Bradstreet's Audience

Originally Bradstreet's audience was her husband and children. She wrote for them. Not only did she want to educate her children, but she wanted them to understand her struggles and how she was able to cope with them. Bradstreet, being a very religious Puritan woman, would turn to God to help her through her every day struggles and then write about them for her children.

Her poetry also circulated throughout her family but it was intended to only for personal reading. "As a Puritan woman of the seventeenth-century, Anne Bradstreet struggled to write poetry in a society that was hostile to imagination. Women were expected to behave deferentially and neither her education nor her privileged status as the child of one colonial governor and wife of another could protect her against the scorn and persecution visited upon women who stepped beyond their role in Puritan society. Anne often appears self-deprecating in order to appease the critical males, describing her work as lowly, meanly clad, poor, ragged, foolish, broken, and blemished" (Behling). 

Her poetry was eventually published and her works spoke "as a wife, as a mother and as a woman." By doing so, this made it easy to look past the fact she was a Puritan woman, going outside of the cultural standards set by her society and people were gradually able to accept and enjoy her poetry. 

 Behling, Susanne. "Anne Dudley Bradstreet". 2007. Web. 11 December 2010. <http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~nwa/bradstreet.html>

Poem of Quotes. 2004. Web. 11 December 2010.JPEG file. <http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~nwa/bradstreet.html>