America's First Feminist Poet

Anne Bradstreet was America's first published poet. Anne was born in Northampton, England in 1612. She was the daughter of Thomas Dudley, a steward of the Earl of Lincoln, and was a well-educated woman for her time, being tutored in history, several languages and literature. 

At the age of sixteen, she married and both Anne's father and husband were later to serve as governors of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Anne and her husband Simon, along with Anne's parents, immigrated to America along with Puritan emigrants in 1630.


Anne Bradstreet was the first poet in the British North American colonies to be published, although her collected poems, The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America, By a Gentlewoman of Those Parts, were published in 1650 without her knowledge. The collection received a positive reception in both England and the New World.

Anne Bradstreet died on September 16, 1672 in North Andover, Massachusetts at the age of 60. A marker in the North Andover cemetery commemorates the 350th anniversary in 2000 of the publishing of The Tenth Muse in London in 1650. That site and the Bradstreet Gate at Harvard may be the only two places in America honoring her memory.

Her poetry is of a style that is not in fashion and if Anne is read today it is most likely to be something anthologized in an American literature textbook.

From her poem "Prologue", here is a witty and sarcastic stanza about how the Puritan men talk to and about her as obnoxious and that "[her] hand a [sewing[ needle better fits” than a pen. How could a woman produce a work of art that would be worthy of praise? It must be “stol’n” or just dumb luck.

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. 

         from The Works of Anne Bradstreet