"Saxton plumbed archives of letters, diaries, newspapers, and other public and private sources to draw detailed portraits of women in various stages of the life cycle - girls; young, unmarried women; young wives and mothers; older widows. These windows on women's intimate lives illuminate the variations in behavior and expectations among women of different ethnicities and backgrounds.

Saxton examines how the values of one group conflicted with or developed in opposition to those of another in seventeenth century Boston and eighteenth-century Virginia, as well as nineteenth-century St. Louis. And, as the women's testimonies make clear, the emotional styles associated with different value systems varied.".

"Saxton argues that women's morals changed in the years from early colonization to those of westward expansion, as women became, in important ways, more confined and as men officially revered them more. Being Good makes clear how these changes shaped women's emotional lives and both reflected and affected trends in the nation at large."--BOOK JACKET.