Rice Historical Review Spring 2017

Permanent URI for this collection

https://hdl.handle.net/1911/94852

The Rice Historical Review is a research journal designed to showcase outstanding scholarly works produced by Rice University's undergraduate students.

Table of Contents

In order of appearance.

—Front Matter (PDF | 317 kB)

—The Politics of Policy: the Obama Doctrine and the Arab Spring
by Hannah Tyler (PDF | 6.2 MB )

—Free Labor through Marx's Capital
by Walden Pemantle (PDF | 2.7 MB)

—The Work of Women: Middle Class Domesticity in Eighteenth Century British Literature
by Abi McDougal (PDF | 3.2 MB)

—Women on the Oil Frontier: Gender and Power in Aramco's Arabia
by Benjamin Jones (PDF | 4.7 MB )

—The Decay of the State
by Nikolai Hood (PDF | 13 MB )

—The Religion of Thomas Jefferson
by James Altschul (PDF | 4.1 MB)

—Back Matter (PDF | 903 kB )

For complete issue of Rice Historical Review Volume II, visit journal website

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Browsing Rice Historical Review Spring 2017 by Author "Dwyer, Meagan"

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    The Work of Women: Middle Class Domesticity in Eighteenth Century British Literature
    (Rice University, 2017) McDougal, Abi; Dwyer, Meagan
    This essay considers how British literature in the eighteenth century participated in creating a singularly domestic image of women. Addressing gender roles, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, Mary Hays’s Emma Courtney, and Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey form a literary progression with which to compare nonfiction historical sources. The critique suggests how the changing economic framework disenfranchised women as it enabled men to advance. It further identifies three aspects contributing to women’s confinement to the home: first, growing authority over domestic staff; second, responsibility over children’s education; and third, a supposed inability to engage with public, political thought. Furthermore, it recognizes how the domestic sphere simultaneously became a women’s source of authority while preventing her from engaging with the world at large. Within these topics, the essay considers how a growing feminist voice in British fiction toward the end of the eighteenth century allowed female authors to push against the devaluation of women.