Discusses emotion, introducing Appraisal Theory to show how emotions and emotional language can be analysed, with a case study looking at multilingual correspondence within a community of European Catholic missionaries in nineteenth-century Australia.

Modern womanhood was also a project of social transformation, with an impact on gender roles as seen in conversations about marriage relationships and love. The 1950s and 1960s were an era of shifting standards in marriage across the globe where novel understandings of love departed from earlier romantic traditions with romantic love standing for youth, progress, and modernity. Companionate marriage had long featured within reform projects across the Middle East. The women’s press contributed to the process of translating marital ideals articulated in state discourse, poetry, fiction, and film into practice through the innovative feature of the advice column. By offering advice and responding to letters, journalists and their audience formed an emotional community within which to deliberate the gendered norms of modern behaviors such as courtship. Yet the promise of love became a tool to discipline youthful femininity into mature adult womanhood, while romantic love also worked to fortify newly constructed national borders by racializing these identities. Within the confines of the women’s press and its relative anonymity, young girls transformed the question of romance into an attack on double standards surrounding premarital sex that urged a reconsideration of hegemonic forms of masculinity.