“Being Good is a book full of light. Few historians have achieved a finer synthesis of the social and the inner life. But then Saxton's scrupulously distilled masterpiece of scholarship is also a work of literature, which is to say, of nuanced passion, wisdom, and revelation. If you're interested in the subject of the American woman--or if you are simply an American woman interested in knowing how you got to be who you are--read it.” —Judith Thurman

“Being Good brilliantly brings to life the moral culture of the American woman. Highly thought of as both a historian and a biographer, Martha Saxton has written a truly luminous book. Fierce, bold and beautifully written, it conveys, as no other book has, what it meant for a woman to come-of-age in 19th century America.” —Wendy Gimbel, author of Havana Dreams

“Being Good is a fascinating work in gender history and in the history of emotions. Encompassing three regions, two centuries, and a racially diverse population, this is one of the most ambitious books of comparative history in many years. The St. Louis section is remarkably original. Saxton takes us into the hearts and minds, the moral universe, of girls and women in early America. We learn of their understanding sexuality, marriage, and motherhood. Saxton has achieved a moving and enlightening story of the burden of expectation, convention, and the struggle for power over one's mind and body in a time at once very different, but still connected to our own.” —David W. Blight, Yale University

“Being Good looks at the dark and the light of women's lives in the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, but mostly the dark. From Saxton's account, we get more of a feeling of what it was like to be a woman over these three centuries than from anything else in print.” —Richard Bushman, Columbia University

“With gripping analytic exactness, Martha Saxton compares the moral and emotional lives American women were expected to lead with the lives they actually led and fought for. Her exactness is matched by her range. She takes us from the 17th to the 19th century. We hear the voices and witness the radically different experiences of Anglo, African and Indian-American women. "Being Good" is essential and wonderfully readable American history.” —Margo Jefferson, co-author of The Tree of Life: A Novel