The Role Of Sexuality In A Puritan Society

Throughout most of Human history a family consisted of a mother, a father and a child. In a Puritan society this standard was not forgotten. Other normalities in a Puritan society were mandatory church attendance, harsh punishments placed on those who strayed from God’s. Some punishments were more vigorous than others, executions, whippings, and public humiliations. In the case of Hester Prynne, her punishment for conceiving her daughter Pearl was to wear a scarlet letter A on her chest. Hester violated the Puritan law of premarital sex, with the young reverend Arthur Dimmesdale. This criminal activity violated the sexual and social norms of the seventeenth century, one of which was the sexual norm of waiting until after marriage to have sex.