Sophie: Woman's Education According 
to Rousseau and Wollstonecraft
 
by Heather E. Wallace
 
 
 
 
 
Give, without scruples, a woman's education to women, see to it that
 
they love the cares of their sex, that they possess modesty, that they
 
know how to grow old in their mŽnage and keep busy in their house.
 
 
 Jean Jacques Rousseau, Emile
 
 
 
The neglected education of my fellow-creatures is the grand source of
 
the misery I deplore.
 
 
 
 Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women
 
 
 
 
 
The salons of Jean Jacques Rousseau's day greatly admired his theories,
 
including his advocation of breast-feeding and his concept of natural
 
education. Today he has enormous influence on accepted educational
 
doctrines. Rousseau describes his methods in Emile, the story of a
 
boy's upbringing in natural state. Admiring his sentiment, Mary
 
Wollstonecraft applauded Rousseau's scheme for Emile but deplored the
 
neglect of Emile's perfect wife, Sophie. Her disappointment in
 
Rousseau was a main influence on Wollstonecraft's best-known work, A
 
Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Rousseau outlines his theories for
 
the ideal education for women in Chapter V of Emile written between
 
1757 and 1761. These so contradict his plan for Emile that it becomes
 
necessary to place them in the framework of his time and the particular
 
prejudices of Rousseau. Certainly he broke no ground regarding the
 
topic of women. Nearly a hundred years before Emile, Mrs. Makin
 
published An Essay to Revive the Ancient Education of Gentlewomen. In
 
her Serious Proposal to Ladies of 1694, Mary Astell advocated a
 
convent where serious-minded women might retire for study and
 
contemplation. In his Essay on Projects , Daniel Defoe suggests an
 
academy for women where they might study whatever they chose. He
 
observes as early as 1697, "We reproach the sex every day with folly
 
and impertinence, while I am confident, had they the advantages of
 
education equal to us, they would be guilty of less than ourselves."1
 
As women and their education were very popular topics among the
 
frequenters of the salons, Rousseau was often drawn into their
 
discussions as a consultant. After publication Rousseau realized some
 
recognition as a spokesman for the rights of people, although there was
 
a decided rise in the intensity of demands for recognition of women's
 
state.2
 
 
 
Rousseau describes his passionate feelings for several women in his
 
life in his Confessions, the first of which was the strange feelings he
 
had as a boy when Mademoiselle Lambercier punished him. "Who would
 
have believed that the chastisement I received at eight from a
 
thirty-year-old girl would have determined my tastes, desires, and
 
passions for the rest of my life?"3 Having left Protestant Switzerland
 
for Catholic France, Rousseau began to meet the women who would support
 
and influence his work for the rest of his life. One of his first
 
encounters was with Madame de Warens, whom he referred to as maman,
 
also a convert to Catholicism and an escapee from Geneva. Because of
 
her support he was able to take part in knowledgeable conversations,
 
philosophical discussions, and intellectual pursuits. From her
 
privileged position he was able to observe with fraternal pity the
 
people whose fate he might have shared.
 
 
 
At the age of thirty, Rousseau left Madame de Warens' residence. He
 
wished to be accepted in the intellectual circles of the salons, and to
 
gain entrance to the Academie des Sciences. He succeeded at the
 
Academie but failed to be accepted socially at the salons. One of his
 
sponsors, P�re Castel, advised, "Since musicians and servants will not
 
sing together with you, change your tactics, and try the women."4 He
 
took this advice and made the acquaintance of several intelligent and
 
influential women.
 
 
 
According to Claude Fervel in Jean Jacques Rousseau et les femmes,
 
Rousseau's feelings of inferiority among these women induced his
 
unnatural attachment to a twenty-three year old servant girl, ThŽr�se
 
Levasseur. "She is so limited," says Hume, "that she knows neither the
 
year, the month, nor the day of the week; she is unaware of the value
 
of money and in spite of all that, she has on Jean Jacques the empire
 
of a nurse over her charge."5 Certainly Levasseur had some influence
 
in Rousseau's concept of the ideal woman.
 
 
 
Rousseau primarily claimed that "[n]ature has created man happy and
 
good, but society depraves him and makes him miserable."6 In the
 
eighteenth century, morality took on a new meaning founded on the
 
natural goodness of man. Happiness became a right supplanting the idea
 
of duty. Sensual delights were natural and therefore rational. All of
 
Rousseau's educational theories derive from his attempt to preserve
 
nature's pure state. His concept of negative education allowed a child
 
to discover for himself and to be punished by the nature he sought to
 
defy. The tutor must not try to reason with the child or show
 
authority. Books would not be forced on the child; at twelve Emile
 
would hardly know what to do with a book. Positive education, or
 
direct instruction, would only begin at approximately the age of
 
adulthood, and then the studies would be based on the student's natural
 
curiosity. Rousseau stressed utility, the need for teaching things
 
with practical applications.
 
