4 Miriam Hibel, “Adultery in New England and the Chesapeake,” (essay, Brandeis n.d.,); Bruce, Institutional History of Virginia, I, 48.
5 The idea that a woman’s adultery polluted the family more than a man’s was not absent from New England. One finds it expressed in Puritan sermons on this subject, and also in the law of adultery, which was defined as extramarital coitus involving a married woman. But Hibel found that men and women were punished more nearly equally in New England than in the Chesapeake.