Rousseau and the Modern Patriarchal Tradition
The ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau on women—on their nature, their education, and their proper place in the social and political order—are worthy of thorough examination for three important reasons. The case he argues is, in a qualified sense, representative of the whole Western tradition regarding women; his views are, unusually, very consciously held and adamantly justified, in spite of the fact that they violate all the major principles of his ethics and social theory; and their effects are tragic, even within the context of his own philosophy.
Albeit in an exaggerated way and sometimes with almost hysterical fervor, Rousseau argues all the most commonly held assertions that have, as part of our patriarchal culture, rationalized the separation and oppression of women throughout the history of the Western world. He argues, to begin with, that woman’s sharply distinct position and functions are those that are natural to her sex. It is interesting, since Rousseau was so much an advocate of the natural, to see how different his reasoning is about what is natural in and for women from about what is natural in and for “man.” In keeping with a long tradition that as we have seen, reaches back to Aristotle and beyond, Rousseau defines woman’s nature, unlike man’s, in terms of her function—that is, her sexual and procreative purpose in life. While man has been categorized in terms of a generally limitless potential, for rational thought, creativity, and so on, woman has been viewed as functionally determined by her reproductive role, and her actual and potential abilities perceived as stunted, in accordance with what have been regarded as the requirements of this role. Woman’s function is seen as physical and sensual, whereas man’s potential is seen as creative and intellectual. For centuries, the extreme disparities between the method and extent of the education of the two sexes have been conveniently glossed over, as they are by Rousseau, as the case is made that women, while intuitive and equipped with a talent for detail, are deficient in rationality and quite incapable of abstract thought.1
Equally in keeping with a tradition that has invented Pandora, Clytemnaestra, Lilith, Eve, succubi and witches, Rousseau saw women as a major source of the world’s evil. As a recent historian of patriarchal attitudes has said, “Woman as a source of danger, as a repository of externalized evil, is an image that runs through patriarchal history.”2 In Rousseau’s writings about women, we can clearly discern his consciousness that it was woman who aroused in him that sexuality which produced in him feelings of both fear and guilt,3 and who by her ability to arouse him endangered his independence and self-sufficiency. Since she is seen, in this sphere, as unlimitedly powerful, the conclusion drawn is that woman must be thoroughly subjugated in other spheres if even a balance of power, let alone man’s superiority, is to be maintained. Since she is depicted as the source of sin and evil, her subjection is seen as her justified desert, and consequently Rousseau had his own version of God’s cursing Eve with the pains of childbirth.4
As man’s sexual object, woman must not only assume a subordinate position; she is also radically dichotomized. Man, with his passionate impulses and desire for pleasure, wants the female to be seductive and arousing; at the same time, out of fear of his own sexuality, he asks her to be responsible for controlling what he conceives to be his unlimited desires. Hence the demand for her to be asexual and chaste. Either different classes of women, or the same woman in a Jekyll and Hyde manner, have been required to be both highly desirable and icy pure, hypersexual and asexual. For Rousseau (who had an exaggerated terror of syphilis even in an age that was so concerned with it),5 the solution that would provide two different types of women to fulfill the two functions was untenable. He represents, instead, a classic example of the demand for the individual woman to be both filled with shame and modesty about sexuality and as enticing as an eastern houri, to be as chaste as marble but to be made for love, to be sober and confined after marriage though coquettish and gay before, to refrain from the least gesture of flirtation with other men but to be everlastingly seductive toward her husband—in short, to be both virgin and prostitute.
Finally, the problem of establishing paternity—a matter of considerable importance in a number of other accounts of the status of women—was an obsession with Rousseau. He refers frequently in his works to the need for a man to be absolutely certain of the faithfulness of his wife in order to insure that his children are indeed his own, thus setting entirely different standards of morality for the two sexes. On this basis Rousseau justifies the absolute rule of men over their wives, the confinement of women in the home after marriage, the desirability of segregation of the sexes even within the household, and a moral education for women that is the complete opposite of what he proposes for the moral education of men. The standard of excellence in a man is a complex one, but the only important virtue in a woman is chastity.
Given the predispositions and general trends of thought indicated above, it is hardly surprising that Rousseau, the philosopher of equality and freedom, should not have applied these basic human values similarly to both sexes. As we shall see, when he undertook to explore the origins of inequality among men, it was literally men that were the subject of his investigation; the inequality of the sexes was assumed in passing, as though it did not also need to be investigated. Rousseau’s failure to apply his most cherished ideals to the female sex will be analyzed in Chapter 7.
