Making Mothers: The Advice Genre and the Domestic Ideal, 1760-1830

Abstract

In part due to the transmission of ideas like those developed by Rousseau in Nouvelle Heloise and Emile, the selflessly nurturing and domestic mother displaced a distant and controlling father as the ideal parent for early childhood. Women, unlike men, were seen as uniquely capable of giving young children the love and attention that they needed to become moral adults. Advice manuals for mothers taught women how to model proper behaviors for prerational girls and boys by being self-controlled, concerned with social norms, and focused on duties, just as the children should be. This self-control, however, provided its own benefits, and this article reexamines whether nineteenth-century domesticity was as coercive as much recent scholarship assumes.