CONCLUSIONS
Femininity was newly formulated at the end of the eighteenth century, firstly by the writers and scientists of the Enlightenment who redefined the natural as female and the cultural as male.
By the dawn of the nineteenth century the body was the root of understandings of gender in European society. The scientific and medical discoveries of anatomy and bodily function began to displace earlier metaphysical thinking which disaggregated sex from gender. The body was the foundation for this new etymology, and physiological or sexual difference came to be used to legitimise an essentialist understanding of masculine and feminine character and roles. Biology was destiny and thus the female destiny was determined by her reproductive capacity. By the beginning of the nineteenth century this rather crude separate spheres model had been elaborated and disseminated through formal and informal channels: the sermon, the marriage manual, the novel and the broadside repeatedly told women that femininity was modesty, patience, self-sacrifice, piety, domesticity and motherhood.Woman's mission was by influence, tasteful economy, intelligent piety and faith to inspire and animate, soothe and resuscitate their men, so that the “mighty engine of masculine life may be aided in its action and its results”.'88 The Reverend Binney's reflections on gender roles in 1850 were acutely reminiscent of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's literary exposition on sex roles some hundred years earlier. For Rousseau and the minister, woman's role was imbued with responsibility; her subordination within marriage was compensated for by her powerful social role, supporting her husband and educating her children. What had been deemed natural roles for women became cultural. There was, though, an alternative route to respectable and virtuous femininity, active rather than passive, emphasising women's potential for self-development and personal autonomy rather than self-denigration. Mary Wollstonecraft's espousal of the ‘improvement and emancipation of the whole sex' was ahead of its time, although her plea to ‘make women rational creatures and free citizens' in order that they might ‘quickly become good wives and mothers' was more in tune with the sympathies and preoccupations of the post-revolutionary era. Those women who attended church and who read Rousseau's novels and the mass of prescriptive literature telling them how to be good wives and mothers interpreted the message not necessarily as constraining but as empowering.