Home, Nature, and the Feminine Ideal (eBook)

Geographies of the Interior and of Empire

Elaine Stratford (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2019
256 Seiten
Rowman & Littlefield International (Verlag)
978-1-78348-510-9 (ISBN)

Infos

This book examines how ideas about bodies, homes, and nature were deployed to serve three interrelated imperatives: the healthy population, the nation, and empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through an analysis of archive material it explores how the role of women in ‘progressive’ reform was a form of governmentality.

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Take three things: the home, nature, and the feminine ideala notional and perfected femininity. Constitute them as inexorably and universally connected. Enrol them in diverse strategies and tactics that create varied anatomo-politics of the body and biopolitics of the population. Enlist those three things as the ';handmaidens' of the government of individuals and groups, places and spaces, and comings and goings. Focus some effort on the periodical press, and on producing and disseminating narratives, discourses, and practices that relate specifically to health and well-being. Deploy those texts and shape those contexts in ways that affect flesh and bone, psychology and social conduct, and the spatial organization and relational dynamics of dwellings and streets, settlements and regions, and states and empires. Stretch these activities over the Anglophone worldfrom the epicentres of the United Kingdom and the United States to Australia or Canada, New Zealand or Indiaand extend their reach over the whole of the long nineteenth century. Such are the subjects of this work, in which Elaine Stratford draws from governmentality, the geohumanities, and geocriticism to converse with an extensive archive that profoundly shaped our engagements with home, nature, and the feminine ideal, deeply influenced our collective capacity to flourish, and powerfully constituted diverse geographies of the interior and of empire that still affect us.

Autor

lt;span>Professor Elaine Stratford is a member of the Institute for the Study of Social Change at the University of Tasmania. Elaine is also the is the lead editor of Rowman & Littlefield International’s series Rethinking the Island and, with Philip Steinberg and Kimberley Peters, is an editor of and contributor to Territory Beyond Terra, another Rowman & Littlefield International title.

Inhalt

(1) ‘Her first duty’ – beauty, morality, and the gilded cage / (2)‘To maintain vigour’ – population, fitness, and race / (3) ‘The song of the skirt’ – raw nature and fashionable conduct / (4) ‘Good breeding’ – combatting the decline of the population / (5) ‘The hand that rocks the cradle’ – scientific mothers and strong babies / (6) ‘Cleanliness is next to godliness’ – health, habit, and domestic economy / (7) ‘We do hereby authorise and require’ – contagion, public health, and a return to home. / Synthesis / Bibliography

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 11.1.2019
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Kulturgeschichte
• Themenwelt: Naturwissenschaften ► Geowissenschaften ► Geografie / Kartografie
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Pädagogik
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung ► Politische Theorie
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Gender Studies
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Makrosoziologie
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Mikrosoziologie
• Schlagworte: 19th century • 20th century • Colonial • Cultural geography • Cultural Studies • Empire • Feminism • Gender and Sexuality • History • Hygenie • identity and difference • Place and Space • Postcolonial • Race • Women
• ISBN-10: 1-78348-510-8 / 1783485108
• ISBN-13: 978-1-78348-510-9 / 9781783485109