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The longest-running war is the battle over how women should behave. “Conduct Books and the History of the Ideal Woman” examines six centuries of advice literature, analyzing the print origins of gendered expectations that continue to inform our thinking about women’s roles and abilities. Close readings of numerous conduct manuals from Britain and America, written by men and women, explain and contextualize the legacy of sexism as represented in prescriptive writing for women from 1372 to the present. While existing period-specific studies of conduct manuals consider advice literature within the society that wrote and read them, “Conduct Books and the History of the Ideal Woman” provides the only analysis of both the volumes themselves and the larger debates taking place within their pages across the centuries. Combining textual literary analysis with a social history sensibility while remaining accessible to expert and novice, this book will help readers understand the on-going debate about the often-contradictory guidelines for female behavior.
A new way of looking at behavioral expectations for women in early modern England
Glenn D. Burger argues that, over the course of the long fourteenth century, the "invention" of the good wife in discourses of sacramental marriage, private devotion, and personal conduct reconfigures how female embodiment is understood.
During the eighteenth-century, at a time when secular and religious authors in France were questioning women’s efforts to read, a new literary genre emerged: conduct books written specifically for girls and unmarried young women. In this carefully researched and thoughtfully argued book, Professor Nadine Bérenguier shares an in-depth analysis of this development, relating the objectives and ideals of these books to the contemporaneous Enlightenment concerns about improving education in order to reform society. Works by Anne-Thérèse de Lambert, Madeleine de Puisieux, Jeanne Marie Leprince de Beaumont, Louise d'Epinay, Barthélémy Graillard de Graville, Chevalier de Cerfvol, abbé Joseph Reyre, Pierre-Louis Roederer, and Marie-Antoinette Lenoir take up a wide variety of topics and vary dramatically in tone. But they all share similar objectives: acquainting their young female readers with the moral and social rules of the world and ensuring their success at the next stage of their lives. While the authors regarded their texts as furthering the common good, they were also aware that they were likely to be controversial among those responsible for girls' education. Bérenguier's sensitive readings highlight these tensions, as she offers readers a rare view of how conduct books were conceived, consumed, re-edited, memorialized, and sometimes forgotten. In the broadest sense, her study contributes to our understanding of how print culture in eighteenth-century France gave shape to a specific social subset of new readers: modern girls.
In The Ideology of Conduct, first published in 1987, scholars from various fields, from the medieval period to the present day, discuss literature in which the sole purpose is to instruct women in how to make themselves desirable. This collection investigates how middle-class writers who had long emulated the behaviour of the aristocracy began to criticise that behaviour by formulating an alternative object of desire. They did so without appearing to breed political controversy because it seemed to concern only the female. But writing for and about women in fact became a powerful instrument of hegemony as it introduced a whole new vocabulary for social relations, induced certain forms of economic behaviour as desirable in men and women respectively, and insured the reproduction of the nuclear family. It is argued, therefore, that the literature of conduct not only recorded but also assisted the production of our contemporary gender-based culture.
This collection aims to give a chronological insight into the evolution of conduct literature, from its early roots in the Renaissance period through to the dramatically different role that women played at the emergence of the 20th century.
This collection aims to give a chronological insight into the evolution of conduct literature, from its early roots in the Renaissance period through to the dramatically different role that women played at the emergence of the 20th century.