New Haven County Court Records

The Bold Defense of Mehittabel Whitehead

For the fifth and final profile in our “women in colonial Connecticut” series, we are going to examine a case where a woman was sued for slander and spoke boldly in her own defense.

When quoting from documents, we will use the actual spelling, including transcriptions of individual words as necessary. (For more information about colonial spelling practices, see The Standardization of American English at teachinghistory.org.)

Micah Palmer vs. Mehittabel Whitehead

In November 1716, Micah Palmer of Branford sued Mehittabel Whitehead, also of Branford, for slander and defamation. He claimed that Whitehead, while “in discourse” with others, accused him of abusing his role as administrator “on a certain Estate,” saying that he “wronged her in the s[ai]d administration, and had gotten him a wedding Coat with that money, and had feathered his nest.” Although she was reproved for saying such things, she continued to insist that Palmer had committed “such underhand cheating tricks and had many times feathered his nest with such tricks.” Palmer claimed that her words were “a slander and unlawful defamation of him,” and requested twenty pounds in damages.

What is particularly interesting about this case is that Whitehead issued a written rebuttal to the County Court:

Mehittabel Whitehead’s rebuttal to the slander lawsuit brought by Micah Palmer

In this rebuttal, Whitehead requested abatement, or dismissal, of the charges. However, she did not deny she made these statements. Instead, she doubled down on them, writing that “there is nyther the matter nor the form of an action of defamation for men may and often do use such [methods] & triks” and she further asserted that “the planti[ff] did witingly and willingly cheat her & feather his neste With the monie.”

Not only was Mehittabel Whitehead literate, she did not couch her words in the modest humility expected of her sex. As Cornelia Hughes Dayton observed, it was men who “gave themselves license to express a level of vexation and moral outrage” when pleading their cases to the male judiciary, whereas women “presented authorities with carefully calculated rationalizations of their behavior... meant to deflect attention from the woman’s autonomous act of defiance to her embeddedness in family obligations and the weaknesses of her sex.” Once a woman was “depicted as a shrew and a scold” by the members of her community, her testimony was far less likely to be considered credible (Women Before the Bar: Gender, Law, & Society in Connecticut, 1639-1789, pp. 149-150, 322).

But Whitehead was clever—or, as they would have said in those days, she had “much wit.” She was also apparently familiar with the law, as evidenced by her legalistic phrasing. Still, in an era where women were expected to be meek helpmeets subordinate to men, such wit and outspokenness could be dangerous qualities for a female to have (as Anne Hutchinson could certainly attest). So even if Whitehead was being completely honest and unvarnished in her words, it would not have been inconceivable for the patriarchal Court to disapprove of her chosen method of expression, as “on a few occasions New Haven Colony magistrates explicitly reprimanded a woman for speech that was ‘uncomely for her sex’” (Dayton, Women Before the Bar, p. 299).

Amazingly, however, the Court sided with Whitehead. Not only did they agree that “this action ought to abate,” they decreed that “the Defendant shall Recover of the plaintiff her [Court] Costs” (County Court Records, New Haven County, Vol. 3, 1713 to 1739, p. 74). The matter appears to have ended there, as the record book does not mention an appeal, review, or continuance. It is truly an unexpected delight to see—especially after the appalling verdict of the Gould witchcraft slander case and the ultimate futility of Mary Hoadly’s quest to salvage her reputation—that women could, on occasion, speak boldly on their own behalf without being punished for it.

As noted in a previous post, the records for this case, as well as several of the cases previously profiled in this blog, are currently in the process of being digitized. They will eventually be available for public viewing at the Connecticut Digital Archive (CTDA). [Update September 2024: This case is now available on CTDA.]

The Connecticut State Library would like to thank the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) for their generous support of this project.