| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Martha Saxton. Being Good: Women's Moral Values in Early America. New York: Hill and Wang. 2003. Pp. x, 388. $30.00.
Reading Martha Saxton's book brought to mind the well-known nursery rhyme: "Sugar and spice and everything nice/That's what little girls are made of." Have little girls always been made of everything nice? What has it meant for girls to be good in America? What kind of moral values have they internalized? Saxton explores these questions by looking at three different historical periods and regions: Puritan New England in the seventeenth century, Virginia in the eighteenth century, and St. Louis, Missouri, in the nineteenth century. The author uses these case studies to make her analysis of the shifting meaning of "being good" concrete.	1
Not surprisingly, Puritan conceptions of what it meant to be a good woman were steeped in Christian doctrine. Girls and women were trained to be obedient to their fathers, their husbands, and, ultimately, God. Puritans valued chastity above all else for girls, although once married, sexual intimacy was to become an important part of married life. Puritans saw marriage as an institution designed to maintain a godly society. Becoming a wife meant submission, as John Winthrop's famous quotation details: "A true wife accounts her subjection her honor and freedom and would not think her condition safe and free but in her subjection to her husband's authority" (p. 52). Obedience to one's husband was central, but Saxton concludes that while women were the subjects of their husbands, they could find a kind of moral authority by living up to this ideal and being good wives and mothers.	. . .

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