SOURCE: “Nets and Bridles: Early Modern Conduct Books and Sixteenth Century Women's Lyrics,” in The Ideology of Conduct: Essays on Literature and the History of Sexuality, edited by Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, pp. 39-72. New York: Methuen & Company, 1987.

In the essay below, Jones explores how sixteenth-century social conduct books defined socially acceptable behavior, primarily for women and their fathers and husbands. She also shows how the focus of conduct books and the image of women shifted over time.

Recent analysis of early modern treatises on the nature of women suggests that debates over gender were articulated with basic issues of hierarchy and change in European society.¹ In the crossfire of gender polemics, however, women were consistently the objects of scrutiny and the targets of complex prescriptions for proper behavior. Even defenses of women were, in the great majority, written by men, and the practical conduct books that...