It was a circumstance to be noted, on the summer morning when our story begins its course, that the women, of whom there were several in the crowd, appeared to take a peculiar interest in whatever penal infliction might be expected to ensue. The 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 unsubstantial persons, if occasion were, into the throng nearest to the scaffold at an execution. Morally, as well as materially, there was a coarser fibre in those wives and maidens of old English birth 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 had transmitted to her child a fainter bloom, a more delicate and briefer beauty, and a slighter physical frame, if not a character of less force and solidity, than her own. The women, who were now standing about the prison-door, stood within less than half a century of the period when the man-like Elizabeth had been the not altogether unsuitable representative of the sex. They were her countrywomen; and the beef and ale of their native land, with a moral diet not a whit more refined, entered largely into their composition. The bright morning sun, therefore, shone on broad shoulders and well-developed busts, and on round and ruddy cheeks, that had ripened in the far-off island, and had hardly yet grown paler or thinner in the atmosphere of New England. There was, moreover, a boldness and rotundity of speech among these matrons, as most of them seemed to be, that would startle us at the present day, whether in respect to its purport or its volume of tone.
Do these women, all of whom with one key exception also appear at the end of the novel when Dimmesdale ascends the scaffold, represent for Hawthorne a better model for women than the more refined and delicate women of his day? How are these women both similar to and different from the agitators on behalf of women in The Bostonians?
Then, the very nature of the opposite sex, or its long hereditary habit, which has become like nature, is to be essentially modified, before woman can be allowed to assume what seems a fair and suitable position. Finally, all other difficulties being obviated, woman cannot take advantage of these preliminary reforms, until she herself shall have undergone a still mightier change. . . ." (Chapter XIII. 130)
and Olive's
the great, the just revolution . . . must triumph, it must sweep everything before it; it must exact from the other, the brutal, blood-stained, ravening race, the last particle of expiation! It would be the greatest change the world had seen; it would be a new era for the human family, and the names of those who helped to show the way and lead the squadrons would be the brightest in the tables of fame. They would be names of women, weak, insulted, persecuted, but devoted in every pulse of their being to the cause, and asking no better fate than to die for it. (44; ch. 6)
Note also the end of Chapter 20, "Verena . . . was not so hungry for revenge as Olive, but . . . she quite agreed that after so many ages of wrong . . . men must take their turn, men must pay!" (219-20).
Also, compare "Earlier in life, Hester had vainly imagined that she herself might be destined prophetess" (204; ch. 23) and "it seemed to her [Olive Chancellor] at times that she had been born to lead a crusade" (43; ch. 5).
Remember that Hawthorne and James were members "of the opposite sex," "the other."