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Chapter Two
Theoretical Framing of Worldviews,Values, and Structural
Dimensions of DisastersDeveloped by: Jean Scandlyn and Jessica Cook
Chapter Objectives
Upon completing this chapter, readers should be able to:
1. Understand what theory is and how it contributes to framing social vulnerability in
a way that illuminates the critical elements of this complex issue.
2. Define critical and conflict theories and explain how they contribute to
understanding vulnerability in a more comprehensive fashion.
3. Appreciate how structure and agency interplay in the creation of vulnerability and
resilience.
4. Explain how theory leads to an explanation of worldviews and values that in turn
influences how disasters are viewed by disaster planners and by individuals and
communities who are vulnerable to hazards and disasters.
5. Appreciate how the theoretical framing of structure and agency illuminate how
worldviews and values affect our approaches to tackling disaster reduction and
increasing resilience.
6. Discuss how systems theory guides a mechanism for understanding and evaluating
vulnerability, also linking to sustainable development.
Chapter Summary
Theory, as formal, explicit, and systematic worldviews provide the foundation for scientific
analysis and are essential to understand and evaluate hazards and disasters. In the
absence of formal theory, we rely on more or less shared or common sense worldviews to
Social Vulnerability to Disasters, Second Edition ©2013, CRC Press/Taylor and Francis LLC
28
explain and predict the world around us. History, the physical environment, social
institutions and social relations all shape these worldviews and through them affect our
perceptions of hazards and disasters and influence preparedness, mitigation, and response
and recovery efforts. Although these factors also shape formal theory, in formal theory we
Social Vulnerability to Disasters, Second Edition ©2013, CRC Press/Taylor and Francis LLC
29
consciously define, explicitly state, and systematically test assumptions, concepts and
propositions.
In the 1990s, emergency managers, social scientists, and those affected by disasters and
hazards began to question the then dominant view of disasters as caused almost
exclusively by geophysical processes such as tornadoes, earthquakes and floods. This led to
a shift in how theorists framed hazards and disasters (as primarily natural and unexpected
events) to framing them as expected outcomes of complex human-environment
interactions. Hurricane Katrina and the landslides in La Paz demonstrated that risk and
vulnerability are not distributed equally within or across societies. Examples like this
prompted the revision of theories of hazards and disasters to include the concept of social
vulnerability. The concept of social vulnerability draws from a number of sources, but in
general, considers individual and collective susceptibility to natural events and the capacity
to respond to those events. Conflict and critical theories explain how differential access to
resources and power create social conditions and inequalities that lead to different levels of
social vulnerability and outcomes of hazardous events among individuals, groups,
communities, and nations.
In conflict theory, inequality is viewed as an inherent feature of the social structure, thus it
is important to keep in mind the agency of individuals and groups when examining how
vulnerable individuals and communities view and respond to hazards and disasters within
a given social structure. The political ecology framework, an application of general systems
theory to human-environment interactions, provides a powerful mechanism to analyze the
complex interplay of variables that result in disasters. Finally, the concept of sustainability
forces us to consider the real costs of the inequalities and inequities that result from a
worldview of humans over nature and points to the value of local knowledge in creating
sustainable interactions with the environment. The concept of human agency, combined
with participatory approaches to research guided by a theoretical lens that includes
humans as an essential part of the natural environment, creates disaster planning that
decreases social vulnerability and promotes sustainable human-environment interactions.
Teaching Suggestions
Theory can be a daunting topic to students and appear overly abstract and irrelevant to
their desire to master the content of a new field of study. One way to help them discover
the importance of theory is to show them how everything that we do in our daily lives is
guided by our shared cultural understandings or common sense theories about the world.
You might begin by asking students to discuss a statement attributed to the linguist John
Gumperz that “You can’t collect seashells on the beach without a theory.” Why not? This
Social Vulnerability to Disasters, Second Edition ©2013, CRC Press/Taylor and Francis LLC
30
discussion can show them how we need a clear idea of what a seashell is (concept), how we
can tell seashell from a rock or a feather (classifications) and where we are likely to find
them (propositions of relationships) to complete this seemingly simple task. From there
you can discuss how these common sense theories, though they may contain valuable local
knowledge, are largely unconscious and their assumptions may not be tested. But they
guide our actions nonetheless. The task of the scientist is to develop, apply, and test formal
theory. Scientific theories may be derived from a variety of sources including formalizing
and testing theories derived from local knowledge of disasters. The example of high water
markers from tsunamis in Japan shows the cost of valuing scientific theories and
knowledge automatically over local knowledge.
Another way to show the relevance of theory is to ask students to analyze the examples of
hazards and disasters included in this chapter or a more recent disaster such as the series
of tornadoes that moved across Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, and
North Carolina in late February and March 2012 using different theoretical perspectives.
The websites included in the resources section can be a useful guide for discussion. You
might ask students to go online and find a report of a recent natural disaster. Ask them to
analyze it using a political ecology approach and then compare that to a conflict and critical
theory approach. Who was most affected? How do we explain differential effects among
regions and communities? How do we account for the damage to different kinds of housing,
to schools and other public buildings? What might disaster managers and planners have
done differently to mitigate the impacts? What future strategies could reduce social
vulnerability?
Have students collect media coverage of a recent disaster that includes news reports, blogs,
maps and other graphics, and interviews with victims and officials. Have the students
analyze the worldview that is being conveyed by the media or blogger and by those who
witnessed or were otherwise affected by the disaster. What might students want to know
that is not being reported? What questions would the students ask of the reporter? Of
people affected by the event? How might the worldviews portrayed affect the response to
this disaster or to similar disasters in the future?
A core objective of this chapter is to challenge students to be critical in their understanding
of “natural” disasters. Divide students into two groups and ask them to debate the
proposition that we abolish the term “natural disaster.” To support their position students
could compare the effects of different kinds of disasters. For example, they might compare
Hurricane Katrina, as an unusually severe weather-event that disproportionately impacted
low-income, minority populations despite levees designed to protect them, to the
tornadoes in the Southeast, that appear to inflict damage more randomly, or to the role of
droughts in famine in the Horn of Africa. Or, they might compare the same kinds of events
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31
in different locations, i.e., earthquakes in Haiti, Afghanistan, Turkey, the U.S., China, and
Japan.
It is important to get students excited about linking theory to natural hazard events. You
might initiate a discussion on how the discourse around natural disasters impacts the role
that people expect the government to play in responding to these events and to mitigating
damage from future events. What are some American worldviews and values, e.g.,
individual responsibility, the relationship between the federal government and states and
local communities, the role of faith-based organizations and civic organizations, that affects
how Americans expect the government to respond—either through pro-active policy and
infrastructure or through aid after an event?
Students might also explore how history and location affect both local and scientific
theories applied to disasters and hazards.
Ask them to compare articles in professional journals from different decades to see
what theories were used and how. Were theoretical approaches explicitly stated or
assumed? When do they begin to see evidence of change in the way scientists are
looking at and understanding disasters?
In terms of location, how does a country’s position in the global political economy
affect how disasters are described and explained? Using materials from their
websites, what theoretical frameworks do the World Bank, the Red Cross, the United
Nations and other international and national disaster relief agencies use? Are there
consistencies across these organizations or do they differ? How has this changed
over time? How do their theoretical approaches or worldviews affect their
programs, policies and priorities? What are the major conflicts and controversies
over theoretical approaches and how would you recommend resolving them?
Finally, the role that culture or worldviews play in determining people’s behavior is a
subject of debate among social scientists. The authors of this chapter argue that we should
be cautious in how we use culture or worldview as an explanatory variable and take other
factors – history, economic and political power, socioeconomic status, race and ethnicity,
gender, and age – into account when analyzing social vulnerability to disasters. To explore
this theme, ask students to read and respond to the article by Craig Janes under Resources
and then examine the responses to offers of foreign assistance with disaster relief by
Japan’s following the 2011 tsunami and Burma following Cyclone Nargis in 2008.
Resources
A PowerPoint is available to accompany this chapter.
The following websites may be useful:
Social Vulnerability to Disasters, Second Edition ©2013, CRC Press/Taylor and Francis LLC
32
o Hazards & Vulnerability Research Institute, University of South Carolina –
This is a social vulnerability index for the US that includes: race and class,
wealth, elderly residents, Hispanic ethnicity, special needs individuals, Native
American ethnicity, and service industry employment -
http://webra.cas.sc.edu/hvri/products/sovi.aspx
o FEMA Emergency Management Institute -
http://www.training.fema.gov/EMIWeb/edu/sovul.asp
o The Institute for Environmental and Social Change – A Boulder, Colorado-
based non-government organization focused on adaptation and resilience to
climate change particularly in southeast Asia - http://www.i-s-e-t.org
o National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration - http://www.noaa.gov/
o American Red Cross - http://newsroom.redcross.org/disaster-response-
guide/international-disaster-response/
o International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies -
http://www.ifrc.org/
o The United Nations Humanitarian and Disaster Relief Assistance -
http://www.un.org/en/globalissues/humanitarian/
o World Bank Disaster Risk Management -
http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/TOPICS/EXTURBANDEVEL
OPMENT/EXTDISMGMT/0,,menuPK:341021~pagePK:149018~piPK:149093
~theSitePK:341015,00.html
Ja ne s, Crai g R. 2006. Comment ary: ‘Cu lture ’, cultural explanations and
causality.
International Journal of Epidemiology 35:261-263 doi:10.1093/ije/dyi238.
List of International Relief Organizations -
http://www.globalcorps.com/jobs/ngolist.pdf
Instructors may also benefit from going to the FEMA Higher Education Website for
downloadable syllabi, course lectures, free textbooks and more! The current URL
for that site is http://www.training.fema.gov/EMIWeb/edu/collegecrsbooks.asp.
(Last accessed April 20, 2011).
Discussion Questions
1. Using a conflict and critical theory approach, how do the zoning policies and building
codes in your local community affect social vulnerability to hazards and disasters?
It may be helpful to have students first make a list of zoning policies and building
codes in their area and then discuss various impacts on social vulnerability. How
do zoning policies and building codes interact? For example, discuss the potential
impact of a zoning policy that allows development in a floodplain that is combined
with a building code that requires buildings to be elevated above flood level. Does
this increase or decrease vulnerability? Zoning policies and building codes are
intended to protect public health; can you think of examples where protection from
one hazard or disaster creates another unintended vulnerability?
Social Vulnerability to Disasters, Second Edition ©2013, CRC Press/Taylor and Francis LLC
33
2. What individuals or organizations can you identify at the local, national, and
international level that have succeeded in changing worldviews and values that
directly affect disaster planning and mitigation? How have they achieved these
changes?
The intent is to get students involved in a discussion about worldviews and values
as a process and not a product of society. When are worldviews and values most
likely to change? After an event? How do new ideas diffuse? Did Hurricane Katrina
act as a catalyst to change worldviews and values? How?
3. How do you see institutions responsible for disaster planning and mitigation
responding to the use of participatory approaches to research and planning in your
community? Should community members and organizations be full and equal
partners? Why or why not? How do you determine who should be included and which
voices should be heard?
Ask students if they have been involved in planning in their communities. How were
they engaged (i.e., public announcement, radio advertising, personal invitation)? If
community members are not full and equal partners, how does that affect their
willingness to participate? How should conflict be resolved? Have students list pros
and cons to full and equal participation versus limited participation.
4. Analyze media reports for a disaster or hazard. What values and worldview guide how
the event is reported? What is the view of hazards and disasters they present? How
might you go about informing journalists and media representatives about ways of
viewing these events?
Provide students with a short media report for a current disaster or hazard event.
Have them identify the event and discuss the cause(s) and effect(s) reported. Is the
event depicted as a “natural” event? Are human actions explicitly stated as
impacting the cause or effect of the event, and what does that indicate about the
values or worldview of the reporter? The readers? Using conflict and critical
theories, what questions do students have about the disaster or hazard that was not
reported?
