Anne Bradstreet

1. Bradstreet was born Anne Dudley in Northampton, England, 1612. She was the daughter of Thomas Dudley, a steward of the Earl of Lincoln, and Dorothy Yorke. Due to her family's position in the society she grew up in cultured circumstances and was a well-educated woman since she was at a very young age, and being tutored in history, several languages and literature.


2. Women tend to be mothers or to manage the houses. They were also not allowed to go to the theater and or act on the stage.


3. Wrote for women’s right, in “The Prologue”:

“I am obnoxious to each carping tongue Who says my hand a needle better fits, A poet's pen all scorn I should thus wrong, For such despite they cast on female wits; If what I do prove well, it won't advance, They'll say it's stol'n, or else it was by chance.”

(The men’s opinions of women: Women were not capable of higher thinking, women’s skulls are small, and ships were wilder, little dignity)

“Let Greeks be Greeks, and women what they are, Men have precedency and still excel, it is but vain unjustly to wage war; Men can do best, and women know it well. Preeminence in all and each is yours; yet grant some small, acknowledgement of ours.”

(Women can do almost everything as men can do and she satires on the reality that women were not supposed to write literature or participate in any politics, just live as properties.)


4. Bradstreet's education gave her advantages to write with authority about politics, history, medicine, and theology.

She is considered by many people as the first female poet to be published from either Puritan America or England.

Her indifference to material wealth, her humility and her spirituality, regardless of religion, made her into a positive, inspirational role model for any of us.

Even, nearly a century later, some 18th-century American poets and writers, was still influenced and pays homage to Bradstreet's verse.