Local author to host national women’s history webinar – Star News Group

POINT PLEASANT — Local author Margaret Cotton will host a national webinar next week on early American women, feminism and the fight for religious freedom in the United States. The sacrifices and rebellious actions of three of these women and others were major factors in the national adoption of the First Amendment to the Constitution, she said.

Announcement

The free webinar, sponsored by the National Women’s History Alliance, will be held on Monday, July 27, at 7 p.m. Attendees are required to register beforehand, at nationalwomenshistoryalliance.org.

“The alliance is a national organization based in California, and it’s a primarily online and Zoom meeting. What they’ve asked me to do is be a featured presenter on their July webinar, which is part of a series of online events that celebrate the founding of our nation. It’s a one-hour event that’s free to view or watch later, and it goes across the country,” Cotton said.

Cotton, a Manasquan-raised author and retired teacher who now resides in Point Pleasant, is the author of the historical fiction novel, “The Radiance of Grace,” which tells the true story of three women, Mary Dyer, Katherine Scott and Anne Hutchinson. They fought for religious freedom in the years before the First Amendment to the Constitution, which guarantees religious freedom by barring Congress from making any law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, was ratified. Cotton argues that their contributions to the First Amendment are often overlooked.

“I think the legacy of these women has to be acknowledged in a way that it isn’t right now,” she said. Cotton said one of the goals of the webinar is to persuade the historical organizations in Boston to explore the lives of revolutionary women such as Mary Dyer.

“Almost all of the early colonies had an official recognized religion, but that’s not the same as religious freedom,” Cotton said. Colonists were required to pay taxes whether or not they attended church, but in Massachusetts they were also fined if they didn’t attend church, Cotton explained. “So when we talk about religious freedom, and people who came here for religious freedom, I think a closer look gives us a different point of view on what kind of religious liberty they were seeking. These women, as early as 1635, envisioned religious freedom, they organized resistance and they paid the price,” she said.

The key locations in the novel are Rhode Island and Boston. Cotton explained that the Royal Charter in Rhode Island was one of the first documents to guarantee the right to religious freedom. When Dyer, Scott and Hutchinson pushed for similar rights in Boston, their efforts later inspired George Mason and James Madison to include the rights in the Virginia Constitution, which in turn inspired the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

“The thing that’s really interesting to me and really motivated the depth of my research was that in Rhode Island, they had a Royal Charter in 1663,” Cotton explained.

“That document in Rhode Island stood alone until Thomas Jefferson used it in his Virginia Constitution (in 1776),” Cotton said. “So no other colony for almost a hundred years offered freedom of religion. That doesn’t mean that local towns may not have pursued it, but there was no other colony that had a charter that guaranteed freedom of religion until the compromise of the Bill of Rights.”

“Rhode Island was one of several states who refused to ratify the Constitution unless freedom of religion was included,” Cotton said. “If you really understand that there was only one colony that had freedom of religion for over 100 years before the Constitution, suddenly the First Amendment looks much more important.”

Cotton’s webinar will primarily focus on the contributions of women like Dyer, Scott and Hutchinson to the ongoing fight for religious freedom, rather than focusing on the book itself, emphasizing the idea that no struggle is too small, and highlighting the fact that these women fought for a future that they never got to experience.

Cotton said she hopes people are inspired by the stories of women like Dyer who fought for freedoms. “(Circumstances) never changed in their lifetimes, but they were empowered within those circumstances to have grand goals and to understand that resilience is their power,” she said.

Cotton said she didn’t expect her research to become more relevant with time. “I didn’t start this with a political agenda. (Organizations like the alliance) have been in existence for at least 12 to 20 years, so this didn’t start as an agenda against policy, but the policy against (women’s history) has been brought to us,” Cotton said. “As a woman, I don’t want to be afraid to tell a story of women who gave up everything, who lived lives bold and courageous.”

“It’s not a women’s history. It’s a national history and as long as young men don’t see the significance and value of real things that real women did, they buy into a false history. Women’s history has absolutely been removed. There are many examples (it) of being removed from history books and history curriculums. Museums are being pressured to reduce exhibits that include it. It’s the same pressure to simplify our history, when in fact we don’t want to simplify it. We want to enhance it and dig into it and expand our knowledge of our history,” Cotton said.

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