13 - Women writing for children

Summary

Along a cool sequestered way,

Her quiet walk she winds;

Sheds milder sunshine on his day,

His brow with flowers binds.

Of art intuitive possest,

Her infant train she rears;

To virtue by her smiles carest,

Or chastened by her tears:

Beside the flitting midnight lamp,

With fond and wakeful eye,

Wipes gently off the dying damp,

Or sooths the parting sigh: –

'Tis here that Woman brightest shines

(Though bright in other spheres):

Her name is drawn in fairest lines,

When written by her tears.

Yet not the weak, the puny thing,

Subdued to silly woe;

The firmest dignity may spring,

Where softest feelings grow.

From ‘Remonstrance’ by Ann Taylor Gilbert (1807)

INTRODUCTION

In a century that defined the role of the ‘proper’ woman as the care of her home and the monitoring of the spiritual and physical welfare of the family, (literate) women often wrote for children, whether privately (through homemade primers, stories, poems and instructive correspondence) or through publication. As nursery monitors, moral arbiters and domestic managers – whether mothers, spinster aunts or maiden daughters, and even as they perhaps worked beside their husband or brothers in trade, or headed households – women were responsible for bringing up the next generation. Middle-class girls were trained in this ideology of ‘woman's mission’ from a very young age, and numerous instructive books on ‘professional motherhood’ existed to guide them. One typical text of this type is Practical Hints to Young Females on the Duties of a Wife, a Mother and a Mistress of a Family (1815), by Ann Martin Taylor, mother of poets Ann and Jane Taylor.