Book Chapter

Mothers, Wives, Widows, and Mother’s Advice Books of the Seventeenth Century

Urban, M

2006

Overview

Women of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England experienced a world where one woman could rule the country, but women, in general, had almost no legal power of their own. Women were in the same legal category as children, wards, lunatics, idiots, and outlaws. The ideal of woman dictated chastity, modesty, and silence. Moreover, this ideal placed women almost solely within the domestic sphere, hence many believed women did not need an extensive education. Women’s domestic education and the societal expectation of silence negatively impacted women’s ability to publish. Men, then, frequently wrote for and to women. Men wrote cookbooks and midwifery books, and they even put together most of the first needlework books.1 Although men could, and often did, give women advice about motherly topics, they could never experience motherhood. The exclusively female functions of childbirth and breast-feeding united women as mothers. This role gave women a natural authority that men could only imagine. Through their function as mothers, the authors of mother’s advice books entered publishing to advise their children and other women to live a good life. Their environment included childbirth, breast-feeding, illness and death, family, class, and aging. Although the authors wrote about domestic topics, only Anne Brockman advised women about their future: old age.

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan,Palgrave Macmillan US
• Subject: Advice Book / Clinical psychology / Domestic Sphere / Elderly Woman / Gender studies, gender groups / Good Wife / Literature & literary studies / Seventeenth Century
• ISBN: 1403970661, 9781403970664, 9781349532360, 1349532363