Being Good: Women's Moral Values in Early America (review)

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...