Simultaneously challenging conventional male-dominated thought and revisionist modern feminism, this book argues that gendered identities can best be conceived relationally, and thus that a fuller understanding of gender roles in the eighteenth century (and by extension in our own) must include an analysis of men's place in the discourse of domesticity. Examining the phenomenal rise of the social periodical at the end of the seventeenth century, the author theorizes the genre's crucial contribution to the construction of a class-specific gender identity that succeeds as ideology not, as...