Medicine and Morality: the Use of Rhetoric in Victorian Marriage and Child Rearing Manuals

Abstract

During the Victorian era, many changes occurred due to industrialization and political upheaval. At a time when the young were moving away from parental supervision to large cities for employment opportunities, the Victorians feared a rift between the immoral youth and traditional family values and social roles. Religion and family's lack of effectiveness in policing morality led to a shift where the medical community became the new moral authority. One path for combating this supposed lapse in morality was the publication of sex, marriage, and child rearing manuals written to instruct the bourgeois and upper classes on matters of health, hygiene, and child management. These physician-authored manuals still argued for traditional, often repressive, social and familial roles, from a biological standpoint. An analysis of eight physician-authored manuals led to the discovery of several rhetorical devices used to shape this new discourse form, including the confessional, plain language, and nature metaphors. Positioned to persuade the reader as to the physicians' credibility and to create truth, these rhetorical staples invoked pathos, differentiated between the sexes and social classes, and reinforced gender norms--all to reinforce the previously determined roles of men and women within the marriage and society. While the rhetoric did reinforce these normative roles, these norms were not necessarily repressive to the Victorian citizens, but instead granted a certain amount of freedom for the bourgeois class.