During the Enlightenment, women’s roles in society became the subject of heated debates. Some men resented what they saw as the growing power of women, especially in the salons. Rousseau railed against their corrupting influence: “Every woman at Paris gathers in her apartment a harem of men more womanish than she.” Rousseau’s Émile (Excerpt 1) offered his own influential answer to the question of how women should be educated. The Encyclopedia ignored the contributions of salon women and praised women who stayed at home; in the words of one typical contributor, women “constitute the principal ornament of the world. . . . May they, through submissive discretion and through simple, adroit, artless cleverness, spur us [men] on to virtue.” Many women objected to these characterizations. The editor of a prominent newspaper for women, Madame de Beaumer, wrote editorials blasting the masculine sense of superiority (Excerpt 2). Many prominent women writers specifically targeted Rousseau’s book because it proved to be the most influential educational treatise of the time (Excerpt 3). Their ideas formed the core of nineteenth-century feminism.

1. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile (1762)

Rousseau used the character of Émile’s wife-to-be, Sophie, to discuss his ideas about women’s education. Sophie is educated for a domestic role as wife and mother, and she is taught to be obedient, always helpful to her husband and family, and removed from any participation in the public world. Despite his insistence on the differences between men’s and women’s roles, many women enthusiastically embraced Rousseau’s ideas, for he placed great emphasis on maternal affections, breast-feeding, and child rearing. Rousseau’s own children, however, suffered the contradictions that characterized his life. By his own admission, he abandoned to a foundling hospital all the children he had by his lower-class common-law wife because he did not think he could support them properly; if their fate was like that of most abandoned children of the day, they met an early death.

There is no parity between man and woman as to the importance of sex. The male is only a male at certain moments; the female all her life, or at least throughout her youth, is incessantly reminded of her sex and in order to carry out its functions she needs a corresponding constitution. She needs to be careful during pregnancy; she needs rest after childbirth; she needs a quiet and sedentary life while she nurses her children; she needs patience and gentleness in order to raise them; a zeal and affection that nothing can discourage. . . .

On the good constitution of mothers depends primarily that of the children; on the care of women depends the early education of men; and on women, again, depend their morals, their passions, their tastes, their pleasures, and even their happiness. Thus the whole education of women ought to be relative to men. To please them, to be useful to them, to make themselves loved and honored by them, to educate them when young, to care for them when grown, to counsel them, to console them, and to make life agreeable and sweet to them—these are the duties of women at all times, and should be taught them from their infancy.

Source: Susan Groag Bell and Karen M. Offen, Women, the Family, and Freedom: The Debate in Documents, vol. 1, 1750–1880 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983), 46–49.

2. Madame de Beaumer, Editorial in Le Journal des Dames (1762)

Madame de Beaumer (d. 1766) was the first of three women editors of Le Journal des Dames (The Ladies’ Journal). She ran it for two years and published many editorials defending women against their male critics.

The success of the Journal des Dames allows us to triumph over those frivolous persons who have regarded this periodical as a petty work containing only a few bagatelles suited to help them kill time. In truth, Gentlemen, you do us much honor to think that we could not provide things that unite the useful to the agreeable. To rid you of your error, we have made our Journal historical, with a view to putting before the eyes of youth striking images that will guide them toward virtue. . . . An historical Journal des Dames! these Gentlemen reasoners reply. How ridiculous! How out of character with the nature of this work, which calls only for little pieces to amuse [ladies] during their toilette. . . . Please, Gentlemen beaux esprits [wits], mind your own business and let us write in a manner worthy of our sex; I love this sex, I am jealous to uphold its honor and its rights. If we have not been raised up in the sciences as you have, it is you who are the guilty ones.

Source: Susan Groag Bell and Karen M. Offen, Women, the Family, and Freedom: The Debate in Documents, vol. 1, 1750–1880 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983), 27–28.

3. Catharine Macaulay, Letters on Education (1787)

Catharine Sawbridge Macaulay-Graham (1731–1791) was one of the best-known English writers of the 1700s. She wrote immensely popular histories of England and also joined in the debate provoked by Rousseau’s Émile.

There is another prejudice . . . which affects yet more deeply female happiness, and female importance; a prejudice, which ought ever to have been confined to the regions of the east, because [of the] state of slavery to which female nature in that part of the world has been ever subjected, and can only suit with the notion of a positive inferiority in the intellectual powers of the female mind. You will soon perceive, that the prejudice which I mean, is that degrading difference in the culture of the understanding, which has prevailed for several centuries in all European societies. . . .

Among the most strenuous asserters of a sexual difference in character, Rousseau is the most conspicuous, both on account of that warmth of sentiment which distinguishes all his writing, and the eloquence of his compositions: but never did enthusiasm and the love of paradox, those enemies of philosophical disquisition, appear in more strong opposition to plain sense than in Rousseau’s definition of this difference. He sets out with a supposition, that Nature intended the subjection of the one sex to the other; that consequently there must be an inferiority of intellect in the subjected party; but as man is a very imperfect being, and apt to play the capricious tyrant, Nature, to bring things nearer to an equality, bestowed on the woman such attractive graces, and such an insinuating address, as to turn the balance on the other scale. . . .

The situation and education of women . . . is precisely that which must necessarily tend to corrupt and debilitate both the powers of mind and body. From a false notion of beauty and delicacy, their system of nerves is depraved before they come out of the nursery; and this kind of depravity has more influence over the mind, and consequently over morals, than is commonly apprehended.

Source: Susan Groag Bell and Karen M. Offen, Women, the Family, and Freedom: The Debate in Documents, vol. 1, 1750–1880 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983), 54–55.

Questions to Consider