5. How does the concept of sustainability challenge the view of hazards and disasters as
natural events? What does it tell us about the costs of social vulnerability? What
worldview of the relationship of humans to nature does it support?
The concept of sustainability challenges us to think about the true costs of
inequalities and inequities that result from a worldview of humans over nature and
points to the value of local knowledge in creating sustainable interactions with the
environment. What are some of the costs of social vulnerability? Have students
think about costs in terms of environmental, economic, and social dimensions.
6. Is protection from hazards and disasters a human right?
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34
According to the World Health Organization, human rights extend beyond the basic
right to health to include underlying determinants of health such as health
information, access to water and food, and housing. Furthermore, rights must be
embedded in norms, institutions, laws, and an enabling environment. How does
protection from hazards and disasters fit within this definition? Does protection
conflict with livelihood opportunities (i.e., the right to work)?
Test Questions
Essay Questions
1. Given a political ecology framework, how can we understand hazards and disasters as
more than just “natural” events?
2. What are the three dominant ways of understanding the relationship of society and
nature? Give brief descriptions of each and discuss their effect on how people with those
views might respond to a hazard or disaster.
3. Briefly explain the concept of hegemony. Might we consider the dominant view of
disasters as “natural events beyond human control” as having hegemonic aspects?
4. Compare how the theoretical perspectives of disasters as caused by geophysical forces
and disasters as caused by human-environment interactions (social vulnerability) affects
the portrayal of people affected by hazards and disasters.
Multiple Choice/True and False
1. Scientific knowledge is always superior to local knowledge about how to respond to
and mitigate hazards and disasters. False
2. To successfully adapt to living in areas prone to natural disasters people must often
balance competing needs of making a living with safety from disasters. True
3. In general, when disasters occur in wealthy nations, property losses are very high
but the number of injuries and deaths is relatively small. True
4. Formal scientific theories differ from worldviews in the following way:
a. They explain and predict events that occur around us
b. They are explicit and systematic*
c. They are largely unconscious
d. They cannot be tested
Social Vulnerability to Disasters, Second Edition ©2013, CRC Press/Taylor and Francis LLC
35
5. Resilience is related to the concept of adaptation in that:
a. Resilient groups or communities are stable and unchanging
b. Resilient groups or communities are never vulnerable to disasters
c. Resilient groups or communities can adjust to changes in the physical and
social environment*
d. Resilient groups or communities are less likely to bounce back from disasters
6. Bangladeshis living in the floodplains of the Ganges River mitigate the risks of
annual floods in which of the following ways:
a. Spending savings
b. Selling land and animals
c. Obtaining help from family members
d. All of the above*
7. Although the community built a 30-foot high levee in 1930, more than 200 people
died in the tsunami in the Taro district of Miyako, Japan in 2001 because:
a. They lacked a warning system for evacuation
b. The levee wasn’t high enough
c. They relied on the levee to protect them and built houses next to it*
d. The levee collapse under the pressure of the tsunami
8. The development of banana plantations increased the vulnerability of peasant
farmers when Hurricane Fifi passed through Honduras in 1974 because:
a. They relied solely on banana production and the crop was ruined
b. They lived near streams and rivers that flooded
c. They could not ask the plantation owners for help replanting their crops
d. They had to farm steep hillsides, which destabilized the soil and created
landslides*
9. Many scientists working within the framework of social vulnerability, view disasters
as:
a. The product of normal or usual processes*
b. Caused by geophysical forces
c. Exceptional events
d. Affecting only the poor
10. Conflict theory assumes that in capitalist society:
a. Conflict is not an inherent aspect of the political economic system
b. Inequality is institutionalized through various forms of capital*
c. Inequality has no effect on who suffers from disasters
Social Vulnerability to Disasters, Second Edition ©2013, CRC Press/Taylor and Francis LLC
36
d. All of the above
11. The development of scientific theory is not affected by history or culture. False
12. People living in disaster-prone areas have little knowledge about disasters and how
to mitigate their effects. False
13. The dominant view of disasters can get in the way of efforts to decrease social
vulnerability to disasters by:
a. Viewing all individuals and communities as equally at risk from disasters*
b. Emphasizing that enforcement of building codes can mitigate damage from
disasters
c. Viewing disasters as resulting from normal and usual processes
d. Relying on local knowledge to mitigate disasters
14. Political ecology differs from ecological systems theory in:
a. Focusing on balance and homeostasis
b. Emphasizing the positive effects of development projects
c. They are different names for the same theory
d. Examining how power and inequality affect ecological systems*
15. Confidence that technology provides the best solutions to human problems like
disasters reflects which view of the relationship between people and nature?
a. People under nature
b. People over nature*
c. People with nature
16. Everyone in a given society shares the same worldview in the same way. False
17. Systems theory enables scientists to examine how the relationships among different
systems such as transportation and sewage contribute to vulnerability to disasters.
True
18. Values provide guidelines for actions that are generally consistent with worldviews.
True
19. Participatory forms of research can empower local communities and increase
resilience by:
a. Equalizing power between researchers and technical experts
Social Vulnerability to Disasters, Second Edition ©2013, CRC Press/Taylor and Francis LLC
37
b. Raising a community’s capacity to analyze their risks from hazards and
disasters
c. Incorporate local knowledge and practices regarding disasters
d. All of the above*
20. Which of the following is not a reason why systems theory is valuable in
anticipating the positive and negative results of a development project like a dam?
a. Dams only generate electricity and control flooding*
b. Dams alter the physical environment
c. Dams displace human communities
d. Dams may change human exposure to waterborne parasites
e. Dams may change farming practices
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
FRIENDSHIP, LOVE, MARRIAGE.
The luxury and dissipation that prevail in genteel life, as they
corrupt the heart in many respects, so they render it incapable of
warm, sincere, and steady friendship. A happy choice of friends will
be of the utmost consequence to you, as they may assist you by
their advice and good offices. But the immediate gratification which
friendship affords to a warm, open and ingenuous heart, is of itself a
sufficient motive to court it.
In the choice of your friends, have principal regard to goodness of
heart and fidelity. If they also possess taste and genius, that will still
make them more agreeable and useful companions. You have
particular reason to place confidence in those who have shewn
affection for you in your early days, when you were incapable of
making them any return. This is an obligation for which you cannot
be too grateful: When you read this, you will naturally think of your
mother’s friend, to whom you owe so much.
If you have the good fortune to meet with any who deserve the
name of friends, unbosom yourself to them with the most
unsuspicious confidence. It is one of the world’s maxims, never to
trust any person with a secret, the discovery of which could give you
any pain; but it is the maxim of a little mind and a cold heart, unless
where it is the effect of frequent disappointments and bad usage. An
open temper, if restrained but by tolerable prudence, will make you,
on the whole, much happier than a reserved suspicious one,
although you may sometimes suffer by it. Coldness and distrust are
but the too certain consequences of age and experience; but they
are unpleasant feelings, and need not be anticipated before their
time.
But however open you may be in talking of your own affairs, never
disclose the secrets of one friend to another. These are sacred
deposites, which do not belong to you, nor have you any right to
make use of them.
There is another case, in which I suspect it is proper to be secret,
not so much from motives of prudence, as delicacy. I mean in love
matters. Though a woman has no reason to be ashamed of an
attachment to a man of merit, yet nature, whose authority is
superior to philosophy, has annexed a sense of shame to it. It is
even long before a woman of delicacy dares avow to her own heart
that she loves; and when all the subterfuges of ingenuity to conceal
it from herself fail, she feels a violence done both to her pride and to
her modesty. This, I should imagine, must always be the case where
she is not sure of a return to her attachment.
In such a situation, to lay the heart open to any person whatever,
does not appear to me consistent with the perfection of female
delicacy. But perhaps I am in the wrong.—At the same time I must
tell you, that, in point of prudence, it concerns you to attend well to
the consequences of such a discovery. These secrets, however
important in your own estimation, may appear very trifling to your
friend, who possibly will not enter into your feelings, but may rather
consider them as a subject of pleasantry. For this reason, love-
secrets are of all others the worst kept. But the consequences to you
may be very serious, as no man of spirit and delicacy ever valued a
heart much hackneyed in the ways of love.
If, therefore, you must have a friend to pour out your heart to, be
sure of her honour and secrecy. Let her not be a married woman,
especially if she lives happily with her husband, There are certain
unguarded moments, in which such a woman, though the best and
worthiest of her sex, may let hints escape, which at other times, or
to any other person than her husband, she would be incapable of;
nor will a husband in this case feel himself under the same
obligation of secrecy and honour, as if you had put your confidence
originally in himself, especially on a subject which the world is apt to
treat so lightly.
If all other circumstances are equal, there are obvious advantages
in your making friends of one another. The ties of blood, and your
being so much united in one common interest, form an additional
bond of union to your friendship. If your brothers should have the
good fortune to have hearts susceptible of friendship, to possess
truth, honour, sense, and delicacy of sentiment, they are the fittest
and most unexceptionable confidants. By placing confidence in
them, you will receive every advantage which you could hope for
from the friendship of men, without any of the inconveniencies that
attend such connexions with our sex.
Beware of making confidants of your servants. Dignity not properly
understood very readily degenerates into pride, which enters into no
friendships, because it cannot bear an equal, and is so fond of
flattery as to grasp at it even from servants and dependants. The
most intimate confidants, therefore, of proud people are valets-de-
chamber and waiting women. Shew the utmost humanity to your
servants; make their situation as comfortable to them as is possible:
but if you make them your confidants, you spoil them, and debase
yourselves.
Never allow any person, under the pretended sanction of
friendship, to be so familiar as to lose a proper respect for you.
Never allow them to tease you on any subject that is disagreeable,
or where you have once taken your resolution. Many will tell you,
that this reserve is inconsistent with the freedom which friendship
allows. But a certain respect is as necessary in friendship as in love.
Without it, you may be liked as a child, but you will never be beloved
as an equal.
The temper and dispositions of the heart in your sex make you
enter more readily and warmly into friendships than men. Your
natural propensity to it is so strong, that you often run into
intimacies which you soon have sufficient cause to repent of; and
this makes your friendships so very fluctuating.
Another great obstacle to the sincerity as well as steadiness of
your friendships is the great clashing of your interests in the pursuits
of love, ambition, or vanity. For these reasons, it should appear at
first view more eligible for you to contract your friendships with the
men. Among other obvious advantages of an easy intercourse
between the two sexes, it occasions an emulation and exertion in
each to excel and be agreeable: hence their respective excellencies
are mutually communicated and blended.—As their interests in no
degree interfere, there can be no foundation for jealousy or
suspicion of rivalship. The friendship of a man for a woman is always
blended with a tenderness, which he never feels for one of his own
sex, even where love is in no degree concerned. Besides we are
conscious of a natural title you have to our protection and good
offices, and therefore we feel an additional obligation of honour to
serve you, and to observe an inviolable secrecy, whenever you
confide in us.
But apply these observations with great caution. Thousands of
women of the best hearts and finest parts have been ruined by men
who approached them under the specious name of friendship. But
supposing a man to have the most undoubted honour, yet his
friendship to a woman is so near a-kin to love, that if she be very
agreeable in her person, she will probably very soon find a lover,
where she only wished to meet a friend. Let me here, however, warn
you against that weakness so common among vain women, the
imagination that every man who takes particular notice of you is a
lover. Nothing can expose you more to ridicule, than the taking up a
man on the suspicion of being your lover, who perhaps never once
thought of you in that view, and giving yourselves those airs so
common among silly women on such occasions.
There is a kind of unmeaning gallantry much practised by some
men, which, if you have any discernment, you will find really
harmless. Men of this sort will attend you to public places, and be
useful to you by a number of little observances, which those of a
superior class do not so well understand, or have not leisure to
regard, or perhaps are too proud to submit to. Look on the
compliments of such men as words of course, which they repeat to
every agreeable woman of their acquaintance. There is a familiarity
they are apt to assume, which a proper dignity in your behaviour will
be easily able to check.
