The Female Aegis; or, The Duties of Women from Childhood to Old Age

Anon

 London : Print. by Sampson Low, 1798

12mo. Bound in contemporary leather-backed marbled boards.  Joints worn, partially cracked.  Engraved frontispiece. Half-title, [2], 187 pages. A book instructing young women on conduct through life.   "The Female Aegis... outlines for its young female readership the three areas in which "the influence of the female character is most important": 1) In contributing daily and hourly to the comfort of husbands, of parents, of brothers and sisters...in the intercourse of domestic life, under every vicissitude of sickness and health, of joy and affliction. 2) IN forming and improving the general manners, disposition, and conduct of the other sex, by society and example. 3) In modeling the human mind during the early stages of its growth, and fixing, while it is still ductile, its growing principle of action.  The text advocates a kind of educational reform for young women, "drawing forth the reasoning power of girls into action" through their instruction in "[g]eography, natural history, portions of general history, and popular facts in astronomy, and in other sciences" - Andrew O'Malley, The Making of the Modern Child: Children's Literature in the Late Eighteenth Century, Routledge, 2004, p. 114.