Being Good

Alternatively viewed as helpess, prone to sin, and intellectually weaker than men, the women of early America were charged nevertheless with maintaining the nation's moral health. Their being good allowed the nation to do the same. Martha Saxton marvelously shows the consequnces of this paradox over three hundred years of history, and she makes startling new discoveries, including evidence that Puritan women were far more empowered than their nineteenth-century conunterparts.