The Natural Woman and her Role
The most prevalent argument used to justify the perpetuation of a distinct and subordinate sex role for the female is that such a role is natural. Far from being anything imposed on or developed in her by particular social, economic and cultural institutions, the passive, dependent, chaste, subrational, sensitive, nurturing characteristics of the female have been regarded as bestowed on her, directly and unmistakably, by nature.1 Since Rousseau is the archetypal modern instance of this mode of argument, and since glorification of the natural is a theme that pervades his entire philosophy, it is important to examine with care exactly how his case is made.
A substantial part of Rousseau’s writings in general is devoted to what amounts to a deification of the natural, in mankind and its mode of living, and to the rejection, or at least devastating criticism, of most of those results of civilization which his contemporaries were inclined to laud unambivalently as constituents of progress. The epigraph he chose from Aristotle’s Politics to introduce the Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men reads: “Not in corrupt things, but in those which are well ordered in accordance with nature, should one consider that which is natural.” It may well be considered one of his most fundamental principles, and the refrain that “nature never lies” occurs throughout most of his works.2 Just as Emile’s education is so carefully planned in order to enable him to be a natural man in a corrupt world, so is Sophie, his proposed wife, to be educated as a natural woman. Advising her to honor her position as a woman, Rousseau tells Sophie, “The essential thing is to be what nature made us. We are always too much inclined to be what men want us to be.”3 Since Sophie’s education is such a complete contrast to Emile’s, it is essential to see what reasoning is employed to discover the natural man and how it differs from that used to discover the natural woman.
Rousseau used two principal means to separate what is natural in man from the characteristics he has acquired from social life and civilization. One way was to try to separate the innate characteristics of the individual from those that are the product of his environment. The real purpose of Emile is to show what a man could be like, educated independently of popular prejudice. Rousseau claims to develop in Emile those innate qualities usually so stunted and warped by a corrupt society that we no longer know what man is really like. The sharp contrast between the ways he applies the nature/nurture distinction to the two sexes will be discussed below.
The other method for discovering natural man, through an hypothesized “state of nature,” was of course by no means uniquely Rousseau’s. The concept of the state of nature has been used by many philosophers in an attempt to strip away the historical accidentals and effects of social and/or political life, in order to find out what human nature and human relations are like in their most fundamental state. By some philosophers, for example Locke, the concept has been used simply to examine man in a state of lawlessness. In some versions, however, including Rousseau’s, it is aimed at separating the effects on human beings of education, technological advance, the division of labor, private property, and a multitude of other social and political institutions, from a human nature that is construed as prior to all these accretions, logically if not chronologically. Then, at least usually, the theorist makes use of the conclusions reached in this manner to argue for a social and political order which is justified and legitimated by the human characteristics that have been established as natural.
This is the type of philosophical voyage of discovery that Rousseau embarks on in the Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men. As he argues in the Preface to the work, in which he justifies his method, we cannot discover the source of inequality amongst men unless we know what man is really like. We must consider, not that disfigured and unrecognizable statue of Glaucus which so many factors in the history of society have distorted, but man “as nature formed him” in “his original constitution” with “his true needs, and … the principles underlying his duties.” Only thus can we “succeed … in separating, in the present constitution of things, what divine will has done from what human art has pretended to do.”4 Making it very clear that he has no pretensions to historical accuracy, but aims only to clarify the nature of things by means of hypothetical reasoning, Rousseau sets out to discover the natural state of mankind. No previous philosopher claiming this discovery had, he asserts, actually penetrated as far back as natural man.
As has been noted,5 Rousseau’s discourse does not postulate a single, simple state of nature, but rather a series of several, culturally distinct stages. Of these, he suggests to the reader, “you will seek the age at which you would desire your species had stopped.”6 It is important to note both that the stage of mankind as isolated brutes, which is what he calls “the state of nature,” is not the age at which he desires that his species had stopped, and, more importantly in the present context, that he refers back to different hypothesized stages in order to assert the “natural” status of different qualities and states of affairs. This is particularly true with respect to both the natural woman and the natural status of the family.
