Cornelia Dahmer, Conduct books für junge Damen des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts: Aufrichtigkeit und Frauenrolle

Cornelia Dahmer’s monograph discusses a genre rising in popularity during the eighteenth century: conduct books aimed at young unmarried women from the “middling sort.” While this type of advice literature has been the subject of research before, Dahmer proposes a reading that opens up a new aspect of conduct books by focusing on an inherent yet long overlooked paradox at the heart of these texts: while a call for honesty and authenticity (the German term “Aufrichtigkeit” used in the book is ..