Conduct Books and the History of the Ideal Woman

Tabitha Kenlon

Description

A chronicle of the presentation of women in conduct manuals

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.

This book presents a unique trans-historical approach, arguing that conduct manuals were influenced by their predecessors and in turn shaped their descendants. While existing period-specific studies of conduct manuals consider advice literature within the society that wrote and read them, this book provides the only analysis of both the volumes themselves and the larger debates taking place within their pages across the centuries. Building on critical conversations about literature’s efforts to define and construct gender roles, this book examines conduct manuals’ contributions to the female ideal prevalent when they were published, as well as the persistence or alteration of that ideal in subsequent eras.

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.

Acknowledgements; Explanatory Note; Introduction: Woman as She Should Be; 1. A Good Woman Is a Godly Woman, Obviously; 2. Conduct for Those Who Are Not Queen; 3. Look but Don’t Talk: Reflections of the Ideal; 4. Playing the Part as Nature Intended; 5. Victoria’s Angels; 6. Suff rage, Little Wives and Career Girls; 7. Feminism Changes Everything, Right? Right??; Coda: An Ideal End; References; Index.

Sujets

• HISTORY
• Women's studies
• Social history
• Social sciences

Informations

• Publié par: Anthem Press
• Date de parution: 31 mars 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781785273162
• Langue: English