There is a different species of men whom you may like as
agreeable companions, men of worth, taste and genius, whose
conversation, in some respects, may be superior to what you
generally meet with among your own sex. It will be foolish in you to
deprive yourselves of an useful and agreeable acquaintance, merely
because idle people say he is your lover. Such a man may like your
company, without having any design on your person.
People whose sentiments, and particularly whose tastes
correspond, naturally like to associate together, although neither of
them have the most distant view of any further connexion. But as
this similarity of minds often gives rise to a more tender attachment
than friendship, it will be prudent to keep a watchful eye over
yourselves, lest your hearts become too far engaged before you are
aware of it. At the same time, I do not think that your sex, at least
in this part of the world, have much of that sensibility which
disposes to such attachments. What is commonly called love among
you is rather gratitude, and a partiality to the man who prefers you
to the rest of your sex; and such a man you often marry, with little
of either personal esteem or affection. Indeed, without an unusual
share of natural sensibility, and very peculiar good fortune, a woman
in this country has very little probability of marrying for love.
It is a maxim laid down among you, and a very prudent one it is.
That love is not to begin on your part, but is entirely to be the
consequence of our attachment to you. Now, supposing a woman to
have sense and taste, she will not find many men to whom she can
possibly be supposed to bear any considerable share of esteem.
Among these few, it is a very great chance if any of them
distinguishes her particularly. Love, at least with us, is exceedingly
capricious, and will not always fix where reason says it should. But
supposing one of them should become particularly attached to her, it
is still extremely improbable that he should be the man in the world
her heart most approved of.
As, therefore, Nature has not given you that unlimited range in
your choice which we enjoy, she has wisely and benevolently
assigned to you a greater flexibility of taste on this subject. Some
agreeable qualities recommend a gentleman to your common good
liking and friendship. In the course of his acquaintance, he contracts
an attachment to you. When you perceive it, it excites your
gratitude; this gratitude rises into a preference, and this preference
perhaps at last advances to some degree of attachment, especially if
it meets with crosses and difficulties, for these, and a state of
suspense, are very great incitements to attachment, and are the
food of love in both sexes. If attachment was not excited in your sex
in this manner, there is not one of a million of you that could ever
marry with any degree of love.
A man of taste and delicacy marries a woman because he loves her
more than any other. A woman of equal taste and delicacy marries
him because she esteems him, and because he gives her that
preference. But if a man unfortunately becomes attached to a
woman whose heart is secretly pre-engaged, his attachment, instead
of obtaining a suitable return, is particularly offensive; and if he
persists to teaze her, he makes himself equally the object of her
scorn and aversion.
The effects of love among men are diversified by their different
tempers. An artful man may counterfeit every one of them so as
easily to impose on a young girl of an open, generous, and feeling
heart, if she is not extremely on her guard. The finest parts in such a
girl may not always prove sufficient for her security. The dark and
crooked paths of cunning are unsearchable, and inconceivable to an
honourable and elevated mind.
The following, I apprehend, are the most genuine effects of an
honourable passion among the men, and the most difficult to
counterfeit. A man of delicacy often betrays his passion by his too
great anxiety to conceal it, especially if he has little hopes of
success. True love, in all its stages, seeks concealment, and never
expects success. It renders a man not only respectful, but timid to
the highest degree in his behaviour to the woman he loves. To
conceal the awe he stands in of her, he may sometimes affect
pleasantry, but it sits aukwardly on him, and he quickly relapses into
seriousness, if not into dulness. He magnifies all her real perfections
in his imagination, and is either blind to her failings, or converts
them into beauties. Like a person conscious of guilt, he is jealous
that every eye observes him; and to avoid this, he shuns all the little
observances of common gallantry.
His heart and his character will be improved in every respect by
his attachment. His manners will become more gentle, and his
conversation more agreeable; but diffidence and embarrassment will
always make him appear to disadvantage in the company of his
mistress. If the fascination continue long, it will totally depress his
spirit, and extinguish every active, vigorous and manly principle of
his mind. You will find this subject beautifully and pathetically
painted in Thomson’s Spring.
When you observe in a gentleman’s behaviour these marks which I
have described above, reflect seriously what you are to do. If his
attachment is agreeable to you, I leave you to do as nature, good
sense, and delicacy shall direct you. If you love him let me advise
you never to discover to him the full extent of your love, no not
although you marry him. That sufficiently shews your preference,
which is all he is entitled to know. If he has delicacy, he will ask for
no stronger proof of your affection for your sake; if he has sense, he
will not ask it for his own. This is an unpleasant truth, but it is my
duty to let you know it; violent love cannot subsist, at least cannot
be expressed, for any time together, on both sides; otherwise the
certain consequence, however concealed, is satiety and disgust.
Nature in this case has laid the reserve on you.
If you see evident proofs of a gentleman’s attachment, and are
determined to shut your heart against him, as you ever hope to be
used with generosity by the person who shall engage your own
heart, treat him honourably and humanely. Do not let him linger in a
miserable suspense, but be anxious to let him know your sentiments
with regard to him.
However people’s hearts may deceive them, there is scarcely a
person that can love for any time without at least some distant hope
of success. If you really wish to undeceive a lover, you may do it in a
variety of ways. There is a certain species of easy familiarity in your
behaviour, which may satisfy him, if he has any discernment left,
that he has nothing to hope for. But perhaps your particular temper
may not admit of this.—You may easily shew that you want to avoid
his company; but if he is a man whose friendship you wish to
preserve, you may not chuse this method, because then you lose
him in every capacity.—You may get a common friend to explain
matters to him, or fall on many other devices, if you are seriously
anxious to put him out of suspense.
But if you are resolved against every such method, at least do not
shun opportunities of letting him explain himself. If you do this, you
act barbarously and unjustly. If he brings you to an explanation, give
him a polite, but resolute and decisive answer. In whatever way you
convey your sentiments to him, if he is a man of spirit and delicacy,
he will give you no further trouble, nor apply to your friends for their
intercession. This last is a method of courtship which every man of
spirit will disdain.—He will never whine nor sue for your pity. That
would mortify him almost as much as your scorn. In short, you may
possibly break such a heart, but you cannot bend it.—Great pride
always accompanies delicacy, however concealed under the
appearance of the utmost gentleness and modesty, and is the
passion of all others the most difficult to conquer.
There is a case where a woman may coquette justifiably to the
utmost verge which her conscience will allow. It is where a
gentleman purposely declines to make his addresses, till such time
as he thinks himself perfectly sure of her consent. This at bottom is
intended to force a woman to give up the undoubted privilege of her
sex, the privilege of her refusing; it is intended to force her to
explain herself, in effect, before the gentleman deigns to do it, and
by this mean to oblige her to violate the modesty and delicacy of her
sex, and to invert the clearest order of nature. All this sacrifice is
proposed to be made merely to gratify a most despicable vanity in a
man who would degrade the very woman whom he wishes to make
his wife.
It is of great importance to distinguish, whether a gentleman who
has the appearance of being your lover delays to speak explicitly,
from the motive I have mentioned, or from a diffidence inseparable
from true attachment. In the one case, you can scarcely use him too
ill: in the other, you ought to use him with great kindness: and the
greatest kindness you can shew him, if you are determined not to
listen to his addresses, is to let him know it as soon as possible.
I know the many excuses with which women endeavour to justify
themselves to the world, and to their own consciences, when they
act otherwise. Sometimes they plead ignorance, or at least
uncertainty, of the gentleman’s real sentiments. That may sometimes
be the case. Sometimes they plead the decorums of their sex, which
enjoin an equal behaviour to all men, and forbid them to consider
any man as a lover, till he has directly told them so.—Perhaps few
women carry their ideas of female delicacy and decorum so far as I
do. But I must say, you are not entitled to plead the obligation of
these virtues, in opposition to the superior ones of gratitude, justice,
and humanity. The man is entitled to all these, who prefers you to
the rest of your sex, and perhaps whose greatest weakness is this
very preference. The truth of the matter is, vanity, and the love of
admiration, are so prevailing passions among you, that you may be
considered to make a very great sacrifice whenever you give up a
lover, till every art of coquetry fails to keep him, or till he forces you
to an explanation. You can be fond of the love, when you are
indifferent to, or even when you despise the lover.
But the deepest and most artful coquetry is employed by women
of superior taste and sense, to engage and fix the heart of a man
whom the world and whom they themselves esteem, although they
are firmly determined never to marry him. But his conversation
amuses them, and his attachment is the highest gratification to their
vanity; nay, they can sometimes be gratified with the utter ruin of
his fortune, fame, and happiness.—God forbid I should ever think so
of all your sex. I know many of them have principles, have
generosity and dignity of soul that elevates them above the
worthless vanity I have been speaking of.
Such a woman, I am persuaded, may always convert a lover, if she
cannot give him her affections, into a warm and steady friend,
provided he is a man of sense, resolution, and candour. If she
explains herself to him with a generous openness and freedom, he
must feel the stroke as a man; but he will likewise bear it as a man:
what he suffers he will suffer in silence. Every sentiment of esteem
will remain; but love though it requires very little food, and is easily
surfeited with too much, yet it requires some. He will view her in the
light of a married woman; and though passion subsides, yet a man
of a candid and generous heart always retains a tenderness for a
woman he has once loved, and who has used him well, beyond what
he feels for any other of her sex.
If he has not confided his own secret to any body, he has an
undoubted title to ask you not to divulge it. If a woman chuses to
trust any of her companions with her own unfortunate attachments,
she may, as it is her own affair alone: but if she has any generosity
or gratitude, she will not betray a secret which does not belong to
her.
Male coquetry is much more inexcusable than female, as well as
more pernicious; but it is rare in this country. Very few men will give
themselves the trouble to gain or retain any woman’s affections,
unless they have views on her either of an honourable or
dishonourable kind. Men employed in the pursuits of business,
ambition, or pleasure, will not give themselves the trouble to engage
a woman’s affections merely from the vanity of conquest, and of
triumphing over the heart of an innocent and defenceless girl.
Besides, people never value much what is entirely in their power. A
man of parts, sentiment, and address, if he lays aside all regard to
truth and humanity, may engage the hearts of fifty women at the
same time, and may likewise conduct his coquetry with so much art,
as to put it out of the power of any of them to specify a single
expression that could be said to be directly expressive of love.
This ambiguity of behaviour, this art of keeping one in suspense, is
the great secret of coquetry in both sexes. It is the more cruel in us,
because we can carry it what length we please, and continue it as
long as we please, without your being so much as at liberty to
complain or expostulate; whereas we can break our chain, and force
you to explain, whenever we become impatient of our situation.
I have insisted the more particularly on this subject of courtship,
because it may most readily happen to you at that early period of
life when you can have little experience or knowledge of the world,
when your passions are warm, and your judgments not arrived at
such full maturity as to be able to correct them.—I wish you to
possess such high principles of honour and generosity as will render
you incapable of deceiving, and at the same time to possess that
acute discernment which may secure you against being deceived.
A woman, in this country, may easily prevent the first impressions
of love, and every motive of prudence and delicacy should make her
guard her heart against them, till such time as she has received the
most convincing proof of the attachment of a man of such merit, as
will justify a reciprocal regard. Your hearts indeed may be shut
inflexibly and permanently against all the merit a man can possess.
That may be your misfortune, but cannot be your fault. In such a
situation, you would be equally unjust to yourself and your lover, if
you gave him your hand when your heart revolted against him. But
miserable will be your fate, if you allow an attachment to steal on
you before you are sure of a return; or, what is infinitely worse,
where there are wanting those qualities which alone can ensure
happiness in a married state.
I know nothing that renders a woman more despicable, than her
thinking it essential to happiness to be married. Besides the gross
indelicacy of the sentiment, it is a false one, as thousands of women
have experienced. But if it was true, the belief that it is so, and the
consequent impatience to be married, is the most effectual way to
prevent it.
