We do not know how MumBet looked as a child or young woman. We do not know what she sounded like or what her posture, her gait and her gestures were like. Can we determine it at a distance of 300 years?
Tag: John Ashley
CONNECTIONS: ‘The Resolves’ of Sheffield, hotbed of insurrection
Some historians dismiss the Sheffield Resolves; others call them the first American Declaration of Independence. In either case, in just seven days, who wrote this impressive document?
Connections: Legislating morality, Part I: Fornication
Premarital sex was sanctioned and encouraged when two people were engaged to be married so the couple could determine beforehand if the marriage would be fruitful. What the women in the fornication trials were actually being punished for was not the act but failing to marry the man afterward.
Review: ‘Mum Bett’s Minute,’ and the passion for freedom
“If one minute’s freedom had been offered to me, and I had been told I must die at the end of that minute, I would have taken it — just to stand one minute on God’s Earth a free woman.”
— Mum Bett, in Jesse Waldinger’s “Mum Bett’s Minute”