4 Samuel Willard, A Complete Body of Divinity (Boston, 1726), 609-612; quoted in Ulrich, “Vertuous Women Found,” 28-30.

5 Milton, Paradise Lost, book IV, line 297.

6 The courts in all New England colonies frequently recognized the right of married women to hold property independently of their husbands. In 1660, for example, a court in Connecticut recorded an agreement that “Jeremiah Adams did resign all power of disposing the estate (left by Thomas Greenhill to Goodwife Adams) unto his wife’s hands to be wholly at her dispose.” See J. Hammond Trumbull, ed., The Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut (Hartford, 1850), I, 360, 14 March 1660. Of Plymouth Colony, a leading authority writes, “ … one finds the Court sustaining certain kinds of contracts involving women on a fairly regular basis.” Both prenuptial and postnuptial contracts were enforced for women living with their husbands. See Demos, A Little Commonwealth, 85-86; cf. Marylynn Salmon, Women and the Law of Property in Early America (Chapel Hill, 1986).