In the first section of the Discourse on Inequality, Rousseau draws a picture of what we will henceforth refer to as his “original state of nature.” This was the stage at which, he hypothesizes, human beings of both sexes had lived isolated and nomadic lives, totally devoid of cooperation except for the momentary and chance encounters that satisfied their sexual impulses. Male and female copulated, with no preference for one individual over another, since they had no capacity for comparison. Then, each going his or her own way, they would not recognize each other if they met again. Thus, it is argued, natural and instinctual sexuality is radically different from sexual love as experienced in civilized society—from that terrible and impetuous passion which “in its fury, seems fitted to destroy the human race it is destined to preserve.”7 In the state of nature, sexuality was a simple animal appetite, analogous to hunger and the need for rest, an instinct designed to ensure the perpetuation of the species, and readily satisfied by any willing member of the opposite sex who chanced to pass by. What savage man experienced was just the physical part of the feeling of love, as opposed to the moral part, which attaches itself to one preferred object, and is “an artifical sentiment born of the usage of society.”8
Since no one in this original state of nature had any contacts with, or even any means of recognizing, anyone else, the females were in practice the only parents of their offspring. Though not endowed with any maternal instinct, the female would suckle the child at first for the sake of her own comfort, and later because habit had endeared it to her. As soon as the child could subsist alone, it left her, and the two would no longer recognize each other. The human female, Rousseau argues, is well equipped to nourish her child and feed and protect herself as well, since she can carry it easily and without slowing her own pace. Indeed, he goes to great lengths, in a note, to argue fiercely against the “specious objection” that Locke had raised against the idea that natural man lived in isolation—the contention, that is, that the conjunction of the two parents in marriage is necessary for the survival of the human species, and that therefore no state of nature can reasonably be hypothesized that does not suppose the existence of the nuclear family.9
Without going into all the details of either Locke’s argument or Rousseau’s counter argument, it is important to point out several assertions in the latter that radically conflict with Rousseau’s subsequent claims about the natural status of the family. First he claims that, in a natural state, prior to cohabitation, pregnancies would be likely to occur less frequently and children would be tougher and sooner able to fend for themselves, so that mothers, unlikely to have more than one dependent child at a time, would be quite capable of rearing them unaided. Second, in the original state of nature, since male and female separate after copulation, and no man therefore knows which children are his, there is no logical reason for him to help a female to rear her child. The assumption that he would is held up by Rousseau as a prime example of the failure of Locke, no less than Hobbes, to get beyond the centuries of society to the real state of nature, in which no one had any reason to cohabit or cooperate with anyone else. Third, Rousseau criticizes Locke’s state of nature methodology in an even more devastating way. Locke is attacked on the grounds that he has used “moral proofs” in his argument for the natural existence of the family; he has referred to the male as “bound to take care for those he hath begot” and therefore “under an obligation” to stay with the female until the children can subsist on their own.10 Such moral arguments, Rousseau objects, “do not have great force in matters of physics, and … they serve rather to give a reason for existing facts than to prove the real existence of those facts.”11 From his next statement it is clear that he is disinguishing between what a philosopher may want to justify as good, and what he can prove to be necessary in the natural order of things. For he says, “Although it may be advantageous to the human species for the union between man and woman to be permanent, it does not follow that it was thus established by nature; otherwise it would be necessary to say that nature also instituted civil society, the arts, commerce, and all that is claimed to be useful to men.”12 And this, clearly, would utterly undermine the purpose of the state of nature concept, for one could define into it any human institution one found desirable.
