The Other woman’s sphere: Nuns, prostitutes, and the medicalization of middle-class domesticity

The difference between the Puritan woman and her antebellum counterpart, according to The Scarlet Letter, is the latter's surer sense of the "impropriety" attaching to her appearance in the public sphere. "The [Puritan] age had not so much refinement, that any sense of impropriety restrained the wearers of petticoat and farthingale from stepping forth into the public ways, and wedging their not insubstantial persons, if occasion were, into the throng [of public life] … Morally, as well as materially, there was a coarser fiber in those wives and maidens of old English force and breeding, than in their fair descendants, separated from them by a series of six or seven generations; for, throughout that chain of ancestry, every successive mother has transmitted to her child a fainter bloom, a more delicate and briefer beauty, and a slighter physical frame, if not a character ofless force and solidity than her own,!