 
 
This concept of negative education as applicable to women was totally
 
inconceivable to Rousseau. He viewed women's options as entirely
 
limited to the roles of wife and mother. What need would there be to
 
allow her to determine for herself when nature had already
 
physiologically dictated her destiny? His scheme for Emile was
 
radical; his scheme for Sophie was not radical enough. Rousseau
 
demanded a reversion to primitivism in the education of women, offering
 
minimal vocational training while insisting on her inability to reason
 
and her inferiority to man. "A woman's education must be planned in
 
relation to man".[S]he will always be in subjection to a man"and she
 
will never be free to set her own opinion above his."7 He stresses
 
freedom of movement and physical exertion for Emile, asserting that
 
weak bodies contain weak minds. At the same time he discourages Sophie
 
from too much physical activity and uses her weakness as another proof
 
of her inferiority. "The object of that cultivation is different. In
 
the one sex it is the development of corporeal powers; in the other,
 
that of personal charms," Rousseau asserts.8
 
 
 
Emile is not instructed in religious matters until he reaches
 
adulthood. He has a natural sense of morality "from reason tempered by
 
the heart."9 Presumably woman cannot reason, so she cannot maintain a
 
state of morality, and must be guarded by men throughout her life.
 
Rousseau proposes that Sophie must be made to love virtue, although she
 
will never understand theological rationale for living uprightly. She
 
must be made to feel subject to society's opinions of her. In fact,
 
Sophie fails at this. In the fragmentary sequel to Emile, Les
 
Solitaires, Rousseau tells of the infidelity of Sophie who had been
 
"educated" to be Emile's ideal wife. Mary Wollstonecraft makes no
 
mention of this book and probably never read it, but she would make the
 
right assumptions about the likelihood of Sophie's fidelity.
 
 
 
Helen Misenheimer points out in Rousseau on the Education of Women that
 
Rousseau leaves off the sexual education of Emile in describing
 
Sophie. In fact, she is his sexual identity. Rousseau considers a
 
man's union with a woman a debasement of his nature. While insisting
 
on the importance of motherhood, he stumbles on women's role as
 
mothers. In addressing mothers in Book I of Emile, he acknowledges
 
their primacy in the education of youth. By denying women the ability
 
to reason he denies them the ability to raise children, which Mary
 
Wollstonecraft later attempts to prove.
 
 
 
Francis Gribble proposes, "Contemporary critics contended that Jean
 
Jacques did not mean a word that he said; the difficulty of the modern
 
critic is to discover that he ever said anything at all which he did
 
not immediately afterwards contradict."10 When accosted by a father
 
who informed him he was using the Emile method to raise his son,
 
Rousseau replied that he was sorry for him but even sorrier for his
 
son.11 Certainly he contradicts himself in Chapter V of Emile. One
 
must ask if woman is as "natural" as man, and nature is essentially
 
good, then why should the same principles of "negative education" not
 
apply to women? Misenheimer discusses the dichotomy of women in
 
Rousseau's writings. She claims that Rousseau makes woman totally
 
subservient to man, making her into a mere plaything for the superior
 
sex. Yet by inserting Sophie in her place in his educational theories,
 
he encourages others to give the question further thought at a moment
 
in history when social revolution uniquely supports her. This is
 
exactly the cause which Mary Wollstonecraft takes up. Furthermore, by
 
speaking of all society and not just the elite, he becomes one of the
 
first writers even to recognize the ordinary woman, giving her a
 
foothold to independence. Rousseau certainly did not intend to
 
liberate women; he advocated the freedom of man.
 
 
 
 Mary Wollstonecraft reputedly tried to rear one of her charges, Ann
 
 Fuseli, as a child of nature. The experiment proved disappointing
 
 when she caught her stealing and lying.14 She considered herself a
 
 rationalist, but she greatly admired Rousseau's "pure sentiment." She
 
 did not, however, share Rousseau's admiration for primitive society,
 
 and took great exception to his views of women. In A Vindication of
 
 the Rights of Woman she asserts, "Rousseau exerts himself to prove
 
 that all was right originally: a crowd of authors that all is now
 
 right: and I, that all will be right [sic]."12
 
 
 
Her most famous and controversial work, Rights of Woman, was not the
 
first work to advocate better education for women. Among
 
Wollstonecraft's contemporaries, there were several in France who had
 
written in behalf of women. Olympe de Gouges spoke boldly in defense
 
of her sex in several publications, one titled A Declaration of the
 
Rights of Woman. Condorcet advocated better education for women in
 
Memoirs on Public Instruction. Wollstonecraft had reviewed Catherine
 
Macaulay's Letters on Education for the Analytical, and acknowledged
 
her debt to the work in Rights of Woman. Letters denies any
 
fundamental difference in character between the sexes, attributing
 
women's weaknesses to faulty education and social position.
 