In Rousseau’s original state of nature, then, there is no sexual love apart from indiscriminately and mutually satisfied instinct, and no marriage, family, or any other sign of dependence of one sex on the other, or inequality between them. When he says, in Emile, that “there is, in the state of nature, in fact, a real and indestructible equality, since it is impossible in that state for the bare difference between one man and another to be sufficient to make one dependent on the other,”13 he has no legitimate reason for excluding the female half of the species. Indeed, considering that the isolated, natural woman was supposed capable of feeding herself and her offspring, while man had only himself to preserve, it would be difficult to argue that she was anything less than equal.14
Rousseau’s attitude to the original state of nature was by no means one of unambivalent rejection. While its inhabitants were in a grossly undeveloped and primitive state, they were undoubtedly free, and independence was one of the most important, if not the most important, of values for him. “What type of misery [can there] be,” he asks, “for a free being whose heart is at peace and whose body is healthy?”15 While the original state of nature is not his chosen age, he asks that we at least suspend judgment on it until we have seen what is to follow. Moreover, it was the only era completely free of the evils of selfishness, as distinguished from a healthy degree of self-love. As soon as there was any regular contact among individuals, selfishness had begun to contaminate mankind, and it is to the original state of nature that Rousseau looks back in order to prove that man is naturally good.16 He is good because he has no need for anyone else, does not compare himself with anyone else, and has no reason to fear that anyone will seek to hurt him.
The decisive events which separate the natural state of mankind from the beginning of civil society in the Discourse on Inequality are the establishment of private property in land, and the division of labor between agriculture and metallurgy. It was from this point on, Rousseau asserts, that some men began to enslave and exploit others, since each was no longer self-sufficient, and all the evils of social inequality had germinated and grown. Rousseau’s preferred stage in man’s hypothetical history is the long period which lies between the original state of nature and the era of inequality which he saw as resulting from the division of labor—that is, the “golden age” of the patriarchal nuclear family. It is very clear, both from his praise for it in the discourse itself and from the numerous attempts he made to recreate the situation, in Emile, in La Nouvelle Héloise, and in his idealized descriptions of the Swiss mountain people, that the self-sufficient, rural, patriarchal family was for Rousseau at least one of the two best possible modes of life for man, and the only one possible in a corrupt age. He called it “the veritable prime of the world.”17
As Lovejoy has remarked, “For Rousseau, in short, man’s good lay in departing from his ‘natural’ state, but not too much.”18 However, the extent of the departure from self-sufficiency and independence that was required in order to enter Rousseau’s nuclear family was considerably greater for the woman than for the man. Suddenly, in a single paragraph, and virtually without explanation, he postulates “a first revolution,” in which, together with rudimentary tools and the first huts, which together constituted “a sort of property,” appears the very first cohabitation, in the form of the monogamous nuclear family. Suddenly, also without justification, he introduces a complete division of labor between the sexes. Whereas previously the way of life of the two sexes had been identical, now “women became more sedentary and grew accustomed to tend the hut and the children, while the man went to seek their common subsistence.”19 This division of labor, of course, meant that the entire female half of the species was no longer self-sufficient, and since it had been this very self-sufficiency which had been the guarantee of the freedom and equality that characterized the original state of nature, one might expect, though one will not find, some commentary on the inequality which has thus been established. On the one hand, this first family is described as united only by the bonds of “reciprocal affection and freedom.”20 On the other hand, however, the male has been assigned the only work Rousseau considers to be productive of property,21 and it is made very clear that the family goods belong only to the father: “The goods of the father, of which he is truly the master, are the bonds which keep his children dependent on him, and he can give them a share of his inheritance only in proportion as they shall have properly deserved it from him by continual deference to his wishes.”22 There is no reason to assume, since the goods are his and the work assigned to his wife is not considered to be productive labor, that the woman’s necessary posture is any less deferential to her husband than her children’s. As we shall see, the necessarily patriarchal character of the golden age family and the economic dependence of women on men are confirmed in many of Rousseau’s subsequent works.
