Reviewed by Laura Henigman | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 61.1

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Reviewed by Laura Henigman | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 61.1 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

The World of Hannah Heaton: The Diary of an Eighteenth-Century New England Farm Woman. Edited by Barbara E. Lacey. (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003. Pp. xxxii, 343. $48.00.) Reviewed by Laura Henigman , James Madison University
Barbara Lacey called attention to Hannah Heaton's journal some fifteen years ago in an article in these pages, and it has been consulted and referred to by students of the period since then.¹ Now that Lacey has edited the complete journal for publication, we have a tremendous opportunity to take stock of where we are in colonial religious and women's studies. This published version of an eighteenth-century Connecticut farm woman's journal is a welcome addition to the small set of woman-authored colonial texts we have in readily available form. It joins such significant publications as The Journal of Esther Edwards Burr and A Midwife's Tale, facilitating an approach to eighteenth-century history and literature that places women front and center.² Heaton's journal forces us to reconsider the functions of family and church in eighteenth-century women's lives. Rather than structuring Heaton's understanding of her place in the world, these institutions push her into alienation. She speaks from the journal as a voice in the wilderness, a perspective that will be important to anyone examining gender roles in eighteenth-century families, churches, and towns.	1
In many respects, Heaton's life followed a familiar trajectory. She was born in 1721 in Southampton, Long Island, and in her late teens and early twenties heard the Great Awakening revivalists Gilbert Tennent and George Whitefield preach; shortly afterward, she experienced a conversion. Later, she moved permanently to North Haven, Connecticut, with her husband, Theophilus Heaton, worked productively on their farm for nearly fifty years, and bore four children, two of whom lived to adulthood. The journal—not always a day-by-day account, more often a retrospective over a few months or a year—is sustained during the course of this long life. Heaton recorded spiritual trials, worries over impending childbirths, and the hardships of farm labor. Other kinds of details, though, are more unusual.	2
Most immediately startling and most well-known to those who know the diary is that Heaton was prosecuted in 1758 for breaking the Sabbath. She refused to attend North Haven's "standing meeting," believing the minister, Isaac Stiles, inadequate and the church itself insufficiently "gathered"; she went, when she could, to a small and sporadic Separate meeting in town. Heaton's writing lets us see just what was at stake for a dissenting woman in a rural community. She was threatened with prosecution for years before it actually happened, was harassed by neighbors, and remained permanently estranged from them. Her encounter with the judge (ironically, the brother of Great Awakening preacher James Davenport, whom she had heard and admired) sounds remarkably like Anne Hutchinson's trial, a familiar model of female resistance to religious and judicial authority: "i spoke & told the justice there was a day acoming when justise would be done. I told him god had said he would execute righteousness & judgment for all that was oppressed.... The justice told me i talked sasse and he lookt with a lofty angry countenance" (p. 81).	. . .

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