In 1802, less than thirty-one weeks after her wedding, Elizabeth Manning Hathorne gave birth to her first child, Elizabeth. Nathaniel Hawthorne the writer, her second child, was born two years later. Interestingly, there are only two things we can say with certainty about this bridal pregnancy. First, we do not know how Hawthorne's parents, their families or indeed Hawthorne himself regarded it. Second, the reason that we cannot infer their responses is that, while one in three brides were pregnant in the last third of the eighteenth century, by 1850 when Hawthorne published The Scarlet Letter bridal pregnancies had become infrequent and completely unacceptable.

When sexual codes alter thus much and so quickly, something much wider is happening in society. This late eighteenth-century incidence of premarital sex was “a product of profound social disequilibrium,” and disappeared once familial, social, and economic situations changed yet again. Hawthorne’s lifetime (1804–64) spans a period of great and rapid change when, in little over half a century, America transformed itself politically, economically, and in its social arrangements. Hawthorne grew up surrounded by family and townspeople born around or before the Revolution. As he reached adulthood, the Early Republic was metamorphosing into Jacksonian America as the onset of industrial capitalism reinforced an ethos of individualism. He married in 1842 at a time when the so-called middling classes were consolidating, not without difficulty, into a new bourgeoisie in an urbanizing and industrializing northeast. Spending much of the troubled 1850s in Europe, he nonetheless returned to America in time for the Civil War. Furthermore, these enormous changes were contested and uneven in spread.