Proposing Men: Dialectics of Gender and Class in the Eighteenth-Century English PeriodicalStanford University Press, 1998 - 306 pages Simultaneously challenging conventional male-dominated thought and revisionist modern feminism, this book argues that gendered identities can best be conceived relationally, and thus that a fuller understanding of gender roles in the eighteenth century (and by extension in our own) must include an analysis of men s place in the discourse of domesticity. Examining the phenomenal rise of the social periodical at the end of the seventeenth century, the author theorizes the genre s crucial contribution to the construction of a class-specific gender identity that succeeds as ideology not, as usually assumed, by separating the feminine private sphere from the masculine public one, but by delineating the private as an important locus of masculine control. Marshalling social history, political theory, economics, and sociology in an attempt to account historically for the appearance of the sentimental family controlled by the man who is at once lover and husband, father and brother this book forcefully questions the validity of the doctrine of separate spheres and the ascription of gender roles connected to it. The social periodical provides compelling evidence for understanding the relationship between gender construction and class values. By focusing on such topics as courtship, marriage, and parent-child relations, the genre configured the nuclear family as a locus where emotional and sexual gratification supported material gain. Periodical literature offered an ostensibly neutral forum for public debate about private issues where male editors, by instructing and reforming women, also learned to become the chaste husbands and watchful fathers of the bourgeois home. In the process of demonstrating how social periodicals constructed new forms of masculine control still very much with us today, the book also shows how, by galvanizing an important new reading class, they contributed to the rise of the novel. Periodical literature exerted a transformative effect on English society by displaying a moral and cultural authority, not to mention a readership, that novels would struggle for many decades to achieve. |
Contents
one Periodical Literature and the Construction | 6 |
two Chaste Heterosexuality in the Early Periodical | 34 |
The NightWalker | 59 |
four Reconstructing Honor | 75 |
Contradictions | 96 |
Attacks on Luxury | 135 |
Economic Interests | 176 |
nine A Womens Magazine? Masculine | 204 |
Afterword | 232 |
Other editions - View all
Proposing Men: Dialectics of Gender and Class in the Eighteenth-century ... Shawn L. Maurer No preview available - 1998 |
Common terms and phrases
ability Addison argues aristocratic Athenian Mercury authority become behavior Bernard Mandeville Bevil junior Bickerstaff century chapter claims Conscious Lovers construction Consumption contrast critics Daniel Defoe daughter Defoe desire discourse domestic dress Early English Periodicals economic editors eidolon eighteenth Eighteenth-Century England Eliza Haywood English essay example exemplary father Female Spectator feminine Fiction function gender difference genre Gentleman Haywood Honour husband Ibid ideology Isaac Bickerstaff J. H. Plumb Jenny John Brewer John Dunton Joseph Addison Journal literary London luxury male marriage masculinity men's merchant middle classes moral Moreover Motteux narrative narrator nature Night-Walker Oxford particular patriarchal periodical literature periodical's pleasure political position Print Culture readers reading realm reforming relations Richard Steele role Sealand sentimental seventeenth sexual Shevelow Sir Andrew Society Spectator's sphere Steele's story Studies supposedly Tatler texts tion trade University Press virtue wife wives woman Women and Print World writes