Wollstonecraft repeats and develops almost every point of her work.
 
 
 
Like many English intellectuals, Wollstonecraft watched the French
 
Revolution with interest, anticipating that the great social experiment
 
would one day reach her shore. The Revolution "must have seemed like a
 
happy fusion of all she had been taught to respect by her sage London
 
friends, and all that she cherished by nature".And so she, like many of
 
her countrymen, looked hopefully to France as the great
 
proving-ground."13 She espouses the cause of freedom in her
 
Vindication of the Rights of Men, written in reply to Edmund Burke's
 
Reflections on the Revolution in France. She digresses occasionally in
 
this work, criticizing the effects of wealth and rank and chiding Burke
 
for his fondness for waifishness and weakness in women.
 
 
 
In her previous work, Wollstonecraft had shown an interest in women's
 
status without directly addressing the matter. According to her
 
husband William Godwin, she spent only six weeks in actual composition,
 
but she had been developing the ideas for Rights of Woman all her
 
life. She found that most writers showed either outright disdain or
 
condescending praise of women's weakness. The immediate cause of
 
Rights of Woman was Talleyrand's Report on Public Institution, an
 
outline of the projected plan of national education under a new French
 
constitution. Talleyrand declared that girls should be educated with
 
boys only until the age of eight. Wollstonecraft prefaces her book
 
with a letter to Talleyrand which urges him and his compatriots not
 
to deny women their rights.13
 
 
 
Wollstonecraft seeks to find a rational explanation for the state of
 
her sex. She questions whether women are really created for the
 
pleasure of men:
 
 
 
[T]hough the cry of irreligion, or even atheism, be raised against, I
 
will simply declare, that were an angel from heaven to tell me that
 
Moses's beautiful, poetical cosmogony, and the account of the fall of
 
man, were literally true, I could not believe what my reason told me
 
was derogatory to the character of the Supreme Being.14
 
 
 
She discovers the only reason for women's state is their lack of
 
education. In Chapter V she attacks several writers, especially
 
Rousseau, who had written poor accounts of women. Wollstonecraft cites
 
and comments on long passages from Emile. She is not unaware of
 
Rousseau's relationships with women. In her chapter "On National
 
Education," she states:
 
 
 
Who ever drew a more exalted female character than Rousseau? Though in
 
the lump he constantly endeavoured to degrade the sex. And why was he
 
thus anxious? Truly to justify to himself the affection which weakness
 
and virtue had made him cherish for that fool Theresa. He could not
 
raise her to the common level of her sex; and therefore he labored to
 
bring woman down to hers. He found her a convenient humble companion,
 
and pride made him determine to find some superiour virtues in the
 
being whom he chose to live with; but did not her conduct during his
 
life, and after his death, clearly show how grossly he was mistaken who
 
called her a celestial innocent.15
 
 
 
 
 
She treats his description of Sophie with smug indignation, as when
 
Rousseau describes Sophie's garb, "simple as it seems, was only put in
 
its proper order to be taken to pieces by the imagination." To this
 
she retorts, "Is this modesty? Is this a preparation for
 
immortality?"16 She correctly accuses Rousseau of depicting not a wife
 
and sensible mother, but a pleasing mistress.
 
 
 
Getting to the heart of Rousseau's error, she determines:
 
 
 
Men have superior strength of body, but were it not for mistaken
 
notions of beauty, women would acquire sufficient to enable them to
 
earn their own subsistence, the true definition of independence". Let
 
us then, by being allowed to take the same exercise as boys, not only
 
during infancy, but youth, arrive at perfection of boys, that we may
 
know how far the natural superiority of man extends.17
 
 
 
She cautions that she has no desire to breed a generation of
 
independent and unattached women like herself, but that she seeks to
 
develop wiser and more virtuous mothers. She believes that children's
 
characters are formed before the age of seven, shuddering to think of
 
the damage done by addle-headed mothers. Without stressing
 
independence she believes that once women gain intellectual equality,
 
they should be given political and economic equality as well.
 
