Conduct Books and the History of the Ideal Woman

By Tabitha Kenlon

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Mar 31, 2020
• ISBN: 9781785273162

Book preview

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 have been published in the last couple of centuries, they have not disappeared completely, and most importantly, the kind of advice they offer has altered little. For example, The New Female Instructor: Young Woman’s Guide to Domestic Happiness, published in 1824, includes uncredited passages from A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters by Dr. John Gregory, first published in 1774, and Important Studies for the Female Sex by Mary Cockle, first printed in 1809. There are numerous similar examples—some conduct books remained in print for decades, so that a teenager might well be reading the same book her grandmother had. Such repetition contributes […] to the assumption that femininity is an unchanging, ‘natural’ condition which successive generations of conduct writers simply describe.² In these books, women were told that they were naturally modest and humble and were created to look after the needs of others. More recently, The Rules: Time-Tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right (1995) recommended that women on a date should be quiet and reserved […] He’ll think you’re interesting and mysterious.³ Two hundred years earlier, A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters also suggested reticence, noting that ladies are likely to be rather silent in company […] One may take a share in conversation without uttering a syllable.⁴ These texts portray an almost identical female ideal—one who says very little.

Everything Is a Conduct Manual

After I started reading conduct books during a research fellowship at Chawton House Library in England in 2013, I started seeing them everywhere. Initially, I thought it was an occupational hazard of writing a doctoral dissertation, or a sign that I was too involved with my subject and should take a holiday. All three hypotheses are true—society is obsessed with women’s behavior, with defining what is right and shaming women who get it wrong. Conduct manuals are not now, and never have been, the only means by which expectations for female behavior have been detailed. Cultural and social forces have always added their own voices to reinforce (and contest) what conduct books advise. There were poems, such as the anonymous fourteenth century’s What the Goodwife Taught Her Daughter and Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Legend of Good Women. There was theatre—consider Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth and Cleopatra as examples of bad women, punished accordingly (though the faultless Desdemona fares no better at the hands of Othello).

Even biographical histories of men could contribute; Karen Nelson argues that Elizabeth Cary’s account of the life of Edward II (written in 1627 and published in 1680) appropriates from the mother’s or woman’s advice-manual strategies of negotiation and [uses] the development of her female character, Queen Isabel to [advocate] an active role for women at court; and it serves as a handbook of behavior for a powerful and effective queen.⁵ In the eighteenth century, the new genre of the novel joined the fray, adding all manner of problematic role models, from bad women who frankly enjoy their misdeeds to good women who reap unrealistic rewards for their virtue.

Later, there were popular songs, movies and the Internet. Every medium has something to say about what women should and should not do. The job is done to this day in visual art, sermons, myths, legends, fairy tales, theatre, poetry, essays, songs, magazines, novels, short stories, advertising, film, television, the Internet and almost anything else that involves humans. Every medium is engaged in attempts to remind us what the ideal is, whether we are being encouraged to conform to it, rebel against it or redefine it.

This Book, However, Does Not Cover Everything

For this book, I have limited my examination to conduct manuals, although I do on occasion mention significant authors or mediums that simply cannot be ignored, such as the development of the novel and social media. Unlike many other genres that provide representations of women, conduct books are aware of their mission; sexism in popular television shows like The Big Bang Theory and How I Met Your Mother are likely not scriptwriters’ concerted efforts to objectify and ridicule women, although the fact that they frequently do ought to get far more attention than it does. But conduct books are intentional. Their purpose is to tell women how to be women. While many other writers and artists have created deliberate representations of an ideal woman, no other makes such an illumination its primary goal. Conduct manuals are straightforward about their expectations. They have nothing to hide and no desire to be clever. Here, they say—this is what you ought to do.

I have omitted books that focus on housewifery, cooking, education or fashion and those addressing both men and women, as many early marital handbooks did. Such books also provide insight into the lives of women, real and imagined, but practical guides typically focus on what a woman should do rather than what she should be. These are not entirely separate things—conduct manuals insist that women be seen being good and engaging in activities that prove their worth as women, but practical guides do not have the same obsession with structuring an ideal woman as conduct manuals do. Like etiquette books, they are concerned with external factors rather than internal virtue. Similarly, since my study charts the persistence of a relatively unchanging ideal, I have not included texts that argue against the ideal. I have acknowledged significant moments of resistance, such as books by Mary Astell and Mary Wollstonecraft, and social movements like the fight for suffrage and feminism. While some of these writings can be seen as nontraditional or counter-conduct manuals, they too have an external focus and often address society at large rather than women. The purpose of my 600-year journey is to trace the repetition and insistence of particular expectations for women’s behavior so that we can better understand our own attitudes today.

