPOC as inferior & in need of guidance/correction. One of the sick pro-slavery arguments was the classic "white savior" belief. BIPOC were like children & needed "saving."

BTW we still see the "white savior" narrative playing out in with well-meaning but misguided efforts by white folks trying to "save" BIPOC by whatever means they come up with instead of actually LISTENING to BIPOC about what they need & FUNDING BIPOC leadership. But I digress.

In 1689, Samuel had a career change and took on the minister position at Salem. Everyone knows about the Salem witch trials, but few talk about Salem village BEFORE the first witch accusation.

In short: Salem was already pretty fucked up by the time Rev. Parris even got there.

Colonial was a clusterfuck of rather messed up white people. You had those going over to make $ by trade, farming, or pillaging. Then you had a crapton of convicts who were "transported" as their jail sentence. A sub-group of these delinquents were non-conformists.

Non-conformist groups, like early Quakers, Ranters, and Puritans, were always in trouble with the law in England, and many religious radicals found themselves being shipped to plantations as transported felons. You could work off your debt to society, but rarely did you return.

Other radical groups fell for the "promised land" propaganda & saw it as a place they could escape persecution & convert more people. Some, like the Quaker William Penn, came for a combination of proselytizing reasons and colonizing land given to him by the king (i.e.$$).

Needless to say, when you have a bunch of blood-thirsty adventurers, imperialist agents, slavers, radicals so extreme they were kicked out of their country, transported criminals, & people stupid enough to believe colonizing propoganda in one place, you're gonna have issues.

Hence, Salem. The folks of Salem did not get along. There was so much contention that they literally could not get a minister to stay. Let me repeat that: THE PEOPLE OF SALEM WERE SO FUBAR THAT EVEN MINISTERS COULDN'T PUT UP WITH THEIR SHIT. So they resigned. Quickly.

Part of what caused three ministers to resign over the course of a decade was the issue of money. Salem didn't pay their ministers what they were owed as a general rule, and contracts were often changed at the last minute. This also happened to Rev. Parris.

Elizabeth must have been stressed out. For one, they were owed a salary that never fully materialized, & the parsonage w/land that was supposed to be theirs was suddenly just a loaner. Adding to the fire, Parris's hardlined hellfire speeches put off the more "liberal" villagers.

It was in this hellscape of feuding families, pissed off ministers, and puritanical speeches that Elizabeth Parris's daughter Betty and niece Abigail started having "witch-caused" afflictions. They were only 9 and 11 years old.

I have a 9 year old. Let me tell you about their psychology. They are still very much afraid of urban legends and things that go bump in the night. They also manifest stress in weird ways. Yes, 9 year olds will still sometimes throw fits. They also conflate one fear w/another.

Their emotions are kind of like a soup where they will meld with one another. For instance, a child who feels sadness over a canceled field trip might suddenly start saying they are axtually sad their dog died 3 years ago. They aren't that great at sorting their feelings out yet.

Kids are also super sensitive to the emotions of adults. They respond accordingly. If you are having a bad day, your kid will pick up on that & before you know it you are both crying in the kitchen. Now imagine that sensitivity in a house with violence, $ insecurity, & hellfire.

I've read the theories about the initial visions and fits the girls had caused by bad wheat or psychosis or whatever, but I think it was just the natural result of kids being in a stressful environment and believing in demons, witchcraft, and damnation as real, tangible things.

Imagine seeing a ghost as a kid and instead of your parents giving you hugs and reassurances that nothing is there instead they freak out, say the devil is physically in your room, rip you out of bed and makes you say prayers as your dad attempts an exorcism. It was nuts.

But to most early modern folks, the supernatural world was a natural given. God & Satan were doing battle for your soul. They were tangible forces you were constantly on the lookout for. Good parents did everything they could to teach their kids how to navigate this spooky world.

This belief makes it easy for paranoia to grow. If everything that happens has a supernatural reason behind it, then you always looked for a supernatural cause for anything that happens, including children acting out. (The Age of Reason wasn't here yet.)

Imagine being a kid where your parents confirmed your worst supernatural fears instead of negating them. Imagine parents who enslaved other people and beat them to keep them in line. Imagine being beaten yourself. Imagine your father having the authority over your own damnation.

So if you were a kid in a stressed out home, raised in this hellfire and brimstone landscape, w/ hell all around you, if you were caught doing something you shouldn't...say one of those fortune-telling cubes we made as kids...would YOU tell the truth & accept a harsh punishment?

If you have ever asked a kid "what possessed you to ever do XYZ?!?!", you probably got a shrug and an "I don't know" tossed at you. Because honestly, they don't. Kids have poor impulse control and developmental emotional intelligence. Imagine if Betty or Abigail were asked this.

I suspect they couldn't really explain why they were acting up or barking like dogs. Kids do weird stuff all the time. Heck, my kid randomly licked my elbow the other day. Who knows why they do what they do? But Parris saw it as witchcraft & so the girls produced a witch.

Rev. Parris beat a paetial confession out of Tituba. It was brutal. There is no way this could have been kept from Elizabeth or the kids. Elizabeth stood by while the first "witch" went to trial with her daughter and niece as the star witnesses. It all goes downhill from there.

Elizabeth dies soon after the trials have ended in 1696. She saw her husband whip the community to a frenzy at the pulpit. She watched 19 "witches" hung and one crushed to death as a result of the paranoia. In 1693, the congregation brought Rev. Parris up on charges for it all.

He was, however, acquitted by Increase Mather, the father of Cotton Mather who would go on to write many famous works. Increase Mather was also a fan of the Malleus Maleficarum, which I went off on in the thread below: https://twitter.com/Literature_Lady/status/1162237785941504001?s=19

Elizabeth was buried in Wadsworth Cemetary in Massachusetts and her headstone is the oldest in the cemetery. It reads:

Elizabeth Parris Aged
about 48 years Decd
July ye 14, 1696
Sleep precious dust no stranger now to rest.
Thou hast thy longed wish in Abrams Breft.
Farewell best Wife, choice Mother, Neighbour, Friend
Wee'l wail the less for hopes of Thee i'th end.

She was much loved by her husband and children if the headstone is a testament of how they felt, but she remains a problematic figure in history. Without leaving behind any journal or collection of letters (that I know of), we have to make educated guesses about her life.

Women's agency is a concept early modern scholars struggle with. As a woman under a rigid patriarchy, did she have the agency to even speak up against the trials? Did she believe in what her husband was doing? A lack of women's records do not always mean complacency.

We have to admit, however, as a white slaver, Elizabeth would have benefitted from being part of the colonialism empire. She also would have benefitted from being the wife of a prominent man in the community.

Without her writings, we will never know if this privilege came at a personal cost or not. We are once again stuck holding the bag, begging for more research on early modern women to be done.

The end!

Footnote: I would like to add that I started this thread last night but didn't post it until this afternoon. I do not start drinking at 1pm on workdays! (No matter how tempting it may be...)