SOURCE: “‘As Sacred as Friendship, as Pleasurable as Love’: Father-Son Relations in the Tatler and Spectator,” in History, Gender & Eighteenth-Century Literature, edited by Beth Fowkes Tobin, The University of Georgia Press, 1994, pp. 14-38.

In this essay, Maurer explores how early periodicals depicted and defined gender roles, family dynamics, and other social and domestic values.

The revolution in which the slogan “liberté, egalité, fraternité” was proclaimed began in 1789, but the alliance between the three elements was forged much earlier. Modern patriarchy is fraternal in form and the original contract is a fraternal pact.

—Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract

From Rae Blanchard in 1929 to Kathryn Shevelow in 1989,¹ critics have examined the ways in which Joseph Addison and Richard Steele's periodical publications, in particular the Tatler (1709-11) and the Spectator (1711-12), acted to influence and define their female audience in the process of constructing a new ideology of domestic femininity: “Through...