 
 
In Chapter XII, "On National Education," Wollstonecraft develops her
 
proposal. She feels that private education is confined to the Žlite,
 
and that school-children need the company of other children. She has
 
an aversion to boarding schools because of the interruptions of
 
vacations. She suggests day schools where children may spend time with
 
other children. These need to be national establishments, so that
 
school-matters are not left to the "caprice of the parents."18 Like
 
Rousseau, she emphasizes that children must be allowed to play freely.
 
 
 
What is so radical about Wollstonecraft's idea is that girls are not
 
educated relative to boys, but with them. She states:
 
 
 
If marriage be the cement of society, mankind should all be educated
 
after the same model, or the intercourse of the sexes will never
 
deserve the name of fellowship, nor will women ever fulfill the
 
peculiar duties of their sex". Nay, marriage will never be held sacred
 
till women, by being brought up with men, are prepared to be their
 
companions rather than their mistresses.19
 
 
 
After the age of nine, girls and boys intended for domestic employments
 
or mechanical trades will be removed to other schools. The two sexes
 
will still study together in the mornings, and in the afternoons girls
 
will learn millinery, mantua-making, and other fitting pursuits.
 
 
 
Girls and boys still together? I hear some readers ask: yes. And I
 
should not fear any other consequence than that some early attachment
 
might take place". Besides, this would be a sure way to promote early
 
marriages, and from early marriages the most salutary physical and
 
moral effects naturally flow.20
 
 
 
Women should be taught anatomy and medicine to make them rational
 
nurses of their infants, parents, and husbands.
 
 
 
At the time of its publication in 1792, A Vindication of the Rights of
 
Women was considered radical and revolutionary. By the end of the year
 
Joseph Johnson published a second edition. An American edition
 
appeared in Boston and Philadelphia, and a French translation appeared
 
in Paris and Lyons. Aaron Burr admired it and attempted to raise his
 
own daughter according to its principles, although he complained in
 
1793 that he had "not yet met a single person who had discovered or
 
would allow the merit of this book."21 Contemporary reactions ranged
 
from shock to amusement to enthusiasm. Despite a number of
 
mean-spirited parodies, including A Sketch of the Rights of Boys and
 
Girls and A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes, there is no doubt her
 
book had a tremendous impact on British and American feminism. Her
 
argument that one must educate mothers so they may better raise their
 
children would be echoed by the advocates of "Republican Motherhood" in
 
the first years of the new American republic.22
 
 
 
Mary Wollstonecraft's ideas were savagely attacked after her death,
 
when the horrors of the French Revolution had convinced most Englishmen
 
that all revolutionary theories were dangerous. However, there is
 
little doubt that her ideas live on, and like Rousseau's, still have an
 
impact on education. Public education, teaching by the exploitation of
 
natural curiosity, practical applications, are all ideas descended from
 
Rousseau and Wollstonecraft. Most distinctive of these is
 
Wollstonecraft's radical notion that women and men be educated
 
together.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
1As cited in Ralph M. Wardle, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Critical
 
Biography (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1951), p. 143.
 
 
 
2Helen Evans Misenheimer, Rousseau on the Education of Women
 
(Washington, DC: University Press of America, Inc., 1981), p. 64.
 
 
 
3Confessions, I as cited by Misenheimer, p. 21.
 
 
 
4Ibid., p. 24.
 
 
 
5Claude Fervel, Jean-Jacques Rousseau et les femmes, as cited by
 
Misenheimer, p. 26.
 
 
 
6Misenheimer, p. 19.
 
 
 
7Rousseau, pp. 322, 325.
 
 
 
8Rousseau, as cited by Wollstonecraft, p. 176.
 
 
 
9Rousseau, as cited by Misenheimer, p. 39.
 
 
 
10Francis Gribble, Rousseau and the Women he Loved, as cited by
 
Misenheimer, p. 4.
 
 
 
11William Boyd, The Minor Educational Writings of Jean Jacques
 
Rousseau, as cited by Misenheimer, p. 8.
 
 
 
12Wardle, p. 178.
 
 
 
13Wollstonecraft, p. 22.
 
 
 
14Wollstonecraft, pp. 173-174.
 
 
 
15Ibid., pp. 403-404.
 
 
 
16Ibid., p.195.
 
 
 
17Ibid., p. 189.
 
 
 
18Ibid., p. 379.
 
 
 
19Ibid., pp. 380, 381.
 
 
 
20Ibid., p. 389.
 
 
 
21Matthew L. Davis, Memoirs of Aaron Burr, as cited by Wardle, p.158.
 
 
 
22Linda K. Kerber, "The Republican Mother," Women's America (Oxford:
 
Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 87-95.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
.