• A key eighteenth-century debate centered on the essential characteristics of women and their appropriate education and social roles. Two of the most vociferous participants in this debate were Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Mary Wollstonecraft. Looking to nature as a guiding principle, Rousseau reasoned that women’s role in sexual intercourse and conception meant they were intended to be subordinate to men and devote themselves to motherhood and home life. Wollstonecraft responded that human virtue was a universal created by God that could not be differentiated by gender. While acknowledging that women were weaker in some ways than men, she insisted that they should strive to honor their God-given human dignity through education and duty, just like men.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education

“In the union of the sexes each contributes equally to the common aim, but not in the same way. From this diversity arises the first assignable difference in the moral relations of the two sexes. One ought to be active and strong, the other passive and weak. One must necessarily will and be able; it suffices that the other put up little resistance. . . .

Woman and man are made for one another, but their mutual dependence is not equal. Men depend on women because of their desires; women depend on men because of both their desires and their needs. We would survive more easily without them than they would without us. For them to have what is necessary to their station, they depend on us to give it to them, to want to give it to them, to esteem them worthy of it. They depend on our sentiments, on the value we set on their merit, on the importance we attach to their charms and their virtues. By the very law of nature women are at the mercy of men’s judgments, as much for their own sake as for that of their children. . . .

To please men, to be useful to them, to make herself loved and honored by them, to raise them when young, to care for them when grown, to counsel them, to console them, to make their lives agreeable and sweet — these are the duties of women at all times, and they ought to be taught from childhood.”

Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

“Rousseau declares that a woman should never, for a moment, feel herself independent, that she should be governed by fear to exercise her natural cunning, and made a coquettish slave in order to render her a more alluring object of desire, a sweeter companion to man, whenever he chooses to relax himself. . . .

What nonsense! When will a great man arise with sufficient strength of mind to puff away the fumes which pride and sensuality have thus spread over the subject! If women are by nature inferior to men, their virtues must be the same in quality, if not in degree, or virtue is a relative idea; consequently, their conduct should be founded on the same principles, and have the same aim. . . .

Cultivate their minds, give them the salutary, sublime curb of principle, and let them attain conscious dignity by feeling themselves only dependent on God. Teach them, in common with man, to submit to necessity, instead of giving, to render them more pleasing, a sex to morals.

Further, should experience prove that they cannot attain the same degree of strength of mind, perseverance, and fortitude, let their virtues be the same in kind, though they may vainly struggle for the same degree.”

Sources: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979), pp. 358, 364–365. Reproduced with permission of BASIC BOOKS in the format Republish in a book via Copyright Clearance Center; Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (London: Johnson, 1796), pp. 47–48, 71.

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