caution, balance, and necessity in womens use of public spaces by showing portrayals of women living in a wide variety of manners, balancing public and private lives in different ways, and using the outcomes of these women's lives as lessons to be learned by the reader. Generally, the more urgent a womans circumstances become, the more public her life becomes. In addition, once engaging in public urban life, a woman must keep from being deceived by the false freedoms that she sees in it, or else the subsequent temptations will lead her into moral corruption, the ultimate ill that is shown to result from women entering into the public domain. The representation of what ills may come of too much engagement in public city life is found in the character of Esther. Esther enters the public initially out of necessity, in order to earn money, which is the way in which many of the female characters in the novel are initiated into public life. However, Esther is not cautious in her involvement in this new way of life. Rather than stepping carefully into a working life by doing respectable work such as sewing, she works in a factory. Factory work is seen as a dangerous occupation for women, and Mary Barton is forbidden from factory work by her father (9). The text informs readers that three-fourths of the young factory employees, from fourteen to twenty years of age, were unchaste(397), which illustrates the moral harm that such labor could inflict upon a woman. Esther becomes susceptible to temptations once she enters such a risky public area. She earns enough money to be able to dress herself nicely, and she stays out of the house until late hours. What she sees as pleasures and freedoms, such as spending money on clothing and receiving attention from men, she misinterprets as that which can bring her above her present station in life and make her a lady. However, in reality the opposite is true, and it is her excessive part...