Thus, only texts that helped establish the dominant ideal we still see today have been included in this study. Some of the books I examine might be familiar to scholars, and others are more obscure; I attempted a balance, though not strictly. Some chapters are devoted in large part to highly influential texts, while other chapters cover numerous titles. Thanks to technology, many of the books are available online for curious readers. As with any project, regardless of scope, some readers will wonder why I didn’t discuss that text or did cover that one; that is the reader’s privilege as a critical thinker. It is simply impossible to analyze all the conduct books ever written, so I had to make some hard decisions.

I have not included biographical details for all the authors, nor have I provided in-depth historical context for each chapter. The chapters progress chronologically and are divided loosely by century. I use the scholarly definition of the long eighteenth century, which permits inclusion of an 1809 text in the chapter devoted to the eighteenth century. I begin each chapter with an introduction to the time period, but I typically focus on social issues of concern rather than a record of wars, politics and natural disasters. These things are important, and I have thoroughly enjoyed the reading I did to learn about histories I knew little about. But in a work covering six centuries, a certain level of depth must be sacrificed. There are excellent studies that meticulously investigate conduct manuals and the lives of women in each of the time periods I discuss, and I encourage readers to consult those texts in addition to this one.

Yet it might be argued that the identities of the writers and the times in which they wrote are negligible, as seen in the examples of A Father’s Legacy and The Rules. Two centuries (or more) might pass, and women, even if their lives and situations have changed in many important ways, are still being told the same thing, still being silenced. The almost ahistorical approach is not without its flaws. Political and social changes did affect women, the opportunities available to them and the tasks that took up their time day after day. Women in 1995 had myriad options that women in 1774 scarcely dreamed of. It would be foolish and quite wrong to believe that these changes do not matter. Emphatically, they do. It is important that women can marry for love and companionship rather than from economic necessity. It is important that women can attend the same schools as men and work the same jobs as men. It is important that women can vote and have control of their own bodies. Such changes, won through generations of activism and determination, are not to be taken for granted or dismissed lightly, and yes, these advances toward equality have altered some behavioral expectations.

But not entirely. It is not surprising that a woman wants to go to college. It might not be shocking that she wants to study finance. What happens, though, in the classroom? In her job hunt? Salary negotiation? Promotion? What happens if she wants to take maternity leave? What are the chances she will be a CEO? If she is a decisive and authoritative leader, will she be praised for being assertive or derided for being bossy? Because of the persistence of the female ideal, which really changes little across the centuries, our deepest expectations for gendered behavior need little historical context.

Can Conduct Manuals Be Trusted?

All scholars of conduct manuals ask: to what extent can conduct manuals be trusted as records of history? Can these books be taken as an accurate representation of life? No, they cannot, any more than so-called reality television reflects our own daily habits. These books are an expression of an ideal, of an aspiration, of what some writers thought women should be like. Thus, my study should not be mistaken for a history of how women behaved in the past. Rather, it is a history of desire. Even if women did not do everything the books told them to, women were still aware of the social pressure to conform. And there is much to learn from the kind of woman depicted in these books. We ask children what they want to be when they grow up, because what they dream of tells us something about them. Similarly, what a culture imagines can be as informative as its reality. In fact, these books can tell us a great deal about reality. If women acted the way they were being told to, they wouldn’t need to be told. In explaining what should be, these books indicate a dissatisfaction with what was—there is usually a link between the insistence of the voices of control and how threatened those in control feel.

A further unreality of conduct manuals is their assumption that the only women that matter are those who are economically comfortable, white, heterosexual and without a disability of any kind. There are books and sermons addressing poor girls or unfortunate women, but I have not included them here, as they tend to do at least as much scolding as instructing, if not more. The ideal these women were supposed to achieve was that of a virtuous Christian, but writers often spend most of their time explaining why sinful women will probably go to hell. While middle- and upper-class parents generally wanted their daughters to read and benefit socially from conduct manuals, it is unclear how working-class or impoverished women were intended to access such texts. Most of these women would have been illiterate and few of them able or willing to spend their precious funds on a book of sermons. Most conduct manuals have a slightly upwardly mobile ethos; if a prosperous father or an advantageous marriage was nudging a young woman toward a slightly higher social circle, she needed to be prepared. And if she hoped to secure that marriage, she had no room for error.

