Timothy Willem Jones
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- January 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199655106
- eISBN:
- 9780191744952
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199655106.003.0003
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Modern History, History of Religion
This chapter explores the significance of the revival of women’s religious orders on Anglican sexual politics. It compares the revival of the order of deaconesses with that of the sisterhoods, or ...
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This chapter explores the significance of the revival of women’s religious orders on Anglican sexual politics. It compares the revival of the order of deaconesses with that of the sisterhoods, or nuns. Both movements utilized Victorian notions of social motherhood to enable middle-class women to expand their sphere of activity, often free from direct male authority. Deaconess’s ancient genealogy and sacral ambiguity, the unresolved question of their place in Holy Orders, meant that they grew less rapidly than the sisterhoods. It also, however, meant that they posed a much more substantial challenge to Anglican sexual metaphysics.Less
This chapter explores the significance of the revival of women’s religious orders on Anglican sexual politics. It compares the revival of the order of deaconesses with that of the sisterhoods, or nuns. Both movements utilized Victorian notions of social motherhood to enable middle-class women to expand their sphere of activity, often free from direct male authority. Deaconess’s ancient genealogy and sacral ambiguity, the unresolved question of their place in Holy Orders, meant that they grew less rapidly than the sisterhoods. It also, however, meant that they posed a much more substantial challenge to Anglican sexual metaphysics.
Tamara S. Wagner
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- November 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780198858010
- eISBN:
- 9780191890567
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198858010.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
The second chapter explores how nineteenth-century parenting publications shaped popular narratives of babyhood and baby care. A critical analysis of the power of the print media in producing as well ...
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The second chapter explores how nineteenth-century parenting publications shaped popular narratives of babyhood and baby care. A critical analysis of the power of the print media in producing as well as spreading rapidly commodified advice material allows us to reconsider the still persistent phenomenon of competing books on babies in its historical context. The expanding market of expert instructions reconfigured images of babyhood, codifying the baby as a source of anxiety that required clinical knowledge and intervention. Women writers of popular childrearing manuals such as Eliza Warren, the main rival of the bestselling Isabella Beeton, packaged infant care advice in narratives, at once trading on and endeavouring to reshape this market. A crucial link between putatively professional, systematically presented, parenting instructions and the interpolation of infant care advice in popular fiction, Warren’s full-scale childrearing manual in narrative form, How I Managed My Children from Infancy to Marriage (1865), provides a test case of the shifting focus on personal experience and new expert knowledge in the selling of parenting publications. Since the nineteenth-century market for these publications was informed by a general move to hands-on, practical advice, Warren’s strategies in creating her authorial persona to market a mother’s experience formed a symptomatic and influential component in the impact of advice literature both on perceptions of baby care and on the literary baby.Less
The second chapter explores how nineteenth-century parenting publications shaped popular narratives of babyhood and baby care. A critical analysis of the power of the print media in producing as well as spreading rapidly commodified advice material allows us to reconsider the still persistent phenomenon of competing books on babies in its historical context. The expanding market of expert instructions reconfigured images of babyhood, codifying the baby as a source of anxiety that required clinical knowledge and intervention. Women writers of popular childrearing manuals such as Eliza Warren, the main rival of the bestselling Isabella Beeton, packaged infant care advice in narratives, at once trading on and endeavouring to reshape this market. A crucial link between putatively professional, systematically presented, parenting instructions and the interpolation of infant care advice in popular fiction, Warren’s full-scale childrearing manual in narrative form, How I Managed My Children from Infancy to Marriage (1865), provides a test case of the shifting focus on personal experience and new expert knowledge in the selling of parenting publications. Since the nineteenth-century market for these publications was informed by a general move to hands-on, practical advice, Warren’s strategies in creating her authorial persona to market a mother’s experience formed a symptomatic and influential component in the impact of advice literature both on perceptions of baby care and on the literary baby.