You must not think from this, that I do not wish you to marry. On
the contrary, I am of opinion, that you may attain a superior degree
of happiness in a married state, to what you can possibly find in any
other. I know the forlorn and unprotected situation of an old maid,
the chagrin and peevishness which are apt to infect their tempers,
and the great difficulty of making a transition with dignity and
chearfulness from the period of youth, beauty, admiration, and
respect, into the calm, silent, unnoticed retreat of declining years.
I see some unmarried women of active, vigorous minds, and great
vivacity of spirits, degrading themselves; sometimes by entering into
a dissipated course of life, unsuitable to their years, and exposing
themselves to the ridicule of girls, who might have been their grand-
children; sometimes by oppressing their acquaintances by
impertinent intrusions into their private affairs; and sometimes by
being the propagators of scandal and defamation. All this is owing to
an exuberant activity of spirit, which if it had found employment at
home, would have rendered them respectable and useful members
of society.
I see other women in the same situation, gentle, modest, blessed
with sense, taste, delicacy, and every milder feminine virtue of the
heart, but of weak spirits, bashful and timid: I see such women
sinking into obscurity and insignificance, and gradually losing every
elegant accomplishment; for this evident reason, that they are not
united to a partner who has sense, and worth, and taste, to know
their value; one who is able to draw forth their concealed qualities,
and shew them to advantage; who can give that support to their
feeble spirits which they stand so much in need of; and who, by his
affection and tenderness, might make such a woman happy in
exerting every talent, and accomplishing herself in every elegant art
that could contribute to his amusement.
In short, I am of opinion, that a married state, if entered into from
proper motives of esteem and affection, will be the happiest for
yourselves, and make you most respectable in the eyes of the world,
and the most useful members of society. But I confess I am not
enough of a patriot to wish you to marry for the good of the public. I
wish you to marry for no other reason but to make yourselves
happier. When I am so particular in my advices about your conduct,
I own my heart beats with the fond hope of making you worthy the
attachment of men who will deserve you, and be sensible of your
merit. But heaven forbid you should ever relinquish the ease and
independence of a single life, to become the slaves of a fool, or a
tyrant’s caprice.
As these have been always my sentiments, I shall do you but
justice, when I leave you in such independent circumstances as may
lay you under no temptation to do from necessity what you would
never do from choice.—This will likewise save you from that cruel
mortification to a woman of spirit, the suspicion that a gentleman
thinks he does you an honour or a favour when he asks you for his
wife.
If I live till you arrive at that age when you shall be capable to
judge for yourselves, and do not strangely alter my sentiments, I
shall act towards you in a very different manner from what most
parents do. My opinion has always been, that when that period
arrives, the parental authority ceases.
I hope I shall always treat you with that affection and easy
confidence which may dispose you to look on me as your friend. In
that capacity alone I shall think myself entitled to give you my
opinion; in the doing of which, I should think myself highly criminal,
if I did not to the utmost of my power endeavour to divest myself of
all personal vanity, and all prejudices in favour of my particular taste.
If you did not chuse to follow my advice, I should not on that
account cease to love you as my children.—Though my right to your
obedience was expired, yet I should think nothing could release me
from the ties of nature and humanity.
You may perhaps imagine, that the reserved behaviour which I
recommend to you, and your appearing seldom at public places,
must cut off all opportunities of your being acquainted with
gentlemen. I am very far from intending this. I advise you to no
reserve, but what will render you more respected and beloved by
our sex. I do not think public places suited to make people
acquainted together. They can only be distinguished there by their
looks and external behaviour. But it is in private companies alone
where you can expect easy and agreeable conversation, which I
should never wish you to decline. If you do not allow gentlemen to
become acquainted with you, you can never expect to marry with
attachment on either side.—Love is very seldom produced at first
sight; at least it must have, in that case, a very unjustifiable
foundation. True love is founded on esteem, in a correspondence of
tastes and sentiments, and steals on the heart imperceptibly.
There is one advice I shall leave you, to which I beg your particular
attention: Before your affections come to be in the least engaged to
any man, examine your tempers, your tastes, and your hearts, very
severely, and settle in your own minds, what are the requisites to
your happiness in a married state; and as it is almost impossible that
you should get every thing you wish, come to a steady
determination what you are to consider as essential, and what may
be sacrificed.
If you have hearts disposed by nature for love and friendship, and
possess those feelings which enable you to enter into all the
refinements and delicacies of these attachments, consider well, for
heaven’s sake, and as you value your future happiness, before you
give them any indulgence. If you have the misfortune (for a very
great misfortune it commonly is to your sex) to have such a temper
and such sentiments deeply rooted in you, if you have spirit and
resolution to resist the solicitations of vanity, the persecution of
friends (for you will have lost the only friend that would never
persecute you) and can support the prospect of the many
inconveniencies attending the state of an old maid, which I formerly
pointed out, then you may indulge yourselves in that kind of
sentimental reading and conversation which is most correspondent
to your feelings.
But if you find, on a strict self-examination, that marriage is
absolutely essential to your happiness, keep the secret inviolable in
your own bosoms, for the reason I formerly mentioned; but shun as
you would do the most fatal poison, all that species of reading and
conversation which warms the imagination, which engages and
softens the heart, and raises the taste above the level of common
life. If you do otherwise, consider the terrible conflict of passions this
may afterwards raise in your breasts.
If this refinement once takes deep root in your minds, and you do
not obey its dictates, but marry from vulgar and mercenary views,
you may never be able to eradicate it entirely, and then it will
imbitter all your married days. Instead of meeting with sense,
delicacy, tenderness, a lover, a friend, an equal companion, in a
husband, you may be tired with insipidity and dullness; shocked with
indelicacy, or mortified by indifference. You will find none to
compassionate, or even understand your sufferings; for your
husbands may not use you cruelly, and may give you as much
money for your clothes, personal expense, and domestic
necessaries, as is suitable to their fortunes. The world therefore
would look on you as unreasonable women, and that did not deserve
to be happy, if you were not so.—To avoid these complicated evils, if
you are determined at all events to marry, I would advise you to
make all your reading and amusements of such a kind, as do not
affect the heart nor the imagination, except in the way of wit or
humour.
I have no view by these advices to lead your tastes; I only want to
persuade you of the necessity of knowing your own minds, which,
though seemingly very easy, is what your sex seldom attain on many
important occasions in life, but particularly on this of which I am
speaking. There is not a quality I more anxiously wish you to
possess, than that collected decisive spirit which rests on itself,
which enables you to see where your true happiness lies, and to
pursue it with the most determined resolution. In matters of
business, follow the advice of those who know them better than
yourselves, and in whose integrity you can confide; but in matters of
taste, that depend on your own feelings, consult no one friend
whatever, but consult your own hearts.
If a gentleman makes his addresses to you, or gives you reason to
believe he will do so, before you allow your affections to be
engaged, endeavour in the most prudent and secret manner, to
procure from your friends every necessary piece of information
concerning him; such as his character for sense, his morals, his
temper, fortune and family; whether it is distinguished for parts and
worth, or for folly, knavery, and loathsome hereditary diseases.
When your friends inform you of these, they have fulfilled their duty.
If they go further, they have not that deference for you which a
becoming dignity on your part would effectually command.
Whatever your views are in marrying, take every possible
precaution to prevent their being disappointed. If fortune, and the
pleasures it brings, are your aim, it is not sufficient that the
settlements of a jointure and children’s provisions be ample, and
properly secured; it is necessary that you should enjoy the fortune
during your own life. The principal security you can have for this will
depend on your marrying a good-natured generous man, who
despises money, and who will let you live where you can best enjoy
that pleasure, that pomp and parade of life for which you married
him.
From what I have said, you will easily see that I could never
pretend to advise whom you should marry; but I can with great
confidence advise whom you should not marry.
Avoid a companion that may entail any hereditary disease on your
posterity, particularly (that most dreadful of all human calamities)
madness. It is the height of imprudence to run into such a danger,
and in my opinion, highly criminal.
Do not marry a fool; he is the most intractable of all animals; he is
led by his passions and caprices, and is incapable of hearing the
voice of reason. It may probably too hurt your vanity to have
husbands for whom you have reason to blush and tremble every
time they open their lips in company. But the worst circumstance,
that attends a fool, is his constant jealousy of his wife being thought
to govern him. This renders it impossible to lead him, and he is
continually doing absurd and disagreeable things, for no other
reason but to shew he dares do them.
A rake is always a suspicious husband, because he has only known
the most worthless of your sex. He likewise entails the worst
diseases on his wife and children, if he has the misfortune to have
any.
If you have a sense of religion yourselves, do not think of
husbands who have none. If they have tolerable understandings,
they will be glad that you have religion, for their own sakes, and for
the sake of their families; but it will sink you in their esteem. If they
are weak men, they will be continually teazing and shocking you
about your principles.—If you have children, you will suffer the most
bitter distress, in seeing all your endeavours to form their minds to
virtue and piety, all your endeavours to secure their present and
eternal happiness frustrated, and turned into ridicule.
As I look on your choice of a husband to be of the greatest
consequence to your happiness, I hope you will make it with the
utmost circumspection. Do not give way to a sudden sally of
passion, and dignify it with the name of love.—Genuine love is not
founded in caprice; it is founded in nature, on honourable views, on
virtue, on similarity of tastes and sympathy of souls.
If you have these sentiments, you will never marry any one, when
you are not in that situation, in point of fortune, which is necessary
to the happiness of either of you. What that competency may be,
can only be determined by your own tastes. It would be ungenerous
in you to take advantage of a lover’s attachment, to plunge him into
distress; and if he has any honour, no personal gratification will ever
tempt him to enter into any connection which will render you
unhappy. If you have as much between you as to satisfy all your
reasonable demands, it is sufficient.
I shall conclude with endeavouring to remove a difficulty which
must naturally occur to any woman of reflection on the subject of
marriage. What is to become of all these refinements of delicacy,
that dignity of manners, which checked all familiarities, and
suspended desire in respectful and awful admiration? In answer to
this, I shall only observe, that if motives of interest or vanity have
had any share in your resolutions to marry, none of these chimerical
notions will give you any pain; nay they will very quickly appear as
ridiculous in your own eyes, as they probably always did in the eyes
of your husbands. They have been sentiments which have floated in
your imaginations, but have never reached your hearts. But if these
sentiments have been truly genuine, and if you have had the
singular happy fate to attach those who understand them, you have
no reason to be afraid.
Marriage indeed, will at once dispel the enchantment raised by
external beauty; but the virtues and graces that first warmed the
heart, that reserve and delicacy which always left the lover
something further to wish, and often made him doubtful of your
sensibility or attachment, may and ought ever to remain. The tumult
of passion will necessarily subside; but it will be succeeded by an
endearment, that affects the heart in a more equal, more sensible,
and tender manner.—But I must check myself, and not indulge in
descriptions that may mislead you, and that too sensibly awake the
remembrance of my happier days, which, perhaps, it were better for
me to forget forever.
I have thus given you my opinion on some of the most important
articles of your future life, chiefly calculated for that period when you
are just entering the world. I have endeavoured to avoid some
peculiarities of opinion, which, from their contradiction to the general
practice of the world, I might reasonably have suspected were not
so well founded. But in writing to you, I am afraid my heart has
been too full, and too warmly interested, to allow me to keep this
resolution. This may have produced some embarrassment, and some
seeming contradictions. What I have written has been the
amusement of some solitary hours, and has served to divert some
melancholy reflections.—I am conscious I undertook a task to which
I was very unequal; but I have discharged a part of my duty.—You
will at least be pleased with it, as the last mark of your father’s love
and attention.
THE END.
Social Vulnerability to Disasters 2nd Thomas Solution Manual
CONTENTS.
page
Modesty, 7
Lying, 12
Good-Breeding, 15
Genteel Carriage, 21
Cleanliness of person, 25
Dress, 26
Elegance of Expression, 28
Address Phraseology,
and small-talk,
33
Observation, 35
Absence of Mind, 37
Knowledge of the World, 39
Choice of Company, 51
Laughter, 55
Sundry Little
Accomplishments,
57
Employment of Time, 71
Dignity of Manners, 74
Rules for Conversation, 79
A Father’s address to his
Daughters,
93
Religion, 96
Conduct and Behaviour, 102
Amusements, 110
Friendship, Love,
Marriage,
116
Transcriber’s Notes:
Missing or obscured punctuation was silently
corrected.
