Publisher Description
As long as people have been writing books, authors have been using them to create misrepresentations of women. From medieval reality show-style wife tests to twenty-first century dating guides based on two-hundred-year-old novels, Conduct Books and the History of the Ideal Woman takes readers on a guided tour of advice on what women should and should not do.
Think today’s media is bad? In this book, you’ll discover:
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A sixteenth-century writer who believed women had the power to transform men’s bad thoughts into good ones (if she didn’t and something bad happened, it was her fault—sound familiar?)
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Why clothes were invented, and that pretty dresses are evil
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Why young ladies should never read—gasp!—novels
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The difference between conduct manuals and etiquette books, and why good manners are basically the same as good morals
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What twentieth-century self-help books have in common with the Middle Ages
Meticulously researched and displaying wry wit (and occasionally exasperation), Conduct Books and the History of the Ideal Woman links seven hundred years of advice on women’s behavior, tracing a through-line from the earliest printed texts that argued women were the property of men, to various iterations of feminism, to today’s casual misogyny. A must-read for everyone who is or knows a woman!
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“Ever wondered why listening to Fordyce’s Sermons in Pride and Prejudice made Lydia Bennet gape? In this lively and accessible look at conduct literature, Tabitha Kenlon ranges from fourteenth-century courtesy books to twenty-first-century rules. She shows how the ideal woman was constructed in the past, and questions her existence both then and now.”
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Gillian Dow, associate professor, University of Southampton, United Kingdom
