First of all, I'd like to send a shout out to all of the pure-hearted, good-intentioned men that spent time creating texts especially for me in hope of furthering my "feminine" education and influencing my development as woman (but of course, not as an individual, since I should not seek to cultivate a sense of personal identity, but blindly submit to blending in to a patriarchal imposed description of female norms). Your concern and interest concerning the education of women is truly touching, and I'm sure the best and brightest of my sex consider your advice to be invaluable: priceless...
PriceLESS, because a monetary value can't be determined, seeing as there is no going rate for absolute crap on the market.
Anyway...
When I read these "instructional" texts, primarily, I see the age-old tendency to encourage women to remain sexually pure, and embody the essence of all that is delicate and matronly. A woman must maintain her Virtue or face losing not only her reputation, but also her decreased value with respect to, or in some cases, complete removal from the marriage market. To paraphrase:
A woman should be the physical manifestation of all that is good, a marble idol of chastity and pristine morality that should never waver, falter, or tarnish. She is merely a decorative article that exists only for the purpose of pleasing her husband, one that sits on the kitchen mantle quietly and waits with wide eyes and unwavering devotion in hopes that he might bless her with a passing glance. Whenever he feels the desire, he will wrench her from her resting place, and with a fist constricted tightly around her torso, brush the dust off of her body with an air of bombastic ambivalence, and return her to the mantle with a fierce SLAM.
Well, this may be a slightly hyperbolic paraphrase (and I may have brought in a few things that weren't specifically mentioned in the advice passages), but the purpose behind the construction these instructional texts for women seems to be the same one behind the 1950s home-economics textbooks: an effort by men to maintain the prevailing patriarchal order via the encouragement of feminine weakness and submissiveness.
Also, as I read these texts, I started to wonder why men felt the need to publish them so extensively--why specifically during the late eighteenth century did they feel their authority was in jeopardy? Since a handful of these texts were published during the "Critical Period" of American History, I wonder if it was a response to Republican Motherhood of sorts, an attempt to reclaim some of the agency women had gained with the success of the American Revolution. Anway, it's just a thought.
2 comments:
I like your metaphors, Emily. :) And I think it's very insightful that you discuss the way in which these texts reaffirm the authority of the man by encouraging submissiveness in women. The fact that the socially naive female must turn to men for advice is, I think, degrading. It implies that women are not capable of making their own judgments; everything has to be spelled out for them.
I enjoyed reading your first couple paragraphs, because I was likewise struck by the irony that men frame their advice with the message that all they want to do is help women find meaning and happiness in their lives. Well, of course, they are so concerned about female education! If a woman follows the male curriculum, who ultimately reaps the rewards? It's frustrating, to say the least.
I really enjoyed reading you're post--I especially liked the image of the men "returning her to the mantle with a fierce SLAM." I think you're right; the men felt even the limited progress that women had made was a threat to their authority. You wonder why they felt insecure--perhaps they were still afraid of England coming back and reclaiming its territory? Good thoughts on the historical context.
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