The important thing to note at this point is that the assumption of patriarchy is not remarked on by Rousseau as constituting an inequality between two adult human beings. Clearly the human inequality with whose origins the discourse is concerned is solely the inequality between one male and another. A brief hint of this is given when, quite early in the work, women are referred to without a qualm as “the sex that ought to obey.”23 It is evident that until the second great revolution instituted landed property and the division of labor among men, Rousseau considers the human race, in spite of the patriarchal nature of the family, to have been living in a state of perfect equality. It was only when “one man [i.e. male] needed the help of another” and “they observed that it was useful for a single person [male] to have provisions for two,” that equality is considered to have disappeared.24
In all his subsequent writings, Rousseau treats the nuclear family as a natural institution and monogamy as a God-given destiny for mankind. “The most ancient of all societies and the only one that is natural is the family,” he says at the beginning of The Social Contract.25 And in describing man in his primitive state in Emile, he asserts that “he is destined by nature to be content with one female,” and that “mating leads to a kind of moral bond, a type of marriage” in which “the female, belonging by choice to the male to whom she has given herself, generally refuses all others.” In complete contradiction with his refutation of Locke, Rousseau here uses the argument that children are helpless for so long that they and their mother could “with difficulty do without the father’s affection and the care that results from it.”26
Moreover, it is not just the monogamous family, but the patriarchal family that is assumed henceforth by Rousseau to exist according to the dictates of nature. Emile is advised that it is “the patriarchal rural life” that is “man’s original life, the most peaceful, the most natural, and the most pleasant for those whose hearts are not corrupted.”27 Sophie is correspondingly told: “When Emile became your husband, he became your master; it is the will of nature that you should obey him.”28 In the Discourse on Political Economy, and in a parallel passage in the Geneva Manuscript version of The Social Contract, Rousseau gives three reasons for the necessity that the male rule within the family. First, there must be a single, final authority to decide issues on which opinion is divided; second, since women are sometimes, however infrequently, incapacitated by their reproductive functions, this single authority must be that of the male; and third, the issue on which the matter clearly turns, the man must have authority over his wife because it is essential for him to know that the children she bears and he maintains are his own.29 The requirement of the certainty of paternity is therefore seen as the unquestionable justification for the natural subordination of women. Thus Rousseau claims:
The relative duties of the two sexes are not, and cannot be, equally rigid. When woman complains of the unjust inequality which man has imposed on her, she is wrong; this inequality is not a human institution, or at least it is not the work of prejudice but of reason: that one of the sexes to whom nature has entrusted the children must answer for them to the other.30
Again, in the Letter to d’Alembert, Rousseau exclaims, “As if all the austere duties of the woman were not derived from the single fact that a child ought to have a father.”31 How could the same moral code be applied to both sexes, when chastity is for this reason so much more essential in a woman than in a man? The unfaithful husband is, admittedly, cruel and unjust to his wife, but the adulterous wife, who exposes herself to the possibility of bearing a child that is not her husband’s, is positively treasonous; “she breaks up the family, and rends all the natural ties,”32 and her wretched child is the sign of her husband’s dishonor and the thief who robs his children of their property. The need for a man to know that his children are his own, and to have others also believe this to be so, is the basic reason why Rousseau completely separates both morality and moral education for women from what he prescribes for men.
It is necessary to make something of a digression at this point, and to return to the subject of Rousseau’s ideas about sexuality, in order to understand fully his characterization of the natural woman. At the beginning of his prescription of the education of Sophie, he states, “In everything that does not depend on sex, a woman is a man; she has the same organs, the same needs, the same faculties.” He very swiftly adds, however, that “where sex is concerned man and woman are in all respects complementary and in all respects different” and that “the difficulty in comparing them is due to our inability to decide, in the constitution of either, what is a matter of sex and what is not.”33 What very soon becomes apparent is that, to Rousseau’s mind, virtually everything for a female is a matter of sex. Thus he argues in three short paragraphs from the statement that “in everything that does not depend on sex, a woman is a man,” to the conclusion that “a perfect woman and a perfect man should no more resemble each other in mind than in face.”34
Since Rousseau argues that the role of woman in the sexual act itself, in addition to her function as a mother in a patriarchal family, has immense implications for her entire personality and the way she should be educated, it is essential to see how his ideas about sexuality changed from those set down in the Discourse on Inequality. There, he had seen sexual intercourse as an instinctual and need-fulfilling activity, freely engaged in by both sexes, and any other form of sexual love was regarded as the product of society. What he later saw as the natural characteristics of the two sexes is based on a view of the sexual act as not a mutually shared one, but one in which the male is the attacker and the female the aggressed upon. It is from this revised theory of sexuality, sexuality in its social form, which in itself has two inconsistent versions, that Rousseau deduces all those necessarily female characteristics—shame and modesty, passivity and conquerable resistance—which dictate so much of the course of Sophie’s education.
