Home, Nature, and the Feminine Ideal: Geographies of the Interior and of Empire

335 Pages·2019·30.479 MB·English

by  Elaine Stratford

Home, Nature, and the
Feminine Ideal

Home, Nature, and the
Feminine Ideal
Geographies of the
Interior and of Empire
Elaine Stratford
New York • London
Published by Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd
6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom
www.rowmaninternational.com
Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd.is an affiliate of Rowman & Littlefield
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706, USA
With additional offices in Boulder, New York, Toronto (Canada), and Plymouth (UK)
www.rowman.com
Copyright © 2019 by Elaine Stratford
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any
electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems,
without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote
passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: HB 978-1-7834-8508-6
PB 978-1-7834-8509-3
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Is Available
978-1-78348-508-6 (cloth: alk. paper)
978-1-78348-510-9 (electronic)
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
For Caroline and Nicola
Especially do I mean to labor for
the elevation of my sex.
(Lucy Stone, 1847)

Contents
Acknowledgements ix
Introduction 1
1 ‘Her first duty’—beauty, morality, and the gilded cage 25
2 ‘To maintain vigour’—population, fitness, and race 51
3 ‘The song of the skirt’—raw nature and fashionable conduct 81
4 ‘Good breeding’—combatting the decline of the population 119
5 ‘The hand that rocks the cradle’—scientific mothers and strong
babies 151
6 ‘Cleanliness is next to godliness’—health, habit, and domestic
economy 183
7 ‘We do hereby authorise and require’—contagion, public health,
and a return to home 217
Synthesis 251
Bibliography 265
Index 307
vii

Acknowledgements
No work is created alone and many years ago when the ideas underpinning
this work were taking shape at the University of Adelaide, I was supported
in my intellectual growth by Tim Doyle, who gave me his time and critical
acumen, all with a generous sense of fun. At the university, I also had the
good fortune to work with a remarkable cohort of colleagues at the Mawson
Graduate Centre for Environmental Studies and would like to acknowledge
the ongoing friendship provided by Nicole Mazur, Michael Martin, Adam
Simpson, and Beverley Clarke. That foundational work was enriched by feed-
back from Leonie Sandercock and Ruth Fincher, two outstanding scholars
of feminist geography and planning. I am also grateful for the support of
colleagues at the University of Tasmania, which has been my professional
home for over twenty years. There, my spirits have been buoyed and my
commitment to this slow-burn project sustained by those in Geography and
Spatial Sciences, Sociology, and English, the Institute for the Study of Social
Change, and the Peter Underwood Centre for Educational Attainment.

As this work has taken shape, I have been blessed to work in some of
the most wonderful research libraries—the British Library, the Library of
Congress, the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building of the New York Public
Library, and the National Library of Australia. At each, staff have shown me
great courtesy and care. The digitization of collections and their remote avail-
ability has meant I can access them from Hobart—and that transformed my
research practices. In addition, during late summer 2015 I was privileged to
work on early drafts of several chapters in a quiet corner in the Department of
Geography at Royal Holloway University of London, and I am most grateful
to staff there for welcoming me during that time.

At Rowman & Littlefield International, Martina O’Sullivan first showed
faith in this project and I am grateful to her for shepherding the proposal
ix