Virtuous Necessity

Virtuous Necessity PDF

Author: Jessica Murphy

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 2015-08-25

Total Pages: 191

ISBN-13: 0472119575

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

Household Politics

Household Politics PDF

Author: Don Herzog

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2013-04-16

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 0300195176

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DIVDIVEarly modern English canonical sources and sermons often urge the subordination of women. In Household Politics, Don Herzog argues that these sources were blather—not that they were irrelevant, but that plenty of people rolled their eyes at them. Indeed many held that a man had to be an idiot or a buffoon to try to act on their hoary “wisdom.� Households didn’t bask serenely in naturalized or essentialized patriarchy. Instead, husbands, wives, and servants struggled endlessly over authority. Nor did some insidiously gendered public/private distinction make the political subordination of women invisible. Conflict, Herzog argues, doesn't corrode social order: it's what social order usually consists in. He uses the argument to impeach conservatives and their radical critics for sharing confused alternatives. The social world Herzog brings vibrantly alive is much richer—and much pricklier—than many imagine./div/div

Gender, Pregnancy and Power in Eighteenth-Century Literature

Gender, Pregnancy and Power in Eighteenth-Century Literature PDF

Author: Jenifer Buckley

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-07-28

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 3319538357

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This book reveals the cultural significance of the pregnant woman by examining major eighteenth-century debates concerning separate spheres, man-midwifery, performance, marriage, the body, education, and creative imagination. Exploring medical, economic, moral, and literary ramifications, this book engages critically with the notion that a pregnant woman could alter the development of her foetus with the power of her thoughts and feelings. Eighteenth-century authors sought urgently to define, understand and control the concept of maternal imagination as they responded to and provoked fundamental questions about female intellect and the relationship between mind and body. Interrogating the multiple models of maternal imagination both separately and as a holistic set of socio-cultural components, the author uncovers the discourse of maternal imagination across eighteenth-century drama, popular print, medical texts, poetry and novels. This overdue rehabilitation of the pregnant woman in literature is essential reading for scholars of the eighteenth century, gender and literary history.