Being Good: Women's Moral Values in Early America.

Being Good: Women's Moral Values in Early America. By Martha Saxton (New York: Hill and Wang, 2003. x plus 375 pp. $30.00).

In this ambitious study, Martha Saxton investigates the nature of the moral values that were culturally prescribed for women in three communities in early America--seventeenth-century Boston, eighteenth-century Virginia, and nineteenth-century St. Louis. She posits an integral connection between feelings, behavior, and moral systems and explores that connection in the lives of girls; young, unmarried women; wives and mothers; and older widows. Her extensive analysis of prescriptive literature, newspapers, letters, diaries, journals, and a wide range of secondary sources reveals that cultural prescriptions for "being good" evolved over time and reflected constructions of race, ethnicity, and class. Different expectations distinguished the moral systems of privileged white women from those of poor, black, and Native American women. Consequently, their behavioral and emotional styles also differed. Despite the diversity of expectations, however, Saxon argues that these moral systems were all designed to control women.

Moral standards for white women in Boston from 1630 to 1700 mirrored the Puritan vision of a godly community. The creation of a virtuous female identity in the New World centered on chastity. Young girls were expected to be obedient, humble, and modest and to assume responsibility for controlling their own and men's sexuality. Their diaries consistently reflect the themes of self-criticism and the search for self control. Parents were advised to prevent exposure to influences that might foster the development of a sexual imagination. While sexual pleasure was important in marriage, women's role was to be chosen, not to choose a mate. Marriage involved obedience, but women could achieve moral authority as wives and as mothers through their adovcacy of the moral system. Saxon suggests that because their culture defined their maternal duties in terms of instilling piety and rescuing offspring from sin, Puritan mothers did not depend emotionally on their children to the same degree as their later counterparts did.

As the seventeenth century progressed, gender-based distinctions in piety emerged; women were now culturally defined as closer to God. They were expected to behave deferentially around their own husbands and other Puritan men, but they frequently displayed authoritarian and aggressive behavior toward individuals whose traditions and family lives were considered uncivilized and immoral. These included Native Americans, whom they encountered more frequently than Africans, and sometimes poor whites. Contemporary racist stereotypes fostered such behavior and explicitly constructed non-white women as innately less moral and thus incapable of adhering to the standards set for white women.

This culturally imposed distinction between the moral outlooks of elite white women and others flourished in the half-slave, half-free Anglican society of eighteenth-century eastern Virginia. Like their Puritan predecessors, privileged white women were expected to defer to male authority, but they lacked the complementary senses of spiritual independence and individual moral power that earlier women often achieved. A code of emotional restraint emphasized chastity and self denial and stressed the development of empathy, sympathy, and refined sensibility. At the same time, this society also valued flirting and romance. Saxton discerns the influence of British models of feminine gentility in the emotional and moral styles of eighteenth-century Virginia women. She also sees the origins of the interdependent sense of self, described as "relatedness" by Carol Gilligan and other scholars who have studied the moral and emotional modes of twentieth-century women.

In stark contrast to the morality constructed for elite white women, a presumption that black women lacked the capacity to experience delicate and refined feelings shaped nineteenth-century cultural definitions of their moral values, particularly with regard to sexual behavior. The view of slaves as intrinsically promiscuous and wanton created a justification for sexual coercion by white males; this, in turn, validated white beliefs about black women's immorality. Saxton suggests that the range of actual values held by enslaved women in Virginia at this time probably represented their diverse West African cultural backgrounds, although she documents a shared belief in the importance of mothering.

A more complicated picture of moral diversity emerges in the context of nineteenth-century St. Louis. Here Anglo-American moral and religious traditions intersected with those of the French, who had settled in Missouri earlier, and also with Native American, African American, Irish, and German influences. As in the earlier Boston and Virginia communities, chastity, modesty, sexual restraint, and obedience continued to represent major components of the moral ideal for middle-class white women and thus to shape the upbringing of young girls. French tolerance for pleasure, physicality, and emotional expressiveness as "moral" contrasted strongly with these values and generated a less repressive approach to socialization within this subculture. Saxton describes the elaboration of two major emotional and moral modes in this period: the further development of "relatedness" as the basis for women's interpersonal interactions and the construction of a sentimental culture of domesticity. The latter incorporated an emphasis on affection and mutuality within the family and the elevation of women to a special status, a process that Saxon traces to the Puritan vision of women as closer to God.

As in earlier periods, the values attributed to black women had no basis in actual beliefs. These included a negative version of relatedness and a presumption of sexual incontinence. Saxton points out that for enslaved women, the claims of marriage and motherhood always remained subordinate to those of slavery. She identifies the pursuit of freedom, as opposed to sexual purity, as most relevant to the female slave's sense of moral self-worth. Paradoxically, black women may have experienced more emotional freedom and more equality in their marriages than white women experienced within the confines of middle-class domesticity. Particularly in the case of free black women, who could develop a sense of personal autonomy and also contributed to the economic support of their families, obedience probably did not represent a central feature of married life.

Martha Saxton has written an intriguing and complex book that offers much for the reader who is interested in women's and gender history, emotions history, and behavioral history. She provides interesting evidence that illustrates the historicity of cultural prescriptions for women's moral lives and for the expression of their emotions. She draws connections between these standards, various examples of women's behavior, and their expressions of emotion, across time and social groups. Although Saxton's evidence clearly documents the evolution of moral standards and modes of emotional expression, her effort to link women's moral systems and behavior with their actual feelings is less persuasive. As other work in emotions history has shown, it is far more difficult to capture the nature of individual emotional experiences historically than it is to find evidence of change over time in prescriptive literature and behavior. It is in this context that Being Good does not fully succeed. Nevertheless, Saxton illuminates a range of complicated issues in the history of women's moral values. Finally, she offers compelling evidence for her conclusion that the development of separate codes with high moral expectations for prosperous whites and low standards for other women has affected both men and women negatively, and has hindered the development of equality in American society.

Linda W. Rosenzweig

Chatham College