`Being Good: Women's Moral Values in Early America' by Martha Saxton; Hill and Wang ($30).

Byline: Kimberly B. Marlowe

Start by blaming the Puritans.

Those hardworking souls, long credited with bravely uprooting their lives in the name of religious freedom, repressed women in insidious ways that haunt us still, according to Martha Saxton's sobering new book, "Being Good: Women's Moral Values in Early America."

Saxton, a women's studies professor at Amherst College, is an able writer for both scholarly and mainstream audiences, as evidenced by her biography of Louisa May Alcott. But this work, while fiery in its message and valuable in deepening our understanding of American cultural history, suffers somewhat from its origins as an …