Typographical errors were silently corrected.
Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were
made consistent only when a predominant
form was found in this book.
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Social Vulnerability to Disasters 2nd Thomas Solution Manual

  • 1. Social Vulnerability to Disasters 2nd Thomas Solution Manual download pdf http://testbankbell.com/product/social-vulnerability-to-disasters-2nd- thomas-solution-manual/ Visit testbankbell.com to explore and download the complete collection of test banks or solution manuals!
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  • 5. Social Vulnerability to Disasters, Second Edition ©2013, CRC Press/Taylor and Francis LLC 27 Social Vulnerability to Disasters 2nd Thomas Solution Manual Full download link at: https://testbankbell.com/product/social-vulnerability-to- disasters-2nd-thomas-solution-manual/ Chapter Two Theoretical Framing of Worldviews,Values, and Structural Dimensions of DisastersDeveloped by: Jean Scandlyn and Jessica Cook Chapter Objectives Upon completing this chapter, readers should be able to: 1. Understand what theory is and how it contributes to framing social vulnerability in a way that illuminates the critical elements of this complex issue. 2. Define critical and conflict theories and explain how they contribute to understanding vulnerability in a more comprehensive fashion. 3. Appreciate how structure and agency interplay in the creation of vulnerability and resilience. 4. Explain how theory leads to an explanation of worldviews and values that in turn influences how disasters are viewed by disaster planners and by individuals and communities who are vulnerable to hazards and disasters. 5. Appreciate how the theoretical framing of structure and agency illuminate how worldviews and values affect our approaches to tackling disaster reduction and increasing resilience. 6. Discuss how systems theory guides a mechanism for understanding and evaluating vulnerability, also linking to sustainable development. Chapter Summary Theory, as formal, explicit, and systematic worldviews provide the foundation for scientific analysis and are essential to understand and evaluate hazards and disasters. In the absence of formal theory, we rely on more or less shared or common sense worldviews to
  • 6. Social Vulnerability to Disasters, Second Edition ©2013, CRC Press/Taylor and Francis LLC 28 explain and predict the world around us. History, the physical environment, social institutions and social relations all shape these worldviews and through them affect our perceptions of hazards and disasters and influence preparedness, mitigation, and response and recovery efforts. Although these factors also shape formal theory, in formal theory we
  • 7. Social Vulnerability to Disasters, Second Edition ©2013, CRC Press/Taylor and Francis LLC 29 consciously define, explicitly state, and systematically test assumptions, concepts and propositions. In the 1990s, emergency managers, social scientists, and those affected by disasters and hazards began to question the then dominant view of disasters as caused almost exclusively by geophysical processes such as tornadoes, earthquakes and floods. This led to a shift in how theorists framed hazards and disasters (as primarily natural and unexpected events) to framing them as expected outcomes of complex human-environment interactions. Hurricane Katrina and the landslides in La Paz demonstrated that risk and vulnerability are not distributed equally within or across societies. Examples like this prompted the revision of theories of hazards and disasters to include the concept of social vulnerability. The concept of social vulnerability draws from a number of sources, but in general, considers individual and collective susceptibility to natural events and the capacity to respond to those events. Conflict and critical theories explain how differential access to resources and power create social conditions and inequalities that lead to different levels of social vulnerability and outcomes of hazardous events among individuals, groups, communities, and nations. In conflict theory, inequality is viewed as an inherent feature of the social structure, thus it is important to keep in mind the agency of individuals and groups when examining how vulnerable individuals and communities view and respond to hazards and disasters within a given social structure. The political ecology framework, an application of general systems theory to human-environment interactions, provides a powerful mechanism to analyze the complex interplay of variables that result in disasters. Finally, the concept of sustainability forces us to consider the real costs of the inequalities and inequities that result from a worldview of humans over nature and points to the value of local knowledge in creating sustainable interactions with the environment. The concept of human agency, combined with participatory approaches to research guided by a theoretical lens that includes humans as an essential part of the natural environment, creates disaster planning that decreases social vulnerability and promotes sustainable human-environment interactions. Teaching Suggestions Theory can be a daunting topic to students and appear overly abstract and irrelevant to their desire to master the content of a new field of study. One way to help them discover the importance of theory is to show them how everything that we do in our daily lives is guided by our shared cultural understandings or common sense theories about the world. You might begin by asking students to discuss a statement attributed to the linguist John Gumperz that “You can’t collect seashells on the beach without a theory.” Why not? This
  • 8. Social Vulnerability to Disasters, Second Edition ©2013, CRC Press/Taylor and Francis LLC 30 discussion can show them how we need a clear idea of what a seashell is (concept), how we can tell seashell from a rock or a feather (classifications) and where we are likely to find them (propositions of relationships) to complete this seemingly simple task. From there you can discuss how these common sense theories, though they may contain valuable local knowledge, are largely unconscious and their assumptions may not be tested. But they guide our actions nonetheless. The task of the scientist is to develop, apply, and test formal theory. Scientific theories may be derived from a variety of sources including formalizing and testing theories derived from local knowledge of disasters. The example of high water markers from tsunamis in Japan shows the cost of valuing scientific theories and knowledge automatically over local knowledge. Another way to show the relevance of theory is to ask students to analyze the examples of hazards and disasters included in this chapter or a more recent disaster such as the series of tornadoes that moved across Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, and North Carolina in late February and March 2012 using different theoretical perspectives. The websites included in the resources section can be a useful guide for discussion. You might ask students to go online and find a report of a recent natural disaster. Ask them to analyze it using a political ecology approach and then compare that to a conflict and critical theory approach. Who was most affected? How do we explain differential effects among regions and communities? How do we account for the damage to different kinds of housing, to schools and other public buildings? What might disaster managers and planners have done differently to mitigate the impacts? What future strategies could reduce social vulnerability? Have students collect media coverage of a recent disaster that includes news reports, blogs, maps and other graphics, and interviews with victims and officials. Have the students analyze the worldview that is being conveyed by the media or blogger and by those who witnessed or were otherwise affected by the disaster. What might students want to know that is not being reported? What questions would the students ask of the reporter? Of people affected by the event? How might the worldviews portrayed affect the response to this disaster or to similar disasters in the future? A core objective of this chapter is to challenge students to be critical in their understanding of “natural” disasters. Divide students into two groups and ask them to debate the proposition that we abolish the term “natural disaster.” To support their position students could compare the effects of different kinds of disasters. For example, they might compare Hurricane Katrina, as an unusually severe weather-event that disproportionately impacted low-income, minority populations despite levees designed to protect them, to the tornadoes in the Southeast, that appear to inflict damage more randomly, or to the role of droughts in famine in the Horn of Africa. Or, they might compare the same kinds of events
  • 9. Social Vulnerability to Disasters, Second Edition ©2013, CRC Press/Taylor and Francis LLC 31 in different locations, i.e., earthquakes in Haiti, Afghanistan, Turkey, the U.S., China, and Japan. It is important to get students excited about linking theory to natural hazard events. You might initiate a discussion on how the discourse around natural disasters impacts the role that people expect the government to play in responding to these events and to mitigating damage from future events. What are some American worldviews and values, e.g., individual responsibility, the relationship between the federal government and states and local communities, the role of faith-based organizations and civic organizations, that affects how Americans expect the government to respond—either through pro-active policy and infrastructure or through aid after an event? Students might also explore how history and location affect both local and scientific theories applied to disasters and hazards. Ask them to compare articles in professional journals from different decades to see what theories were used and how. Were theoretical approaches explicitly stated or assumed? When do they begin to see evidence of change in the way scientists are looking at and understanding disasters? In terms of location, how does a country’s position in the global political economy affect how disasters are described and explained? Using materials from their websites, what theoretical frameworks do the World Bank, the Red Cross, the United Nations and other international and national disaster relief agencies use? Are there consistencies across these organizations or do they differ? How has this changed over time? How do their theoretical approaches or worldviews affect their programs, policies and priorities? What are the major conflicts and controversies over theoretical approaches and how would you recommend resolving them? Finally, the role that culture or worldviews play in determining people’s behavior is a subject of debate among social scientists. The authors of this chapter argue that we should be cautious in how we use culture or worldview as an explanatory variable and take other factors – history, economic and political power, socioeconomic status, race and ethnicity, gender, and age – into account when analyzing social vulnerability to disasters. To explore this theme, ask students to read and respond to the article by Craig Janes under Resources and then examine the responses to offers of foreign assistance with disaster relief by Japan’s following the 2011 tsunami and Burma following Cyclone Nargis in 2008. Resources A PowerPoint is available to accompany this chapter. The following websites may be useful:
  • 10. Social Vulnerability to Disasters, Second Edition ©2013, CRC Press/Taylor and Francis LLC 32 o Hazards & Vulnerability Research Institute, University of South Carolina – This is a social vulnerability index for the US that includes: race and class, wealth, elderly residents, Hispanic ethnicity, special needs individuals, Native American ethnicity, and service industry employment - http://webra.cas.sc.edu/hvri/products/sovi.aspx o FEMA Emergency Management Institute - http://www.training.fema.gov/EMIWeb/edu/sovul.asp o The Institute for Environmental and Social Change – A Boulder, Colorado- based non-government organization focused on adaptation and resilience to climate change particularly in southeast Asia - http://www.i-s-e-t.org o National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration - http://www.noaa.gov/ o American Red Cross - http://newsroom.redcross.org/disaster-response- guide/international-disaster-response/ o International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies - http://www.ifrc.org/ o The United Nations Humanitarian and Disaster Relief Assistance - http://www.un.org/en/globalissues/humanitarian/ o World Bank Disaster Risk Management - http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/TOPICS/EXTURBANDEVEL OPMENT/EXTDISMGMT/0,,menuPK:341021~pagePK:149018~piPK:149093 ~theSitePK:341015,00.html Ja ne s, Crai g R. 2006. Comment ary: ‘Cu lture ’, cultural explanations and causality. International Journal of Epidemiology 35:261-263 doi:10.1093/ije/dyi238. List of International Relief Organizations - http://www.globalcorps.com/jobs/ngolist.pdf Instructors may also benefit from going to the FEMA Higher Education Website for downloadable syllabi, course lectures, free textbooks and more! The current URL for that site is http://www.training.fema.gov/EMIWeb/edu/collegecrsbooks.asp. (Last accessed April 20, 2011). Discussion Questions 1. Using a conflict and critical theory approach, how do the zoning policies and building codes in your local community affect social vulnerability to hazards and disasters? It may be helpful to have students first make a list of zoning policies and building codes in their area and then discuss various impacts on social vulnerability. How do zoning policies and building codes interact? For example, discuss the potential impact of a zoning policy that allows development in a floodplain that is combined with a building code that requires buildings to be elevated above flood level. Does this increase or decrease vulnerability? Zoning policies and building codes are intended to protect public health; can you think of examples where protection from one hazard or disaster creates another unintended vulnerability?
