Focusing on the complex relationship between discourse and experience, Women of Quality examines the role of gender in aristocratic women's daily lives during a period of significant cultural change. In the years following the Glorious Revolution, didactic writers and other social critics responded to a perceived crisis of gender relations by creating a new discourse of 'natural' feminine behavior in opposition to the luxury and decadence of fashionable women. Modern scholars have often portrayed this agenda as representing the rise of a middle-class ideology, but Ingrid Tague argues that the...
Focusing on the complex relationship between discourse and experience, Women of Quality examines the role of gender in aristocratic women's daily live...