From the late twentieth century, books offering advice to a diverse range of women have been published, but I have encountered none in the majority of the years studied in this book. Because I set out to chronicle the slow changes of the female ideal within conduct manuals, I have by default excluded women who are not considered close enough to the ideal to be instructed how to achieve it. This reflects the prejudices of my subjects, not my own. Although the contents of my book are limited to texts written for middle- and upper-class white women, my objective is to demonstrate both how this ideal has been painstakingly established, and how harmful its persistence is for all women, regardless of race, ethnicity, sexuality or ability.

Although I use the phrase female ideal repeatedly in this book, the reader should understand that I refer to a fairly specific Western ideal; with the exception of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century texts that were written in French, Spanish or Italian and then translated to English, all the books in this volume were created in Britain or America. Many of the traits and virtues recommended to women will nonetheless be familiar to people around the world, though explanations for the required behavior may differ. But I do not suggest that the books I examine are truly global; societies and cultures have a variety of guidelines, expectations and ideals. It is beyond my ability to account for them all here. If this book inspires readers to engage in similar projects, we can continue to improve our understanding of our past and thus, our future.

Women: By Accident or Design?

Although my study begins with the 1484 publication of an English translation of The Book of the Knight of the Tower, written in French in 1372 by Geoffrey de La Tour-Landry, efforts to control women go much further back in history. In ancient Greece, with a limited understanding of human anatomy, Aristotle characterized women as mistakes of Nature, an imperfect act of generation.⁶ He theorized that babies were created by male semen alone and merely carried in the woman’s womb; men desired to reproduce themselves, especially since they were apparently the superior sex, and if a female child was the result, it was the mother’s fault and a disappointment.⁷ Setting a lasting precedent,

Greek theorists [believed] the biology of males and females was the key to their psychology. The female was softer and more docile, more apt to be despondent, querulous, and deceitful. Being incomplete, moreover, she craved sexual fulfillment in intercourse with a male. The male was intellectual, active, and in control of his passions.⁸

Conduct book writers throughout the centuries would return to these teachings to explain why it was natural for women to be passive and submissive—women were just made that way.

Thomas Laqueur argues that the anatomist Galen’s (c. 130–200) understanding of male and female bodies, what Laqueur calls a one-sex model, lasted until the end of the seventeenth century. Galen claimed that men and women possessed the same basic genitalia, but women’s were turned inward while men’s were external. Instead of being divided by their reproductive anatomies, the sexes are linked by a common one. Women, in other words, are inverted, and hence less perfect, men. They have exactly the same organs but in exactly the wrong places.⁹ Laqueur explains that these distinctions were not understood to create a sexual hierarchy, but were instead a way of imagining or expressing it. Biology only records a higher truth.¹⁰ Galen and Aristotle helped establish a justification for controlling women that endured for millennia. Men and women were, it was argued, suited to different tasks, and whether these proclivities were endowed by God, Nature, science or tradition, they were held up as indisputable. Aristotle posited that [t]he qualities of each sex entailed the comparative advantage of one or the other in minding the home or fighting,¹¹ and the binary still exists. Conduct manuals would later take this construct and provide lavish details about which specific tasks and pastimes were appropriate for each sex, always reserving domestic and passive duties for women.

Be a Woman

If men and women were essentially the same biologically, Jean Howard argues in her study of Renaissance society, gender differences and hierarchy had to be produced and secured—through ideological interpellation when possible, through force when necessary—on other grounds.¹² Difference was thus located in women’s lack of masculine perfection, which led logically to their subjugation.¹³ These discussions demonstrate to what extent sex-based differences and so-called natural qualities are constructs created and maintained by men who saw no reason to share their privileged positions with women. Conduct book writers helped make these differences part of the code by which men and women were distinguished. Each sex had to do certain things (and not do others) in order to establish their credentials as male or female. If either sex violated the rules, they upset the hierarchy and incurred the worst insults: an effeminate man or a masculine or unnatural woman.

The acknowledgment that certain actions were required to demonstrate gender reveals a lack of trust in the stability of the guidelines. This fear is entirely reasonable: Judith Butler states, "gender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceed; rather, it is an identity tenuously constituted in time—an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts."¹⁴ Gender is thus a performance, and its rules are delicate. If women have to act in certain ways to be women, what would happen if they refused? The hierarchy would be upset and the men in