Look at those times! You can almost see them changing!

I think that the women in the texts are definitely being presented in different lights throughout the reading. The “witches” as we saw earlier were blamed for every evil in the towns and were persecuted or killed because other young women (who just wanted a little agency for themselves) singled them out. The majority of the women that were first blamed were the ones on the side lines of society, who perhaps didn’t fit in the female gender role as much as they might have. The women in the infanticide narratives were also seen as criminals (obviously), but their criminality was most often seen as an inherent quality in their natures that could only be forced out of them by Christianity. There were still those women who were accused of infanticide or admitted to it, that in all likelihood weren’t guilty at all. These women, due to their sketchy pasts were essentially condemned to death because they couldn’t overcome peoples’ perceptions of them and weren’t able to stand up for themselves under patriarchal pressures. The “Lady” in the Panther Narrative is really one of the first women we see that has any kind of agency in her own life, though this agency leads to murder. This Lady is still accepted back into society though, because her crime meant she got to keep her virtue. During Puritan times, this woman would have probably been hung for that same crime.

The authors change with the times. Cotton Mather was trying to justify what had been done to all those poor people. Authors of the infanticide narratives (notably not the women offenders, but the ministers), were trying to use them as examples on how not to live their lives. And Abraham Panther wrote his narrative to entertain the post-revolutionary audience, that enjoyed the sentimental story and the captivity narrative.

I think we constantly see revisions of the way women are depicted today. There are all sorts of movements to encourage girls to have a healthy body image, although at the same time there are tiny girls across the pages of magazines and TV screens. (I’m talking about you 90210!) It is really hard to grow up anyway, but it is even harder when your body type doesn’t match those of the images you are daily barraged with. Luckily, in our print culture today, there are a slew of novels for young girls that reflect these same kinds of issues they are having. I think it must help to not feel as alone. Books with awkward, braces-wearing heroines and stories about girls who can’t and never will be a size 2 are extremely popular, so maybe there is hope yet. Girls don’t have to be perfect—they don’t have to look or act exactly as society or the media would have them. They can be free to be themselves. Well, mostly.