Deconstructing female conventions

2006 ◽  
Vol 33 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 11-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria E. Rodríguez-Gil
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Mother Tongue ◽  
New Approach ◽  
The Public ◽  
English Grammar ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
At Home

Summary This paper examines Ann Fisher’s (1719–1778) most important and influential work, A New Grammar (1745?). In this grammar, the author did not follow the trend of making English grammar fit the Latin pattern, a common practice still in the eighteenth century. Instead, she wrote an English grammar based on the nature and observation of her mother tongue. Besides, she scattered throughout her grammar a wide set of teaching devices, the ‘examples of bad English’ being her most important contribution. Her innovations and her new approach to the description of English grammar were indeed welcomed by contemporary readers, since her grammar saw almost forty editions and reprints, it influenced other grammarians, for instance Thomas Spence (1750–1814), and it reached other markets, such as London. In order to understand more clearly the value of this grammar and of its author, this grammar has to be seen in the context of her life. For this reason, we will also discuss some details of her unconventional lifestyle: unconventional in the sense that she led her life in the public sphere, not happy with the prevailing idea that women should be educated for a life at home.

Deconstructing Female Conventions: Ann Fisher (1719–1778)

2006 ◽  
Vol 33 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 11-38
Author(s):  
Maria E. Rodríguez-Gil
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Mother Tongue ◽  
New Approach ◽  
The Public ◽  
English Grammar ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
At Home

This paper examines Ann Fisher’s (1719–1778) most important and influential work, A New Grammar (1745?). In this grammar, the author did not follow the trend of making English grammar fit the Latin pattern, a common practice still in the eighteenth century. Instead, she wrote an English grammar based on the nature and observation of her mother tongue. Besides, she scattered throughout her grammar a wide set of teaching devices, the ‘examples of bad English’ being her most important contribution. Her innovations and her new approach to the description of English grammar were indeed welcomed by contemporary readers, since her grammar saw almost forty editions and reprints, it influenced other grammarians, for instance Thomas Spence (1750–1814), and it reached other markets, such as London. In order to understand more clearly the value of this grammar and of its author, this grammar has to be seen in the context of her life. For this reason, we will also discuss some details of her unconventional lifestyle: unconventional in the sense that she led her life in the public sphere, not happy with the prevailing idea that women should be educated for a life at home.

Sex in the City that Peter Built: The Demimonde and Sociability in Mid-Eighteenth Century St. Petersburg

Slavic Review ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 76 (4) ◽  
pp. 907-930
Author(s):  
Igor Fedyukin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Associational Life ◽  
The Public ◽  
The World ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The City

This article uses the materials of the Drezdensha affair, a large-scale investigation of “indecency” in St. Petersburg in 1750, to explore unofficial sociability among the Imperial elite, and to map out the institutional, social, and economic dimensions of the post-Petrine “sexual underworld.” Sociability and, ultimately, the public sphere in eighteenth century Russia are usually associated with loftier practices, with joining the ranks of the reading public, reflecting on the public good, and generally, becoming more civil and polite. Yet, it is the privately-run, commercially-oriented, and sexually-charged “parties” at the focus of this article that arguably served as a “training ground” for developing the habits of sociability. The world of these “parties” provides a missing link between the debauchery and carousing of Peter I's era and the more polite formats of associational life in the late eighteenth century, as well as the historical context for reflections on morality, sexual licentiousness, foppery, and the excesses of “westernization.”

scholarly journals Altering Cooking and Eating Habits during the Romanian Communist Regime by Using Cookbooks

2018 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 141-162
Author(s):  
Ina Irina Ghita
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Gender Equity ◽  
Eating Habits ◽  
Communist Regime ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Eastern European Countries ◽  
At Home

This digital project examines the role of a cook book, Sanda Marin’s Carte de Bucate, first published in 1936,  as a vehicle for social education in Communist Romania. The book was censored and transformed during the Communist regime as two interconnected phenomena were taking place: the reinforcing of the ideology of the Communist model and an increasing economic crisis that led to scarcity of food. The paper also pays attention to how the language and tone used in the book changed depending on the understanding of gender roles in different decades. In spite of Communist claims of an equal division of responsibilities, procuring of food and cooking was considered a woman’s task.   By addressing equal responsibility in the public sphere, not at home, the progress toward gender equity reached after the War was completely erased during communism since women had to work and also be responsible for all domestic duties at home, a situation that has been similar in other eastern European countries to this day.  

In Search of “Fellow Pilgrims”: Radical Protestants and Transconfessional Exchanges in Europe and the British Atlantic, c. 1670–1730

2014 ◽  
Vol 83 (3) ◽  
pp. 590-617 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Bouldin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Great Awakening ◽  
British Isles ◽  
British Atlantic ◽  
The Public ◽  
Geographic Boundaries ◽  
The Public Sphere

The mobility and literacy of many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century dissenters allowed for the circulation of people and ideas throughout Europe, the British Isles, and colonial North America. This article focuses on the interactions of dissenting groups who flourished in the half century between the Restoration and the Great Awakening, such as English Philadelphians, French Prophets, radical German Pietists, Quakers, Bourignonians, and Labadists. It considers how a push for further reforms, particularly those arising from the context of late seventeenth-century millenarianism, served as a catalyst for radical Protestants to seek out other dissenters with the goal of uniting communities of reformers across linguistic, confessional, and geographic boundaries. Dissenters facilitated their endeavors through the development of new sites of sociability, a reliance on implicit codes of expected behavior, and the circulation of manuscript and printed texts. By relying on mechanisms of the public sphere, they carried out esoteric conversations and critical debates about radical Protestantism.

scholarly journals Feminism and the Public Sphere in Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

1998 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel K. Carnell
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Century Model ◽  
Separate Spheres ◽  
The Public ◽  
Cultural Power ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Different Levels

The bipartite narrative structure of Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) has been interpreted recently as an attempt to subvert the traditional Victorian rubric of separate spheres. Reconsidering this novel in terms of Jürgen Habermas's concept of the eighteenth-century public sphere broadens the historical context for the way we understand the separate spheres. Within Brontë's critique of Victorian gender roles, we may identify a reluctance to address the Chartist-influenced class challenges to an older version of the public good. In hearkening back to an eighteenth-century model of the public sphere, Brontë espouses not so much a twentieth-century-style challenge to the Victorian model of separate spheres as a nineteenth-century-style nostalgia for the classical liberal model of bourgeois public debate. At the same time, the awkward rupture in Brontë's narrative represents the inherent contradictions between the different levels of discourse-literary, political, and scientific-within the public sphere itself and the complex ways in which these contradictions are both accorded and denied cultural power.

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