Being Good: Women's Moral Values in Early America - Hardcover

Saxton, Martha

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374110115 ISBN 13: 9780374110116

Publisher: Hill and Wang, 2002

Synopsis

A pathbreaking new study of women and morality

How do people decide what is "good" and what is "bad"? How does a society set moral guidelines -- and what happens when the behavior of various groups differs from these guidelines? Martha Saxton tackles these and other fascinating issues in Being Good, her history of the moral values prescribed for women in early America.

Saxton begins by examining seventeenth-century Boston, then moves on to eighteenth-century Virginia and nineteenth-century St. Louis. Studying women throughout the life cycle -- girls, young unmarried women, young wives and mothers, older widows -- through their diaries and personal papers, she also studies the variations due to different ethnicities and backgrounds. In all three cases, she is able to show how the values of one group conflicted with or developed in opposition to those of another. And, as the women's testimonies make clear, the emotional styles associated with different value systems varied. A history of American women's moral life thus gives us a history of women's emotional life as well. In lively and penetrating prose, Saxton argues that women's morals changed from the days of early colonization to the days of westward expansion, as women became at once less confined and less revered by their men -- and explores how these changes both reflected and affected trends in the nation at large.

About this title

About the Author

Martha Saxton is an assistant professor of history and women's and gender studies at Amherst College. She is the author of several books, including Louisa May Alcott: A Modern Biography. She lives in New York City.

Review

"Being Good is a fascinating work in gender history and in the history of emotions. Encompassing three regions, two centuries, and a racially diverse population, this is one of the most ambitious books of comparative history in many years. The St. Louis section is remarkably original. Saxton takes us into the hearts and minds, the moral universe, of girls and women in early America. We learn of their understanding sexuality, marriage, and motherhood. Saxton has achieved a moving and enlightening story of the burden of expectation, convention, and the struggle for power over one's mind and body in a time at once very different, but still connected to our own."—David W. Blight, Yale University

"Being Good looks at the dark and the light of women's lives in the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, but mostly the dark. From Saxton's account, we get more of a feeling of what it was like to be a woman over these three centuries than from anything else in print."—Richard Bushman, Columbia University

"Provocative . . . Readers of the past two decades of scholarship in women's history have long understood that women are not universally held accountable to the same moral code regardless of class or race; nor is Saxton the first to notice that our very standards of moral judgment are shaped in response to those we consider 'other.' The strength of Being Good lies in the historical specificity with which Saxton demonstrates how this process works. But the book is, finally, strongest in portraying the ways that white women's moral codes reflected and sustained their own relatively privileged position . . . Being Good reminds us of another lesson that is not entirely about gender: that if we judge our own moral stature against that of those whom we consider, by virtue of class, race, religion, or culture, inherently lesser than ourselves, we praise our own goodness at great moral risk to ourselves and to one another."—Lori D. Ginzberg, The American Scholar

"Saxton, a women's studies professor at Amherst College, is an able writer for both scholarly and mainstream audiences, as was evidenced by her biography of Louisa May Alcott . . . [Being Good] is a valuable addition to the American Studies canon, focusing as it does on the powerful influence of largely ignored African-American social structures and customs on the French and Anglo-American populations . . . Saxton's book is an intelligent addition to a history lover's shelves. The reader . . . will benefit from Saxton's deep well of research and her professorial ability to motivate one to question long-accepted (or neglected) aspects of America's history."—Kimberly B. Marlowe, The Seattle Times

"[Saxton] zooms in on the stories of individual women, showing the way the standards and expectations for moral behavior varied among ethnicities and social classes and developed in opposition to one another . . . Being Good does a lot to explain how tying women's ability to exercise public moral power to their sexual behavior has stunted their capacity to speak up as well as to be heard on public issues."—Malena Waltrous, San Francisco Chronicle

"The intimate, compelling, sometimes startling personal stories Martha Saxton has skillfully teased from archives in Puritan New England, colonial Virginia and turn-of-the-nineteenth century Missouri remind us how complex and contradictory the relationship between American men and American women has been from the very beginning. Being Good is very good indeed.”—Geoffrey C. Ward, author of A First-Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt

"Being Good brilliantly brings to life the moral culture of the American woman. Highly thought of as both a historian and a biographer, Martha Saxton has written a truly luminous book. Fierce, bold and beautifully written, it conveys, as no other book has, what it meant for a woman to come-of-age in 19th century America."—Wendy Gimbel, author of Havana Dreams

"With gripping analytic exactness, Martha Saxton compares the moral and emotional lives American women were expected to lead with the lives they actually led and fought for. Her exactness is matched by her range. She takes us from the 17th to the 19th century. We hear the voices and witness the radically different experiences of Anglo, African and Indian-American women. Being Good
dn0 is essential and wonderfully readable American history."—Margo Jefferson, co-author of The Tree of Life: A Novel

"Being Good is a book full of light. Few historians have achieved a finer synthesis of the social and the inner life. But then Saxton's scrupulously distilled masterpiece of scholarship is also a work of literature, which is to say, of nuanced passion, wisdom, and revelation. If you're interested in the subject of the American woman—or if you are simply an American woman interested in knowing how you got to be who you are—read it."—Judith Thurman, author of Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette

"A massive accumulation of detail earns Saxton the right to state her conclusion succinctly: fetishizing female chastity has been 'one of the most enduring hindrances to women's equality.' In this exhaustive and entertaining work, Saxton studies women's morals in three settings: 17th-century Massachusetts, 18th-century Virginia and 19th-century St. Louis. While men's moral life included political and professional concerns, the overarching demands on white women, according to Saxton, were for sexual restraint and obedience. White women's behavior, in turn, was conflated with the survival of the republic. In contrast, Saxton says, a mythical salaciousness was ascribed to black women, which, as well as offering a comforting difference from supposed white chastity, justified men's sexual abuse of female slaves. Many of the letters, newspapers and court records Saxton has found give telling glimpses of old customs, e.g., the Puritan practice of sending even well-off girls to work as maids and the Virginian habit of describing runaway female slaves by their breast size and perceived 'lusty' sexual behavior."—Publishers Weekly

About this edition

• Publisher: Hill and Wang
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0374110115
• ISBN 13: 9780374110116
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 416