Rousseau’s patriarchal theories about women are of course representative of a long tradition. They cannot, however, be glossed over as mere biases or assumptions of the contemporary scene or as anachronistic prejudices to which he gave little thought, which have slight bearing on the main body of his work, and which, in all deference to his genius, should be tactfully ignored. This is so for a number of reasons. Emile, in which the ideal education for women is described at length, was claimed by its author to be “the best and most important of all my works,” and the one with which one should begin, in order to understand his whole philosophy.6 The essentials of his thought, he asserted, are contained within Emile and the First and Second Discourses7 Moreover, it was Book 5 of Emile, about half of which is concerned with the rearing and education of the ideal woman, Sophie, which Rousseau claimed to be his favorite part of the work. And, as Pierre Burgelin has said of Book 5, “Quant au ton, ce qui concerne Sophie est écrit avec un frémissement que le reste ne comporte évidemment pas.”8 Again, the importance to Rousseau of his ideas and assertions about women is testified to by the fact that he wrote to a critic that the whole object of his Letter to M. d’Alembert, which we generally consider to be about the theater, was to demonstrate how women are to blame for the corruption of society.9
Rousseau was certainly not disposed, in general, to accept contemporary opinion or prejudice.10 It is by no means predictable that such an iconoclast should take a not merely conservative, but positively reactionary stance on the issue of the position of women. He openly challenged those philosophers who regarded his views about women as old-fashioned prejudice and deceit, maintained by men to protect their patriarchal privileges, and took it upon himself to show that the subordination of women was not the result of mere prejudice or convention but was part of the natural and necessary order of things.11 Thus while an independent man like Emile should not take account of the opinions of those around him with respect to other matters, the prejudice, so-called, that held a man accountable for his wife’s misconduct was a unique and justifiable one, because the whole order of society depends on its being maintained.12 Indeed, Rousseau claimed that the inequality between the sexes which is reflected in law and custom “is not of man’s making, or at any rate it is not the result of mere prejudice, but of reason.”13
In the period in which Rousseau wrote, there was no lack of discussion of the subject of women, their status in society, and the question of whether their subordination to men was their natural position or rather the result of centuries of discrimination practiced against them in the interests of patriarchal culture. In the Lettres persanes, Montesquieu had raised some of the central issues, such as the socialization of women, the importance of their sexual fidelity, and the institution of monogamy itself.14 In the Esprit des lois, moreover, he states unequivocally that it is nature which has distinguished men by their reason and strength and women by their charms, and that the sexual boldness of men and shame and resistance of women are likewise dictated by nature.15 On the other hand, Helvétius, in De l’Homme et de l’éducation, gives a very different explanation of the contemporary differences between the sexes. Referring to the examples of famous women in several important spheres of life, he argues that they are not naturally disadvantaged in comparison with men. “If women be in general inferior,” he says, “it is because in general they receive a still worse education.”16 However, the first substantial application of Enlightenment theories about the importance of environment and education to the case of women is to be found in the chapter “Des Femmes” of Baron d’Holbach’s Systeme sociale. “From the way in which women in all countries are brought up,” he asserts, “it seems that it is only intended to turn them into beings who retain the frivolity, fickleness, caprices and lack of reason of childhood, throughout their lives.”17 The refusal of contemporary European society to give them a sensible education, he argues, is just another instance of the universal enslavement to which women have always been subjected. In the Encyclopedic of the philosophes, too, there are a number of articles under the heading “Femmes,” in which the case is argued for and against the naturalness of various female characteristics and of the subordination of women to the authority of men.18
Moreover, not only was Rousseau not writing about women in a vacuum, but he himself had in his early adulthood held views on the subject that were very different from those he so adamantly asserted in his major works. He had collaborated with a Mme. Dupin on a proposed book about the condition of women in society, of which only a few pages are known to be extant, and which was clearly to constitute a violent and revolutionary attack on the position forced on women.19 His two brief essays on women, which date from the 1730s when he was living at Chamblry, likewise reveal Rousseau as having held far more radical opinions about women and their proper role in his youth than in his middle age.20 The latter then, for all the above reasons, are certainly not unquestioned assumptions, but constitute a consciously thought-out position.
The final major reason for the importance of Rousseau’s arguments about the proper education and role of women is that the results of his proposals are tragic, even within the confines of his own social theory. They are tragic, moreover, not only for women themselves, but for those two institutions which he depicted as the ideal modes of human experience. As we shall see in Chapter 8, a woman socialized in the way Rousseau approved of, and subject to the constraints that he claimed were right for her, would have an extremely high propensity for undermining the monogamous family and the ideal republic, and, moreover, for being destroyed herself in the process. We have only to follow and reflect on the fates of the two ideal women He created—Julie, in La Nouvelle Héloise, and Sophie, in Emile and its unfinished sequel—to see that his theory of the education and treatment of women, in practice leads to tragic conclusions. Rousseau’s perceptive recognition of the conflicts of loyalties with which human beings are faced led him to pessimistic conclusions about the fate of man, but his conclusions concerning the fate of the only type of woman he could conceive of are even worse.