Conduct Books and the History of the Ideal Woman

Conduct Books and the History of the Ideal Woman PDF Author: Tabitha Kenlon
Publisher: Anthem Press
ISBN: 1785273159
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
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.

Conduct Books and the History of the Ideal Woman

Conduct Books and the History of the Ideal Woman PDF Author: Tabitha Kenlon
Publisher: Anthem Press
ISBN: 1785273159
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 220

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Virtuous Necessity

Virtuous Necessity PDF Author: Jessica Murphy
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472119575
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description
A new way of looking at behavioral expectations for women in early modern England

“The” English Gentlewoman, Drawne Out to the Full Body

“The” English Gentlewoman, Drawne Out to the Full Body PDF Author: Richard Brathwaite
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Clothing and dress
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description


Reading the Romance

Reading the Romance PDF Author: Janice A. Radway
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807898856
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Originally published in 1984, Reading the Romance challenges popular (and often demeaning) myths about why romantic fiction, one of publishing's most lucrative categories, captivates millions of women readers. Among those who have disparaged romance reading are feminists, literary critics, and theorists of mass culture. They claim that romances enforce the woman reader's dependence on men and acceptance of the repressive ideology purveyed by popular culture. Radway questions such claims, arguing that critical attention "must shift from the text itself, taken in isolation, to the complex social event of reading." She examines that event, from the complicated business of publishing and distribution to the individual reader's engagement with the text. Radway's provocative approach combines reader-response criticism with anthropology and feminist psychology. Asking readers themselves to explore their reading motives, habits, and rewards, she conducted interviews in a midwestern town with forty-two romance readers whom she met through Dorothy Evans, a chain bookstore employee who has earned a reputation as an expert on romantic fiction. Evans defends her customers' choice of entertainment; reading romances, she tells Radway, is no more harmful than watching sports on television. "We read books so we won't cry" is the poignant explanation one woman offers for her reading habit. Indeed, Radway found that while the women she studied devote themselves to nurturing their families, these wives and mothers receive insufficient devotion or nurturance in return. In romances the women find not only escape from the demanding and often tiresome routines of their lives but also a hero who supplies the tenderness and admiring attention that they have learned not to expect. The heroines admired by Radway's group defy the expected stereotypes; they are strong, independent, and intelligent. That such characters often find themselves to be victims of male aggression and almost always resign themselves to accepting conventional roles in life has less to do, Radway argues, with the women readers' fantasies and choices than with their need to deal with a fear of masculine dominance. These romance readers resent not only the limited choices in their own lives but the patronizing atitude that men especially express toward their reading tastes. In fact, women read romances both to protest and to escape temporarily the narrowly defined role prescribed for them by a patriarchal culture. Paradoxically, the books that they read make conventional roles for women seem desirable. It is this complex relationship between culture, text, and woman reader that Radway urges feminists to address. Romance readers, she argues, should be encouraged to deliver their protests in the arena of actual social relations rather than to act them out in the solitude of the imagination. In a new introduction, Janice Radway places the book within the context of current scholarship and offers both an explanation and critique of the study's limitations.

The Ideology of Conduct (Routledge Revivals)

The Ideology of Conduct (Routledge Revivals) PDF Author: Nancy Armstrong
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317744322
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
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.

A Father's Legacy to His Daughters

A Father's Legacy to His Daughters PDF Author: John Gregory
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Christian education
Languages : en
Pages : 156

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Book Description


Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century

Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century PDF Author: Nazera Sadiq Wright
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 025209901X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
Long portrayed as a masculine endeavor, the African American struggle for progress often found expression through an unlikely literary figure: the black girl. Nazera Sadiq Wright uses heavy archival research on a wide range of texts about African American girls to explore this understudied phenomenon. As Wright shows, the figure of the black girl in African American literature provided a powerful avenue for exploring issues like domesticity, femininity, and proper conduct. The characters' actions, however fictional, became a rubric for African American citizenship and racial progress. At the same time, their seeming dependence and insignificance allegorized the unjust treatment of African Americans. Wright reveals fascinating girls who, possessed of a premature knowing and wisdom beyond their years, projected a courage and resiliency that made them exemplary representations of the project of racial advance and citizenship.

Thoughts on the Education of Daughters; With Reflections on Female Conduct, in the More Important Duties of Life

Thoughts on the Education of Daughters; With Reflections on Female Conduct, in the More Important Duties of Life PDF Author: Mary Wollstonecraft
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
ISBN: 3387303300
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 78

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Book Description
Reproduction of the original. The publishing house Megali specialises in reproducing historical works in large print to make reading easier for people with impaired vision.

The Ladies' Book of Etiquette, and Manual of Politeness

The Ladies' Book of Etiquette, and Manual of Politeness PDF Author: Florence Hartley
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN:
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
In preparing a book of etiquette for ladies, I would lay down as the first rule, "Do unto others as you would others should do to you." You can never be rude if you bear the rule always in mind, for what lady likes to be treated rudely? True Christian politeness will always be the result of an unselfish regard for the feelings of others, and though you may err in the ceremonious points of etiquette, you will never be impolite. Politeness, founded upon such a rule, becomes the expression, in graceful manner, of social virtues. The spirit of politeness consists in a certain attention to forms and ceremonies, which are meant both to please others and ourselves, and to make others pleased with us; a still clearer definition may be given by saying that politeness is goodness of heart put into daily practice; there can be no _true_ politeness without kindness, purity, singleness of heart, and sensibility.

How to Suppress Women's Writing

How to Suppress Women's Writing PDF Author: Joanna Russ
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 9780292724457
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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Book Description
Discusses the obstacles women have had to overcome in order to become writers, and identifies the sexist rationalizations used to trivialize their contributions