  • 11. Social Vulnerability to Disasters, Second Edition ©2013, CRC Press/Taylor and Francis LLC 33 2. What individuals or organizations can you identify at the local, national, and international level that have succeeded in changing worldviews and values that directly affect disaster planning and mitigation? How have they achieved these changes? The intent is to get students involved in a discussion about worldviews and values as a process and not a product of society. When are worldviews and values most likely to change? After an event? How do new ideas diffuse? Did Hurricane Katrina act as a catalyst to change worldviews and values? How? 3. How do you see institutions responsible for disaster planning and mitigation responding to the use of participatory approaches to research and planning in your community? Should community members and organizations be full and equal partners? Why or why not? How do you determine who should be included and which voices should be heard? Ask students if they have been involved in planning in their communities. How were they engaged (i.e., public announcement, radio advertising, personal invitation)? If community members are not full and equal partners, how does that affect their willingness to participate? How should conflict be resolved? Have students list pros and cons to full and equal participation versus limited participation. 4. Analyze media reports for a disaster or hazard. What values and worldview guide how the event is reported? What is the view of hazards and disasters they present? How might you go about informing journalists and media representatives about ways of viewing these events? Provide students with a short media report for a current disaster or hazard event. Have them identify the event and discuss the cause(s) and effect(s) reported. Is the event depicted as a “natural” event? Are human actions explicitly stated as impacting the cause or effect of the event, and what does that indicate about the values or worldview of the reporter? The readers? Using conflict and critical theories, what questions do students have about the disaster or hazard that was not reported? 5. How does the concept of sustainability challenge the view of hazards and disasters as natural events? What does it tell us about the costs of social vulnerability? What worldview of the relationship of humans to nature does it support? The concept of sustainability challenges us to think about the true costs of inequalities and inequities that result from a worldview of humans over nature and points to the value of local knowledge in creating sustainable interactions with the environment. What are some of the costs of social vulnerability? Have students think about costs in terms of environmental, economic, and social dimensions. 6. Is protection from hazards and disasters a human right?
  • 12. Social Vulnerability to Disasters, Second Edition ©2013, CRC Press/Taylor and Francis LLC 34 According to the World Health Organization, human rights extend beyond the basic right to health to include underlying determinants of health such as health information, access to water and food, and housing. Furthermore, rights must be embedded in norms, institutions, laws, and an enabling environment. How does protection from hazards and disasters fit within this definition? Does protection conflict with livelihood opportunities (i.e., the right to work)? Test Questions Essay Questions 1. Given a political ecology framework, how can we understand hazards and disasters as more than just “natural” events? 2. What are the three dominant ways of understanding the relationship of society and nature? Give brief descriptions of each and discuss their effect on how people with those views might respond to a hazard or disaster. 3. Briefly explain the concept of hegemony. Might we consider the dominant view of disasters as “natural events beyond human control” as having hegemonic aspects? 4. Compare how the theoretical perspectives of disasters as caused by geophysical forces and disasters as caused by human-environment interactions (social vulnerability) affects the portrayal of people affected by hazards and disasters. Multiple Choice/True and False 1. Scientific knowledge is always superior to local knowledge about how to respond to and mitigate hazards and disasters. False 2. To successfully adapt to living in areas prone to natural disasters people must often balance competing needs of making a living with safety from disasters. True 3. In general, when disasters occur in wealthy nations, property losses are very high but the number of injuries and deaths is relatively small. True 4. Formal scientific theories differ from worldviews in the following way: a. They explain and predict events that occur around us b. They are explicit and systematic* c. They are largely unconscious d. They cannot be tested
  • 13. Social Vulnerability to Disasters, Second Edition ©2013, CRC Press/Taylor and Francis LLC 35 5. Resilience is related to the concept of adaptation in that: a. Resilient groups or communities are stable and unchanging b. Resilient groups or communities are never vulnerable to disasters c. Resilient groups or communities can adjust to changes in the physical and social environment* d. Resilient groups or communities are less likely to bounce back from disasters 6. Bangladeshis living in the floodplains of the Ganges River mitigate the risks of annual floods in which of the following ways: a. Spending savings b. Selling land and animals c. Obtaining help from family members d. All of the above* 7. Although the community built a 30-foot high levee in 1930, more than 200 people died in the tsunami in the Taro district of Miyako, Japan in 2001 because: a. They lacked a warning system for evacuation b. The levee wasn’t high enough c. They relied on the levee to protect them and built houses next to it* d. The levee collapse under the pressure of the tsunami 8. The development of banana plantations increased the vulnerability of peasant farmers when Hurricane Fifi passed through Honduras in 1974 because: a. They relied solely on banana production and the crop was ruined b. They lived near streams and rivers that flooded c. They could not ask the plantation owners for help replanting their crops d. They had to farm steep hillsides, which destabilized the soil and created landslides* 9. Many scientists working within the framework of social vulnerability, view disasters as: a. The product of normal or usual processes* b. Caused by geophysical forces c. Exceptional events d. Affecting only the poor 10. Conflict theory assumes that in capitalist society: a. Conflict is not an inherent aspect of the political economic system b. Inequality is institutionalized through various forms of capital* c. Inequality has no effect on who suffers from disasters
  • 14. Social Vulnerability to Disasters, Second Edition ©2013, CRC Press/Taylor and Francis LLC 36 d. All of the above 11. The development of scientific theory is not affected by history or culture. False 12. People living in disaster-prone areas have little knowledge about disasters and how to mitigate their effects. False 13. The dominant view of disasters can get in the way of efforts to decrease social vulnerability to disasters by: a. Viewing all individuals and communities as equally at risk from disasters* b. Emphasizing that enforcement of building codes can mitigate damage from disasters c. Viewing disasters as resulting from normal and usual processes d. Relying on local knowledge to mitigate disasters 14. Political ecology differs from ecological systems theory in: a. Focusing on balance and homeostasis b. Emphasizing the positive effects of development projects c. They are different names for the same theory d. Examining how power and inequality affect ecological systems* 15. Confidence that technology provides the best solutions to human problems like disasters reflects which view of the relationship between people and nature? a. People under nature b. People over nature* c. People with nature 16. Everyone in a given society shares the same worldview in the same way. False 17. Systems theory enables scientists to examine how the relationships among different systems such as transportation and sewage contribute to vulnerability to disasters. True 18. Values provide guidelines for actions that are generally consistent with worldviews. True 19. Participatory forms of research can empower local communities and increase resilience by: a. Equalizing power between researchers and technical experts
  • 15. Social Vulnerability to Disasters, Second Edition ©2013, CRC Press/Taylor and Francis LLC 37 b. Raising a community’s capacity to analyze their risks from hazards and disasters c. Incorporate local knowledge and practices regarding disasters d. All of the above* 20. Which of the following is not a reason why systems theory is valuable in anticipating the positive and negative results of a development project like a dam? a. Dams only generate electricity and control flooding* b. Dams alter the physical environment c. Dams displace human communities d. Dams may change human exposure to waterborne parasites e. Dams may change farming practices
  • 16. Exploring the Variety of Random Documents with Different Content
  • 17. FRIENDSHIP, LOVE, MARRIAGE. The luxury and dissipation that prevail in genteel life, as they corrupt the heart in many respects, so they render it incapable of warm, sincere, and steady friendship. A happy choice of friends will be of the utmost consequence to you, as they may assist you by their advice and good offices. But the immediate gratification which friendship affords to a warm, open and ingenuous heart, is of itself a sufficient motive to court it. In the choice of your friends, have principal regard to goodness of heart and fidelity. If they also possess taste and genius, that will still make them more agreeable and useful companions. You have particular reason to place confidence in those who have shewn affection for you in your early days, when you were incapable of making them any return. This is an obligation for which you cannot be too grateful: When you read this, you will naturally think of your mother’s friend, to whom you owe so much. If you have the good fortune to meet with any who deserve the name of friends, unbosom yourself to them with the most unsuspicious confidence. It is one of the world’s maxims, never to trust any person with a secret, the discovery of which could give you any pain; but it is the maxim of a little mind and a cold heart, unless where it is the effect of frequent disappointments and bad usage. An open temper, if restrained but by tolerable prudence, will make you, on the whole, much happier than a reserved suspicious one, although you may sometimes suffer by it. Coldness and distrust are but the too certain consequences of age and experience; but they are unpleasant feelings, and need not be anticipated before their time. But however open you may be in talking of your own affairs, never disclose the secrets of one friend to another. These are sacred
  • 18. deposites, which do not belong to you, nor have you any right to make use of them. There is another case, in which I suspect it is proper to be secret, not so much from motives of prudence, as delicacy. I mean in love matters. Though a woman has no reason to be ashamed of an attachment to a man of merit, yet nature, whose authority is superior to philosophy, has annexed a sense of shame to it. It is even long before a woman of delicacy dares avow to her own heart that she loves; and when all the subterfuges of ingenuity to conceal it from herself fail, she feels a violence done both to her pride and to her modesty. This, I should imagine, must always be the case where she is not sure of a return to her attachment. In such a situation, to lay the heart open to any person whatever, does not appear to me consistent with the perfection of female delicacy. But perhaps I am in the wrong.—At the same time I must tell you, that, in point of prudence, it concerns you to attend well to the consequences of such a discovery. These secrets, however important in your own estimation, may appear very trifling to your friend, who possibly will not enter into your feelings, but may rather consider them as a subject of pleasantry. For this reason, love- secrets are of all others the worst kept. But the consequences to you may be very serious, as no man of spirit and delicacy ever valued a heart much hackneyed in the ways of love. If, therefore, you must have a friend to pour out your heart to, be sure of her honour and secrecy. Let her not be a married woman, especially if she lives happily with her husband, There are certain unguarded moments, in which such a woman, though the best and worthiest of her sex, may let hints escape, which at other times, or to any other person than her husband, she would be incapable of; nor will a husband in this case feel himself under the same obligation of secrecy and honour, as if you had put your confidence originally in himself, especially on a subject which the world is apt to treat so lightly.
  • 19. If all other circumstances are equal, there are obvious advantages in your making friends of one another. The ties of blood, and your being so much united in one common interest, form an additional bond of union to your friendship. If your brothers should have the good fortune to have hearts susceptible of friendship, to possess truth, honour, sense, and delicacy of sentiment, they are the fittest and most unexceptionable confidants. By placing confidence in them, you will receive every advantage which you could hope for from the friendship of men, without any of the inconveniencies that attend such connexions with our sex. Beware of making confidants of your servants. Dignity not properly understood very readily degenerates into pride, which enters into no friendships, because it cannot bear an equal, and is so fond of flattery as to grasp at it even from servants and dependants. The most intimate confidants, therefore, of proud people are valets-de- chamber and waiting women. Shew the utmost humanity to your servants; make their situation as comfortable to them as is possible: but if you make them your confidants, you spoil them, and debase yourselves. Never allow any person, under the pretended sanction of friendship, to be so familiar as to lose a proper respect for you. Never allow them to tease you on any subject that is disagreeable, or where you have once taken your resolution. Many will tell you, that this reserve is inconsistent with the freedom which friendship allows. But a certain respect is as necessary in friendship as in love. Without it, you may be liked as a child, but you will never be beloved as an equal. The temper and dispositions of the heart in your sex make you enter more readily and warmly into friendships than men. Your natural propensity to it is so strong, that you often run into intimacies which you soon have sufficient cause to repent of; and this makes your friendships so very fluctuating. Another great obstacle to the sincerity as well as steadiness of your friendships is the great clashing of your interests in the pursuits
  • 20. of love, ambition, or vanity. For these reasons, it should appear at first view more eligible for you to contract your friendships with the men. Among other obvious advantages of an easy intercourse between the two sexes, it occasions an emulation and exertion in each to excel and be agreeable: hence their respective excellencies are mutually communicated and blended.—As their interests in no degree interfere, there can be no foundation for jealousy or suspicion of rivalship. The friendship of a man for a woman is always blended with a tenderness, which he never feels for one of his own sex, even where love is in no degree concerned. Besides we are conscious of a natural title you have to our protection and good offices, and therefore we feel an additional obligation of honour to serve you, and to observe an inviolable secrecy, whenever you confide in us. But apply these observations with great caution. Thousands of women of the best hearts and finest parts have been ruined by men who approached them under the specious name of friendship. But supposing a man to have the most undoubted honour, yet his friendship to a woman is so near a-kin to love, that if she be very agreeable in her person, she will probably very soon find a lover, where she only wished to meet a friend. Let me here, however, warn you against that weakness so common among vain women, the imagination that every man who takes particular notice of you is a lover. Nothing can expose you more to ridicule, than the taking up a man on the suspicion of being your lover, who perhaps never once thought of you in that view, and giving yourselves those airs so common among silly women on such occasions. There is a kind of unmeaning gallantry much practised by some men, which, if you have any discernment, you will find really harmless. Men of this sort will attend you to public places, and be useful to you by a number of little observances, which those of a superior class do not so well understand, or have not leisure to regard, or perhaps are too proud to submit to. Look on the compliments of such men as words of course, which they repeat to every agreeable woman of their acquaintance. There is a familiarity
  • 21. they are apt to assume, which a proper dignity in your behaviour will be easily able to check. There is a different species of men whom you may like as agreeable companions, men of worth, taste and genius, whose conversation, in some respects, may be superior to what you generally meet with among your own sex. It will be foolish in you to deprive yourselves of an useful and agreeable acquaintance, merely because idle people say he is your lover. Such a man may like your company, without having any design on your person. People whose sentiments, and particularly whose tastes correspond, naturally like to associate together, although neither of them have the most distant view of any further connexion. But as this similarity of minds often gives rise to a more tender attachment than friendship, it will be prudent to keep a watchful eye over yourselves, lest your hearts become too far engaged before you are aware of it. At the same time, I do not think that your sex, at least in this part of the world, have much of that sensibility which disposes to such attachments. What is commonly called love among you is rather gratitude, and a partiality to the man who prefers you to the rest of your sex; and such a man you often marry, with little of either personal esteem or affection. Indeed, without an unusual share of natural sensibility, and very peculiar good fortune, a woman in this country has very little probability of marrying for love. It is a maxim laid down among you, and a very prudent one it is. That love is not to begin on your part, but is entirely to be the consequence of our attachment to you. Now, supposing a woman to have sense and taste, she will not find many men to whom she can possibly be supposed to bear any considerable share of esteem. Among these few, it is a very great chance if any of them distinguishes her particularly. Love, at least with us, is exceedingly capricious, and will not always fix where reason says it should. But supposing one of them should become particularly attached to her, it is still extremely improbable that he should be the man in the world her heart most approved of.
