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Page history last edited by Mattie 15 years, 7 months ago

 

 

Marginalia on the frontispiece of Mary Wollstonecraft's "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman"

 

This wiki is part of a project completed for Professor Paula McDowell's NYU Undergraduate English seminar, "Eighteenth-Century British Women's Writing."   It is an online version of a display case from the symposium held at the Fales Library on April 10th and 11th, 2008, "Writing Women 1700-1800: Literary History at the Crossroads."

 

We chose to study conduct books written for eighteenth-century young women, and occasionally young men, to guide them during their development from childhood to adulthood. These books both reflected and created the socially acceptable roles of women.  They also represent a growing awareness during this time of a need to educate women, and despite their often restrictive treatment of themes like religion, courtship, and marriage, they can be seen as proto-feminist texts.  Many of the conduct books in this collection are part of a tradition of women instructing each other on how to survive in a man's world; others, like Advice to His Son... shed light on the gender inequalities that made such instruction necessary.  In many ways, early conduct authors planted the seeds of the more radical demand for women's rights that was to come, and although Wollstonecraft decries male conduct authors in her Vindication, she owes a debt of gratitude to female authors like Pennington who first recognized that the everyday lives of contemporary women were worth writing about.

 

A special thanks to the Fales Library for permission to access and reproduce these materials.

 

Table of Contents:

 

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Advice to His Son on Men and Manners

An Unfortunate Mother's Advice to Her Absent Daughters

The Two Cousins: A Moral Story

The Governess: Or The Little Female Academy

Commentary on the Difference Between Male and Female Conduct Books

The Conduct Novel

 

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