Thoughts On The Education of Daughters - Genre: The Conduct Book

Genre: The Conduct Book

Between 1760 and 1820, conduct books reached the height of their popularity in Britain; one scholar refers to the period as "the age of courtesy books for women". As Nancy Armstrong writes in her seminal work on this genre, Desire and Domestic Fiction (1987): "so popular did these books become that by the second half of the eighteenth century virtually everyone knew the ideal of womanhood they proposed".

Conduct books integrated the styles and rhetorics of earlier genres, such as devotional writings, marriage manuals, recipe books, and works on household economy. They offered their readers a description of (most often) the ideal woman while at the same time handing out practical advice. Thus, not only did they dictate morality, but they also guided readers' choice of dress and outlined "proper" etiquette. Typical examples include Bluestocking Hester Chapone's Letters on the Improvement of the Mind (1773), which went through at least sixteen editions in the last quarter of the 18th century, and the classically-educated historian Catharine Macaulay's Letters on Education (1790). Chapone's work, in particular, appealed to Wollstonecraft at this time and influenced her composition of Thoughts because it argued "for a sustained programme of study for women" and was based on the idea that Christianity should be "the chief instructor of our rational faculties". Moreover, it emphasized that women should be considered rational beings and not left to wallow in sensualism. When Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792, she drew on both Chapone and Macaulay's works.

Conduct books have traditionally been viewed by scholars as an integral factor in the creation of a bourgeois sense of self. The conduct book "helped to generate the belief that there was such a thing as a 'middle class' and that the modest, submissive but morally and domestically competent woman it described was the first 'modern individual'". By developing a specifically bourgeois ethos through genres such as the conduct book, the emerging middle class challenged the primacy of the aristocratic code of manners. However, conduct books simultaneously constricted women's roles, propagating what has been called "the angel in the house" image (alluding to Coventry Patmore's poem of that name). Women were encouraged to be chaste, pious, submissive, modest, selfless, graceful, pure, delicate, compliant, reticent, and polite.

More recently, a few scholars have argued that conduct books should be differentiated more carefully and that some of them—such as Wollstonecraft's Thoughts—transformed traditional female advice manuals into "proto-feminist tracts". These scholars view Thoughts as part of a tradition that adapted older genres to a new message of female empowerment, genres such as advice manuals for women's education, moral satires, and moral and spiritual works by religious Dissenters (those not associated with the Church of England). Wollstonecraft's text resembles conventional conduct books in promoting self-control and submission, traits that were supposed to attract a husband. Yet at the same time, the text challenges this portrait of the "proper lady" by introducing strains of religious Dissent that promote equality of the soul. Thus, Thoughts appears to be torn between several sets of binaries, such as compliance and rebellion; spiritual meekness and rational independence; and domestic duty and political participation. This view of the conduct book, and of Thoughts in particular, questions the earlier interpretation of the genre as a mere tool of ideological indoctrination, an interpretation that grew out of criticism influenced by theorists such as Michel Foucault.