Extrait

Conduct Books and the History of the Ideal Woman
Conduct Books and the History of the Ideal Woman
Tabitha Kenlon
Anthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
www.anthempress.com
This edition first published in UK and USA 2020
by ANTHEM PRESS
75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK
or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK
and
244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA
Copyright © Tabitha Kenlon 2020
The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-314-8 (Hbk)
ISBN-10: 1-78527-314-0 (Hbk)
This title is also available as an e-book.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Explanatory Note
Introduction: Woman as She Should Be
1. A Good Woman Is a Godly Woman, Obviously
2. Conduct for Those Who Are Not Queen
3. Look but Don’t Talk: Reflections of the Ideal
4. Playing the Part as Nature Intended
5. Victoria’s Angels
6. Suffrage, Little Wives and Career Girls
7. Feminism Changes Everything, Right? Right??
Coda: An Ideal End
References
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
No one told me that this was an unreasonable project for someone who lived on a different continent from all the texts she proposed to study; who had limited resources and an extremely demanding workload; and who is partially sighted. But, as I am far from the ideal woman profiled in these pages, even if someone had tried to dissuade me, I most likely would not have listened.
That I have persevered is testament both to my own stubbornness and to the generosity of family, friends and strangers. At the British Library, Jason Murray introduced me to technology that made reading a pleasure again, and the staff at the reference desk in the rare books room were unfailingly kind and helpful. I whole-heartedly thank the publishers and authors who make their work available in accessible formats, electronically and especially as audio books.
Friends near and far have been unflagging in their faith. My international support network includes Puspa “Didi” Acharya, Deema Al-Khalidi, Shahed Al-Shawa, Dr. Sandra Alexander, Antonia Czaika, Emily Fadrogane, Amna Khazi, Dr. Summer Loomis, Jean Michael, Susmita Mogpati, Sarah Pituwala, Dr. Micah Robbins, Dr. Sarah Schell, Pasangma Sherpa, Dr. Ann-Marie Simmonds, Jon Solomon, Dr. Megan Tarquinio and Dr. Art Zilleruelo, as well as members of the Women’s Studies Group 1558–1837, especially Dr. Angela Escott and Felicity Roberts. Dr. Louise Duckling is an eagle-eyed citation-wrangler extraordinaire. Dr. Sarah Connell helped me find materials, made me laugh and shared her whiskey and chocolate (no small thing). Amy Cox has been a kindred spirit across 30 years, three continents and three islands.
My California cousins offered me a respite from research, and my aunt read to us from a conduct manual her aunt had given her. Elaine Eastman and Marc Mathieu; Janis, Scott, Miles and Caroline Grant; and Marion and Andrew Lennon know how to make a globe-trotting east-coaster feel at home.
Finally, my parents and siblings are owed impossible debts. My dad and brothers, Edward, Seth and Dr. William Kenlon, are the best of men. My mom, Marilee Kenlon, inspires me, and my sister, Joanna Graupman, is my sister, and that says it all. The six of us have traveled the world together and separately, bickered and teased, cajoled and comforted. We don’t agree about everything, but we are unanimous on two points: Mom and Dad are crazy (in a good way), and we all love each other. This book, therefore, begins with love.
EXPLANATORY NOTE
On Spelling and Grammar
For the most part, I have retained original spelling and punctuation. In the first two chapters, however, I have modernized the spelling of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century texts for the ease of the reader. The punctuation and word order are unchanged, but the spelling has been updated.
Introduction
WOMAN AS SHE SHOULD BE
The battle over women’s behavior is perhaps the longest war in history. We live with its consequences and participate in skirmishes almost every day, as recent high-profile developments like GamerGate, MeToo and Time’s Up remind us. These cases focus on harmful male behavior, but the impunity with which many men act is the result of millennia of precedent, based largely on the desire to control women’s action, through force if necessary. Traditionally, if a woman defies or falls short of the ideal, her punishment is understood to be justifiable. The passive female ideal can be found throughout history, represented in visual art, religious texts and literature. From the late fourteenth century, conduct manuals provided printed details about what the ideal woman should and should not do; these books contain the stories we have been told for centuries about what is manly and what is womanly and why men are strong and powerful and women are not—though typically, the rhetoric reveals a certainty that men are strong and a desperate hope that women are not. After all, it is only necessary to control the things that are feared. If women were truly as weak as many men would have us believe, those men would not work so hard to control women.
This book focuses on British and American standards for women’s behavior, but the texts I examine here voice concerns that can be found across innumerable cultures, traditions and religions. This in itself is noteworthy. Globally, throughout history, the behavior of women has been paramount, and there have been different standards of conduct for men and women. In the pages that follow, I will not attempt to prove that this is true and unjust; most people seem to agree, in principle if not in practice, that double standards and inequality are wrong. Instead, this book provides an analysis of the history of the female ideal as presented in conduct manuals—how appropriate womanly behavior was defined and justified from the early days of print to the present in a variety of advice literature.
The female ideal is both obvious and mysterious. She is often identified by what she does not do: she does not dress in ways that attract attention; she does not speak too loudly; she does not interrupt; she does not publicize her accomplishments. In all likelihood, she is neither unmarried nor childless (but if she is unmarried, she is a virgin), and she does not claim a sexuality other than heterosexual. This brief description summarizes centuries of concerted efforts to create and enforce a specific set of standards intended to control women’s actions, thoughts and bodies. It has changed little throughout almost six hundred years of literature on the subject. Almost all our current attitudes toward women and their behavior can be seen in centuries of conduct manuals: blaming the victim, the necessity of marriage and motherhood, cautions against too much education, the separation of masculine tasks and feminine duties and so on.
What Are Conduct Manuals?
Conduct manuals began life in the fourteenth century as courtesy books, volumes offering advice to men who wanted to prosper at court. As literacy among women increased, books were written for them as well; although “in the first 100 years of English printing there is relatively little direct evidence that books were being published with a female audience in mind,” by the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, women were the primary audience. 1 Until the late nineteenth century, the vast majority of conduct manuals contained overt religious directives (the Christian Bible might be considered one of the earliest conduct manuals). Conduct manuals came in many different formats: collections of sermons, letters of advice from a concerned relative or illustrative stories. They are never secretive about their mission, however. They always state quite plainly that their purpose is to tell women what to do.
Conduct manuals are different from etiquette and self-help books, both of which have to some degree replaced traditional conduct manuals by now. Conduct manuals are much less focused on individual advancement than self-help books are, yet they contain a stronger emphasis on personal responsibility than etiquette books’ detached advice about when to RSVP and whether it’s appropriate to include gift cards on wedding registries. Twenty-first century mainstream conduct manuals typically focus on a specific aspect of life, such as dating, whereas for most of its history, a conduct book instructed its reader on the full range of her personal duties and functions, from how to be a good daughter to how to be a good mother.
By the end of the eighteenth century, the popularity of conduct books had started to decline. Many scholars believe that the relatively new genre of the novel made conduct manuals redundant, as readers could recognize appropriate and inappropriate behavior in the characters of the novels. Yet conduct manuals continued to be written, reprinted and purchased as writers adapted to the changing media culture. Chapters might no longer be titled “Chastity” or contain admonitions to trust one’s parents to select one’s husband, but the attempts to restrain women’s agency and control over their own lives persisted.
Although fewer conduct books hav