Being good : women's moral values in early America

The Resource Being good : women's moral values in early America

Label

Being good : women's moral values in early America

Title remainder

women's moral values in early America

Statement of responsibility

Martha Saxton

Language

eng

Summary

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. 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

Cataloging source

DLC

Dewey number

170/.82/0973

Index

index present

LC call number

BJ1610

LC item number

.S39 2003

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

bibliography

Context

Context of Being good : women's moral values in early America

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