Conduct Books and the History of the Ideal Woman

Summary

As long as people have been writing books, authors have been using them to create misrepresentations of women. From medieval reality show-style wife tests to twenty-first century dating guides based on two-hundred-year-old novels, Conduct Books and the History of the Ideal Woman takes readers on a guided tour of advice on what women should and should not do.

Think today’s media is bad? In this book, you’ll discover:

• A sixteenth-century writer who believed women had the power to transform men’s bad thoughts into good ones (if she didn’t and something bad happened, it was her fault—sound familiar?)

• Why clothes were invented, and that pretty dresses are evil

• Why young ladies should never read—gasp!—novels

• The difference between conduct manuals and etiquette books, and why good manners are basically the same as good morals

• What twentieth-century self-help books have in common with the Middle Ages

Meticulously researched and displaying wry wit (and occasionally exasperation), Conduct Books and the History of the Ideal Woman links seven hundred years of advice on women’s behavior, tracing a through-line from the earliest printed texts that argued women were the property of men, to various iterations of feminism, to today’s casual misogyny. A must-read for everyone who is or knows a woman!