ABSTRACT
Training started in childhood along with the teaching of religion, the Puritan connection between cleanliness and godliness made manifest. Middle-class men continued to take snuff and to smoke pipes. Language and speech, like other parts of middle-class culture, were becoming more formal, more differentiated and more careful of gender connotations. Provincial middle-class culture seemed as much concerned with strengthening ties within the family and controlling women's independent behaviour as with sexuality. Growing constraints on the physical and social mobility of women, especially young girls, is a motif across a range of activities. In addition to difficulties with availability and expense, middle-class young women had to be shielded from possible exposure to the hazards of public travel, including sexual and social advances, by being accompanied by a man or an older woman. Young men were expected to roam, to seek adventure, to go out from as well as return to the home.
