Martha Saxton is a professor of history and women's and gender studies at Amherst College. Professor Saxton has undertaken biographies of figures as diverse as 1950s bombshell Jayne Mansfield and nineteenth-century author and reformer Louisa May Alcott. Her most recent publication is Being Good: Women's Moral Values in Early America. She is returning to biography as she embarks on a new project entitled The Widow Washington, on President George Washington's mother Mary Ball Washington. She is married to Enrico Ferorelli. She lives in New York City. The TV film The Jayne Mansfield Story featuring Loni Anderson and Arnold Schwarzenegger was based on her book Jayne Mansfield and the American fifties.