In early America's Massachusetts Bay theocracy, dissenters, especially women, lived lives of quiet desperation, subject to men and their harsh laws in almost every aspect of their lives. Such is the world that Chastity Hoar faces in seventeenth-century Boston, and such is the world that two of her friends, the historical Anne Hutchinson and Mary Dyer, face in their dissent against the iron laws of that theocracy. The whipping post, the...