An exploration of how 18th-century women writers of novels, conduct books, and tracts addressed key social, political and economic issues, revising public thinking about the family and refashioning women's sexual and domestic conduct. Eve Tavor Bannet examines the works of women writers who fell into two distinct camps. "Matriarchs" such as Eliza Haywood, Maria Edgeworth and Hannah More argued that women had a superiority of sense and virtue over men and needed to take control of the family. "Egalitarians" such as Fanny Burney, Mary Hays and Mary Wollstonecraft sought to level hierarchies both in the family and in the state, believing that a family should be based on consensual relations between spouses and between parents and children. Bannet shows how Matriarch and Egalitarian writers, in their different ways, sought to raise women from their inferior standing relative to men in the household, in cultural representations, and in prescriptive social norms. Both groups promoted an idealized division of labour between men and women, later to be dubbed the doctrine of "separate spheres".
- ISBN10 080186416X
- ISBN13 9780801864162
- Publish Date 16 October 2000
- Publish Status Out of Stock
- Out of Print 30 July 2003
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Johns Hopkins University Press
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 296
- Language English