ABSTRACT
The concern of all eighteenth-century ‘conduct’ manuals for women is how women might create themselves as objects of male desire, but in terms which will contain that desire within the publicly sanctioned form of marriage. They form a significant sub-genre among the hundreds of books and periodicals (the most famous of which is Addison and Steele’s Spectator) which offered instruction in all areas of social, domestic, and professional behaviour to a rapidly growing readership. Highly popular, they were powerfully instrumental in defining an ideological identity for the emergent middle class. Fictionalized forms of advice literature were also popular, and in this section three examples of these moral narratives (1.2, 1.4, 1.5) are juxtaposed with extracts from more straightforwardly instructional conduct manuals (1.1, 1.2, 1.6). The final extract (1.7) is from a conduct book by Mary Wollstonecraft. Her Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (see also 3.4) is an early work, published in 1788, and its inclusion here demonstrates the common ground that frequently exists between moral instruction, educational literature and ‘feminist’ texts (cf. Sections 3 and 5).