  • 22. As, therefore, Nature has not given you that unlimited range in your choice which we enjoy, she has wisely and benevolently assigned to you a greater flexibility of taste on this subject. Some agreeable qualities recommend a gentleman to your common good liking and friendship. In the course of his acquaintance, he contracts an attachment to you. When you perceive it, it excites your gratitude; this gratitude rises into a preference, and this preference perhaps at last advances to some degree of attachment, especially if it meets with crosses and difficulties, for these, and a state of suspense, are very great incitements to attachment, and are the food of love in both sexes. If attachment was not excited in your sex in this manner, there is not one of a million of you that could ever marry with any degree of love. A man of taste and delicacy marries a woman because he loves her more than any other. A woman of equal taste and delicacy marries him because she esteems him, and because he gives her that preference. But if a man unfortunately becomes attached to a woman whose heart is secretly pre-engaged, his attachment, instead of obtaining a suitable return, is particularly offensive; and if he persists to teaze her, he makes himself equally the object of her scorn and aversion. The effects of love among men are diversified by their different tempers. An artful man may counterfeit every one of them so as easily to impose on a young girl of an open, generous, and feeling heart, if she is not extremely on her guard. The finest parts in such a girl may not always prove sufficient for her security. The dark and crooked paths of cunning are unsearchable, and inconceivable to an honourable and elevated mind. The following, I apprehend, are the most genuine effects of an honourable passion among the men, and the most difficult to counterfeit. A man of delicacy often betrays his passion by his too great anxiety to conceal it, especially if he has little hopes of success. True love, in all its stages, seeks concealment, and never expects success. It renders a man not only respectful, but timid to
  • 23. the highest degree in his behaviour to the woman he loves. To conceal the awe he stands in of her, he may sometimes affect pleasantry, but it sits aukwardly on him, and he quickly relapses into seriousness, if not into dulness. He magnifies all her real perfections in his imagination, and is either blind to her failings, or converts them into beauties. Like a person conscious of guilt, he is jealous that every eye observes him; and to avoid this, he shuns all the little observances of common gallantry. His heart and his character will be improved in every respect by his attachment. His manners will become more gentle, and his conversation more agreeable; but diffidence and embarrassment will always make him appear to disadvantage in the company of his mistress. If the fascination continue long, it will totally depress his spirit, and extinguish every active, vigorous and manly principle of his mind. You will find this subject beautifully and pathetically painted in Thomson’s Spring. When you observe in a gentleman’s behaviour these marks which I have described above, reflect seriously what you are to do. If his attachment is agreeable to you, I leave you to do as nature, good sense, and delicacy shall direct you. If you love him let me advise you never to discover to him the full extent of your love, no not although you marry him. That sufficiently shews your preference, which is all he is entitled to know. If he has delicacy, he will ask for no stronger proof of your affection for your sake; if he has sense, he will not ask it for his own. This is an unpleasant truth, but it is my duty to let you know it; violent love cannot subsist, at least cannot be expressed, for any time together, on both sides; otherwise the certain consequence, however concealed, is satiety and disgust. Nature in this case has laid the reserve on you. If you see evident proofs of a gentleman’s attachment, and are determined to shut your heart against him, as you ever hope to be used with generosity by the person who shall engage your own heart, treat him honourably and humanely. Do not let him linger in a
  • 24. miserable suspense, but be anxious to let him know your sentiments with regard to him. However people’s hearts may deceive them, there is scarcely a person that can love for any time without at least some distant hope of success. If you really wish to undeceive a lover, you may do it in a variety of ways. There is a certain species of easy familiarity in your behaviour, which may satisfy him, if he has any discernment left, that he has nothing to hope for. But perhaps your particular temper may not admit of this.—You may easily shew that you want to avoid his company; but if he is a man whose friendship you wish to preserve, you may not chuse this method, because then you lose him in every capacity.—You may get a common friend to explain matters to him, or fall on many other devices, if you are seriously anxious to put him out of suspense. But if you are resolved against every such method, at least do not shun opportunities of letting him explain himself. If you do this, you act barbarously and unjustly. If he brings you to an explanation, give him a polite, but resolute and decisive answer. In whatever way you convey your sentiments to him, if he is a man of spirit and delicacy, he will give you no further trouble, nor apply to your friends for their intercession. This last is a method of courtship which every man of spirit will disdain.—He will never whine nor sue for your pity. That would mortify him almost as much as your scorn. In short, you may possibly break such a heart, but you cannot bend it.—Great pride always accompanies delicacy, however concealed under the appearance of the utmost gentleness and modesty, and is the passion of all others the most difficult to conquer. There is a case where a woman may coquette justifiably to the utmost verge which her conscience will allow. It is where a gentleman purposely declines to make his addresses, till such time as he thinks himself perfectly sure of her consent. This at bottom is intended to force a woman to give up the undoubted privilege of her sex, the privilege of her refusing; it is intended to force her to explain herself, in effect, before the gentleman deigns to do it, and
  • 25. by this mean to oblige her to violate the modesty and delicacy of her sex, and to invert the clearest order of nature. All this sacrifice is proposed to be made merely to gratify a most despicable vanity in a man who would degrade the very woman whom he wishes to make his wife. It is of great importance to distinguish, whether a gentleman who has the appearance of being your lover delays to speak explicitly, from the motive I have mentioned, or from a diffidence inseparable from true attachment. In the one case, you can scarcely use him too ill: in the other, you ought to use him with great kindness: and the greatest kindness you can shew him, if you are determined not to listen to his addresses, is to let him know it as soon as possible. I know the many excuses with which women endeavour to justify themselves to the world, and to their own consciences, when they act otherwise. Sometimes they plead ignorance, or at least uncertainty, of the gentleman’s real sentiments. That may sometimes be the case. Sometimes they plead the decorums of their sex, which enjoin an equal behaviour to all men, and forbid them to consider any man as a lover, till he has directly told them so.—Perhaps few women carry their ideas of female delicacy and decorum so far as I do. But I must say, you are not entitled to plead the obligation of these virtues, in opposition to the superior ones of gratitude, justice, and humanity. The man is entitled to all these, who prefers you to the rest of your sex, and perhaps whose greatest weakness is this very preference. The truth of the matter is, vanity, and the love of admiration, are so prevailing passions among you, that you may be considered to make a very great sacrifice whenever you give up a lover, till every art of coquetry fails to keep him, or till he forces you to an explanation. You can be fond of the love, when you are indifferent to, or even when you despise the lover. But the deepest and most artful coquetry is employed by women of superior taste and sense, to engage and fix the heart of a man whom the world and whom they themselves esteem, although they are firmly determined never to marry him. But his conversation
  • 26. amuses them, and his attachment is the highest gratification to their vanity; nay, they can sometimes be gratified with the utter ruin of his fortune, fame, and happiness.—God forbid I should ever think so of all your sex. I know many of them have principles, have generosity and dignity of soul that elevates them above the worthless vanity I have been speaking of. Such a woman, I am persuaded, may always convert a lover, if she cannot give him her affections, into a warm and steady friend, provided he is a man of sense, resolution, and candour. If she explains herself to him with a generous openness and freedom, he must feel the stroke as a man; but he will likewise bear it as a man: what he suffers he will suffer in silence. Every sentiment of esteem will remain; but love though it requires very little food, and is easily surfeited with too much, yet it requires some. He will view her in the light of a married woman; and though passion subsides, yet a man of a candid and generous heart always retains a tenderness for a woman he has once loved, and who has used him well, beyond what he feels for any other of her sex. If he has not confided his own secret to any body, he has an undoubted title to ask you not to divulge it. If a woman chuses to trust any of her companions with her own unfortunate attachments, she may, as it is her own affair alone: but if she has any generosity or gratitude, she will not betray a secret which does not belong to her. Male coquetry is much more inexcusable than female, as well as more pernicious; but it is rare in this country. Very few men will give themselves the trouble to gain or retain any woman’s affections, unless they have views on her either of an honourable or dishonourable kind. Men employed in the pursuits of business, ambition, or pleasure, will not give themselves the trouble to engage a woman’s affections merely from the vanity of conquest, and of triumphing over the heart of an innocent and defenceless girl. Besides, people never value much what is entirely in their power. A man of parts, sentiment, and address, if he lays aside all regard to
  • 27. truth and humanity, may engage the hearts of fifty women at the same time, and may likewise conduct his coquetry with so much art, as to put it out of the power of any of them to specify a single expression that could be said to be directly expressive of love. This ambiguity of behaviour, this art of keeping one in suspense, is the great secret of coquetry in both sexes. It is the more cruel in us, because we can carry it what length we please, and continue it as long as we please, without your being so much as at liberty to complain or expostulate; whereas we can break our chain, and force you to explain, whenever we become impatient of our situation. I have insisted the more particularly on this subject of courtship, because it may most readily happen to you at that early period of life when you can have little experience or knowledge of the world, when your passions are warm, and your judgments not arrived at such full maturity as to be able to correct them.—I wish you to possess such high principles of honour and generosity as will render you incapable of deceiving, and at the same time to possess that acute discernment which may secure you against being deceived. A woman, in this country, may easily prevent the first impressions of love, and every motive of prudence and delicacy should make her guard her heart against them, till such time as she has received the most convincing proof of the attachment of a man of such merit, as will justify a reciprocal regard. Your hearts indeed may be shut inflexibly and permanently against all the merit a man can possess. That may be your misfortune, but cannot be your fault. In such a situation, you would be equally unjust to yourself and your lover, if you gave him your hand when your heart revolted against him. But miserable will be your fate, if you allow an attachment to steal on you before you are sure of a return; or, what is infinitely worse, where there are wanting those qualities which alone can ensure happiness in a married state. I know nothing that renders a woman more despicable, than her thinking it essential to happiness to be married. Besides the gross indelicacy of the sentiment, it is a false one, as thousands of women
  • 28. have experienced. But if it was true, the belief that it is so, and the consequent impatience to be married, is the most effectual way to prevent it. You must not think from this, that I do not wish you to marry. On the contrary, I am of opinion, that you may attain a superior degree of happiness in a married state, to what you can possibly find in any other. I know the forlorn and unprotected situation of an old maid, the chagrin and peevishness which are apt to infect their tempers, and the great difficulty of making a transition with dignity and chearfulness from the period of youth, beauty, admiration, and respect, into the calm, silent, unnoticed retreat of declining years. I see some unmarried women of active, vigorous minds, and great vivacity of spirits, degrading themselves; sometimes by entering into a dissipated course of life, unsuitable to their years, and exposing themselves to the ridicule of girls, who might have been their grand- children; sometimes by oppressing their acquaintances by impertinent intrusions into their private affairs; and sometimes by being the propagators of scandal and defamation. All this is owing to an exuberant activity of spirit, which if it had found employment at home, would have rendered them respectable and useful members of society. I see other women in the same situation, gentle, modest, blessed with sense, taste, delicacy, and every milder feminine virtue of the heart, but of weak spirits, bashful and timid: I see such women sinking into obscurity and insignificance, and gradually losing every elegant accomplishment; for this evident reason, that they are not united to a partner who has sense, and worth, and taste, to know their value; one who is able to draw forth their concealed qualities, and shew them to advantage; who can give that support to their feeble spirits which they stand so much in need of; and who, by his affection and tenderness, might make such a woman happy in exerting every talent, and accomplishing herself in every elegant art that could contribute to his amusement.
