True to her nature

changing advice to American women

Edición de la obra True to her nature

From colonial times to the present, advice givers from Cotton Mather to Dr. Benjamin Spock and Martha Stewart have offered a litany of opinions on proper child care and good housekeeping. Drawing on sermons, child-rearing manuals, and women s magazines, author Maxine L. Margolis explores changing ideologies about middle-class women s roles and asserts they can only be explained within a larger material context. Variables such as household vs. industrial production, the demand or lack of demand for women s labor, and the changing costs and benefits of rearing children have been instrumental in influencing views of women s true nature and proper place. This provocative and persuasive analysis suggests there are well-defined material causes for attitudes toward women s employment and housework, changing advice on child rearing including the discovery that fathers are parents too and the rebirth of feminism.