Making Advice Modern

From early periodicals to conduct books, advice in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries was largely a one-way transmission from advice giver to receiver. It also served conservative ends, reinforcing traditional gender roles to wide audiences, and soothing male anxieties about cultural change. But transformations in media and in American culture at the end of the nineteenth century paved the way for a new and strikingly modern paradigm of advice—one that was interactive, public, flexible in topic and form, and woman-centered. This chapter offers an overview of the rise of the advice column and frames its genesis in the context of the changing newspaper and advertising industries.

Bathsua Makin

Bathsua Makin (b. 1600–d. 1681?) was a child prodigy, writer, and noted educator. Her father Henry Reginald was a schoolmaster. Her first book, Musa Virginea, appeared when she was 16; a second published work on shorthand is undated, but appeared before 1619. She followed her father into education, working as tutor for the Princess Elizabeth, daughter of Charles I, and later for the Countess of Huntingdon and her children. Makin’s specialty was languages, so she taught Princess Elizabeth Latin, Hebrew, Greek, French, and Italian by the time the child was nine, and she taught Latin, Greek, and Hebrew to the Huntingdon family. Finally, An Essay to Revive the Antient Education of Gentlewomen (Essay) is attributed to Makin by many scholars. The Essay says Makin planned to open a school in 1673, though nothing further is heard of the school. It also provides information about education, catalogues learned women, and offers a spirited defense of women’s abilities, as well as an attack on misogyny. Makin’s importance lies in the way she exemplifies the problems of research on early modern women writers, her work as a Latin poet, her essay on education, as well as her reception. Her brother-in-law John Pell once remarked that “she is a woman of great acquaintance.” Pell was one of Samuel Hartlib’s correspondence circle, and Hartlib mentions both Makin and her father in his papers. Surviving letters and the Hartlib papers link her to notable men: Sir Symonds D’Ewes, Carew Ralegh, Robert Boyle, and several prominent London physicians. Around 1640, Anna Maria van Schurman wrote Makin, and they continued corresponding until at least 1645 and possibly until 1648. Makin almost certainly knew other learned Englishwomen, including Rachel Speght, Anne Halkett, Dorothy Moore Dury, and Katherine Jones, Lady Ranelagh, though none of these is listed in her catalogues of learned ladies, perhaps because they demurred. Her influence on later women is less clear. The Countess of Huntingdon’s granddaughter, Lady Elizabeth Hastings, was Mary Astell’s sponsor; another was Lady Catherine Jones, daughter of Katherine Jones, Lady Ranelagh. This article does not include the many anthologies that include passages from the Essay speaking to such concerns as politics, women’s lives, conduct books, religion, classical studies, and so forth. Simply using a search engine like Google to find the search terms “Bathsua Makin” and “anthology” will yield around 9,000 results, and the range of topics is broad and varied.

The history of the regulation and exploitation of women’s speech and writing in Japan

This chapter describes how women’s relationship to Japanese language has been defined, assessed, and exploited within the field of Japanese linguistics. After a brief history of language studies in Japan in the Introduction, the second section analyses the norms for women’s speech in conduct books (etiquette manuals) since the thirteenth century. The third section summarizes the arguments concerning women’s contribution to the development of kana script in the Heian period (794–1185). The fourth section examines the changing values assigned to two speech styles linguists have prominently attributed to women: jogakusei kotoba (‘schoolgirl speech’) of the late nineteenth century and nyōbō kotoba (‘court-women speech’) since the fourteenth century. The last section considers the shifting evaluations assigned to the works by two individual women, the Japanese translation of Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886) by Wakamatsu Shizuko and the codification of Ainu oral narrative by Chiri Yukie. Conclusions outline three major findings of the chapter.

The ‘most Sacred of Duties’1: Maternal Ideals and Discourses of Authority in Victorian Breastfeeding Advice

The maternal role and its associated practices were subject to much scrutiny throughout the Victorian period. Whilst motherhood was seen as the natural destiny of the (respectable) woman, mothers were nonetheless deemed in need of strict guidance on how best to raise their offspring. This was offered in an extensive range of advice and conduct books, via newspapers, journals, and fiction, and from medical practitioners, and covered pregnancy, childbirth, and all aspects of care for babies and young children. This article considers Victorian advice on infant feeding, focusing in particular on the various strategies deployed to encourage mothers to breastfeed. Advice literature for mothers frequently invoked patriarchal – religious, medical, and (pseudo-) scientific – authority, in line with broader Victorian discourses on femininity. Much of this advice was produced by, or drew on, the authority of (male) medical practitioners, whilst comparatively little emphasis was placed on maternal experience as a source of expertise. Set within the wider historical context of shifting trends in infant feeding, this article analyses the various persuasive techniques employed by the authors of advice literature, which ultimately served as an attempt to control women’s maternal behaviours and to suppress their own maternal authority.

Characteristic Features of Recreation in Hungarian Protestant Colleges (16‒18.-c.)

The aim of this essay is to find some hints and data about how the meaning of sport was interpreted in conduct books in the early modern Hungarian literature. Here, the attributes of sport are said to further piety in the perspective of regulation: man should not serve God every day through sportive tricks, but through zealous routine of life, as a recreation form of a Christian. The laws of Hungarian Protestant Colleges (17th–19th centuries) include canons for many arts of sport and the conduct book also addresses regular exercises for preaching and praying as if they were acts of recreation.

Emotive Figures as "Shown" Emotion in Italian Post-Unification Conduct Books (1860-1900)

Within a digital corpus of 20 Italian post-unification conduct books (1860 to 1900), UAM CorpusTool is used to perform a manual annotation of 13 emotive rhetorical figures as indices of “shown” emotion (émotion montrée, Micheli 2014). The analysis consists in two text mining tasks: classification, which identifies emotive figures using the 13 categories, and clustering, which identifies groups, i.e. clusters where emotive figures co-occur. Emotive clusters mainly discuss diligence and parsimony—personal values linked to self-improvement for which reader agreement is not taken for granted. In this corpus they function as “moving” values, that is, values acting recurrently as contexts for “argued” emotion (émotion étayée, Micheli 2014).

Jane Austen’s Questioning of Gender and Genres

If Jane Austen admits in her correspondence that she was eventually pleased with Thomas Gisborne’s Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex (1797), the Anglican theologian nonetheless endorsed the prejudices shared by most eighteenth-century moralists towards novels. Now, in Northanger Abbey, a novel filled with literary allusions, Jane Austen’s narrator bravely takes the opposite view by launching into a bold defence of the genre. Besides resorting to a biting irony to scrutinize her society’s axioms, rules and power relations, her novels notably question Manichean representations of masculine and feminine roles. Jane Austen’s choice to distance herself from the strictly gendered models inherited from conduct books, sentimental, or gothic novels, further combines with her questioning of generic conventions. This article thus aims at exploring how Jane Austen engaged with these representations while articulating her subtle didacticism. Her aim was not merely to raise the respectability of the novel genre, but also to provide a possible answer to the crisis of values that was threatening the very foundations of the political and social order.