  • 29. In short, I am of opinion, that a married state, if entered into from proper motives of esteem and affection, will be the happiest for yourselves, and make you most respectable in the eyes of the world, and the most useful members of society. But I confess I am not enough of a patriot to wish you to marry for the good of the public. I wish you to marry for no other reason but to make yourselves happier. When I am so particular in my advices about your conduct, I own my heart beats with the fond hope of making you worthy the attachment of men who will deserve you, and be sensible of your merit. But heaven forbid you should ever relinquish the ease and independence of a single life, to become the slaves of a fool, or a tyrant’s caprice. As these have been always my sentiments, I shall do you but justice, when I leave you in such independent circumstances as may lay you under no temptation to do from necessity what you would never do from choice.—This will likewise save you from that cruel mortification to a woman of spirit, the suspicion that a gentleman thinks he does you an honour or a favour when he asks you for his wife. If I live till you arrive at that age when you shall be capable to judge for yourselves, and do not strangely alter my sentiments, I shall act towards you in a very different manner from what most parents do. My opinion has always been, that when that period arrives, the parental authority ceases. I hope I shall always treat you with that affection and easy confidence which may dispose you to look on me as your friend. In that capacity alone I shall think myself entitled to give you my opinion; in the doing of which, I should think myself highly criminal, if I did not to the utmost of my power endeavour to divest myself of all personal vanity, and all prejudices in favour of my particular taste. If you did not chuse to follow my advice, I should not on that account cease to love you as my children.—Though my right to your obedience was expired, yet I should think nothing could release me from the ties of nature and humanity.
  • 30. You may perhaps imagine, that the reserved behaviour which I recommend to you, and your appearing seldom at public places, must cut off all opportunities of your being acquainted with gentlemen. I am very far from intending this. I advise you to no reserve, but what will render you more respected and beloved by our sex. I do not think public places suited to make people acquainted together. They can only be distinguished there by their looks and external behaviour. But it is in private companies alone where you can expect easy and agreeable conversation, which I should never wish you to decline. If you do not allow gentlemen to become acquainted with you, you can never expect to marry with attachment on either side.—Love is very seldom produced at first sight; at least it must have, in that case, a very unjustifiable foundation. True love is founded on esteem, in a correspondence of tastes and sentiments, and steals on the heart imperceptibly. There is one advice I shall leave you, to which I beg your particular attention: Before your affections come to be in the least engaged to any man, examine your tempers, your tastes, and your hearts, very severely, and settle in your own minds, what are the requisites to your happiness in a married state; and as it is almost impossible that you should get every thing you wish, come to a steady determination what you are to consider as essential, and what may be sacrificed. If you have hearts disposed by nature for love and friendship, and possess those feelings which enable you to enter into all the refinements and delicacies of these attachments, consider well, for heaven’s sake, and as you value your future happiness, before you give them any indulgence. If you have the misfortune (for a very great misfortune it commonly is to your sex) to have such a temper and such sentiments deeply rooted in you, if you have spirit and resolution to resist the solicitations of vanity, the persecution of friends (for you will have lost the only friend that would never persecute you) and can support the prospect of the many inconveniencies attending the state of an old maid, which I formerly pointed out, then you may indulge yourselves in that kind of
  • 31. sentimental reading and conversation which is most correspondent to your feelings. But if you find, on a strict self-examination, that marriage is absolutely essential to your happiness, keep the secret inviolable in your own bosoms, for the reason I formerly mentioned; but shun as you would do the most fatal poison, all that species of reading and conversation which warms the imagination, which engages and softens the heart, and raises the taste above the level of common life. If you do otherwise, consider the terrible conflict of passions this may afterwards raise in your breasts. If this refinement once takes deep root in your minds, and you do not obey its dictates, but marry from vulgar and mercenary views, you may never be able to eradicate it entirely, and then it will imbitter all your married days. Instead of meeting with sense, delicacy, tenderness, a lover, a friend, an equal companion, in a husband, you may be tired with insipidity and dullness; shocked with indelicacy, or mortified by indifference. You will find none to compassionate, or even understand your sufferings; for your husbands may not use you cruelly, and may give you as much money for your clothes, personal expense, and domestic necessaries, as is suitable to their fortunes. The world therefore would look on you as unreasonable women, and that did not deserve to be happy, if you were not so.—To avoid these complicated evils, if you are determined at all events to marry, I would advise you to make all your reading and amusements of such a kind, as do not affect the heart nor the imagination, except in the way of wit or humour. I have no view by these advices to lead your tastes; I only want to persuade you of the necessity of knowing your own minds, which, though seemingly very easy, is what your sex seldom attain on many important occasions in life, but particularly on this of which I am speaking. There is not a quality I more anxiously wish you to possess, than that collected decisive spirit which rests on itself, which enables you to see where your true happiness lies, and to
  • 32. pursue it with the most determined resolution. In matters of business, follow the advice of those who know them better than yourselves, and in whose integrity you can confide; but in matters of taste, that depend on your own feelings, consult no one friend whatever, but consult your own hearts. If a gentleman makes his addresses to you, or gives you reason to believe he will do so, before you allow your affections to be engaged, endeavour in the most prudent and secret manner, to procure from your friends every necessary piece of information concerning him; such as his character for sense, his morals, his temper, fortune and family; whether it is distinguished for parts and worth, or for folly, knavery, and loathsome hereditary diseases. When your friends inform you of these, they have fulfilled their duty. If they go further, they have not that deference for you which a becoming dignity on your part would effectually command. Whatever your views are in marrying, take every possible precaution to prevent their being disappointed. If fortune, and the pleasures it brings, are your aim, it is not sufficient that the settlements of a jointure and children’s provisions be ample, and properly secured; it is necessary that you should enjoy the fortune during your own life. The principal security you can have for this will depend on your marrying a good-natured generous man, who despises money, and who will let you live where you can best enjoy that pleasure, that pomp and parade of life for which you married him. From what I have said, you will easily see that I could never pretend to advise whom you should marry; but I can with great confidence advise whom you should not marry. Avoid a companion that may entail any hereditary disease on your posterity, particularly (that most dreadful of all human calamities) madness. It is the height of imprudence to run into such a danger, and in my opinion, highly criminal.
  • 33. Do not marry a fool; he is the most intractable of all animals; he is led by his passions and caprices, and is incapable of hearing the voice of reason. It may probably too hurt your vanity to have husbands for whom you have reason to blush and tremble every time they open their lips in company. But the worst circumstance, that attends a fool, is his constant jealousy of his wife being thought to govern him. This renders it impossible to lead him, and he is continually doing absurd and disagreeable things, for no other reason but to shew he dares do them. A rake is always a suspicious husband, because he has only known the most worthless of your sex. He likewise entails the worst diseases on his wife and children, if he has the misfortune to have any. If you have a sense of religion yourselves, do not think of husbands who have none. If they have tolerable understandings, they will be glad that you have religion, for their own sakes, and for the sake of their families; but it will sink you in their esteem. If they are weak men, they will be continually teazing and shocking you about your principles.—If you have children, you will suffer the most bitter distress, in seeing all your endeavours to form their minds to virtue and piety, all your endeavours to secure their present and eternal happiness frustrated, and turned into ridicule. As I look on your choice of a husband to be of the greatest consequence to your happiness, I hope you will make it with the utmost circumspection. Do not give way to a sudden sally of passion, and dignify it with the name of love.—Genuine love is not founded in caprice; it is founded in nature, on honourable views, on virtue, on similarity of tastes and sympathy of souls. If you have these sentiments, you will never marry any one, when you are not in that situation, in point of fortune, which is necessary to the happiness of either of you. What that competency may be, can only be determined by your own tastes. It would be ungenerous in you to take advantage of a lover’s attachment, to plunge him into distress; and if he has any honour, no personal gratification will ever
  • 34. tempt him to enter into any connection which will render you unhappy. If you have as much between you as to satisfy all your reasonable demands, it is sufficient. I shall conclude with endeavouring to remove a difficulty which must naturally occur to any woman of reflection on the subject of marriage. What is to become of all these refinements of delicacy, that dignity of manners, which checked all familiarities, and suspended desire in respectful and awful admiration? In answer to this, I shall only observe, that if motives of interest or vanity have had any share in your resolutions to marry, none of these chimerical notions will give you any pain; nay they will very quickly appear as ridiculous in your own eyes, as they probably always did in the eyes of your husbands. They have been sentiments which have floated in your imaginations, but have never reached your hearts. But if these sentiments have been truly genuine, and if you have had the singular happy fate to attach those who understand them, you have no reason to be afraid. Marriage indeed, will at once dispel the enchantment raised by external beauty; but the virtues and graces that first warmed the heart, that reserve and delicacy which always left the lover something further to wish, and often made him doubtful of your sensibility or attachment, may and ought ever to remain. The tumult of passion will necessarily subside; but it will be succeeded by an endearment, that affects the heart in a more equal, more sensible, and tender manner.—But I must check myself, and not indulge in descriptions that may mislead you, and that too sensibly awake the remembrance of my happier days, which, perhaps, it were better for me to forget forever. I have thus given you my opinion on some of the most important articles of your future life, chiefly calculated for that period when you are just entering the world. I have endeavoured to avoid some peculiarities of opinion, which, from their contradiction to the general practice of the world, I might reasonably have suspected were not so well founded. But in writing to you, I am afraid my heart has
  • 35. been too full, and too warmly interested, to allow me to keep this resolution. This may have produced some embarrassment, and some seeming contradictions. What I have written has been the amusement of some solitary hours, and has served to divert some melancholy reflections.—I am conscious I undertook a task to which I was very unequal; but I have discharged a part of my duty.—You will at least be pleased with it, as the last mark of your father’s love and attention. THE END.
  • 37. CONTENTS. page Modesty, 7 Lying, 12 Good-Breeding, 15 Genteel Carriage, 21 Cleanliness of person, 25 Dress, 26 Elegance of Expression, 28 Address Phraseology, and small-talk, 33 Observation, 35 Absence of Mind, 37 Knowledge of the World, 39 Choice of Company, 51 Laughter, 55 Sundry Little Accomplishments, 57 Employment of Time, 71 Dignity of Manners, 74 Rules for Conversation, 79 A Father’s address to his Daughters, 93
  • 38. Religion, 96 Conduct and Behaviour, 102 Amusements, 110 Friendship, Love, Marriage, 116
  • 39. Transcriber’s Notes: Missing or obscured punctuation was silently corrected. Typographical errors were silently corrected. Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only when a predominant form was found in this book.
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