Though he never denies that men and women have similar sexual needs, in his first revised version of human sexuality, Rousseau implies that the male will be aroused only if the female makes herself especially pleasing to him, and lures him by means of her bashfulness, coquetry, and either genuine or simulated resistance to his advances. The mutuality and spontaneity of the original state of nature completely vanish in the Letter to d’Alembert, where it is argued that the man must necessarily be the pursuer, since it is his sexual arousal upon which the successful performance of the sexual act depends. If women did not veil their desires with shame or at least feign resistance, “the passions, ever languishing in a boring freedom, would have never been excited.”35 Far from repressing the desires of the male, “chasteness inflames them.” Because, then, of what appears to be a dubious faith in the natural potential for sexual arousal in the male, Rousseau concludes that whereas it is not essential for the man to please the woman, beyond displaying his strength, woman, on the other hand, is “specially made to please the man.” Since the best way to arouse him is to resist his advances, chasteness and shame are natural concomitants of the female’s role in the sexual act. And this, Rousseau says, in spite of the theory of spontaneous and instinctual sexuality he had postulated in the Discourse on Inequality, “is the law of nature, which is older than love itself.”36 It is no mere result of certain societal or cultural variables.
Concurrent with this account of the nature of human sexuality, however, there appears in Emile another, completely incompatible version, although it, too, requires that women be modest and bashful. According to this second view, presented along with the first as if there were no inconsistency between the two, the human potential for sexual arousal is frighteningly limitless. God has endowed both sexes with “unlimited passions,” but he has given reason to man, and modesty to woman, in order to restrain them. Here, then, female resistance becomes essential not in order to entice and arouse the male, but as a curb to the boundless desires of both sexes. Without this restraint—of necessity imposed by the woman, both because of the greater consequences which the act may entail for her, and because the requirement of his potency makes the man naturally the aggressor—“the result would soon be the ruin of both, and the human race would perish by the means established for its preservation.”37
These two conflicting accounts of sexuality are of great significance, because they are at the root of the two conflicting demands Rousseau makes of women. Women must, on the one hand, allure, and on the other hand, control and restrain; they must be sensuous, lovable and passionate, but on the other hand scrupulously chaste. It is the tension between these two “natural” functions of woman that ultimately leads to the tragedies of both Rousseau’s ideal women, Sophie in Emile and its unfinished sequel, and Julie in La Nouvelle Héloise.
Unwilling to acknowledge that many aspects of the relations between the sexes as he presented them were the results of many centuries of patriarchal culture and of the economic and social dependence on men of women and their children, Rousseau argues that the consequences of her sex are inevitably much greater for a woman than maleness is for a man. “The male is only a male at certain times, the female is a female all her life or at least throughout her youth.”38 While admittedly she does not spend her whole life bearing children, yet “that is her proper purpose.”39 A woman’s education must be founded on the principles that “woman is made to please and to be subjected to man” and “it is according to nature for the woman to obey the man.”40 Clearly, the “natural” status of these precepts depends on the correctness of Rousseau’s assumptions that both the patriarchal family and his version of sexuality are natural. Once these premises are accepted, he can proceed to define woman solely in terms of her sexual and reproductive functions, and structure her position in society and her education accordingly. As Julie writes to her lover Saint-Preux, taking issue with Plato’s single model of perfection for the two sexes, “The attack and defense, the boldness of men and the modesty of women, these are not conventions as your philosophers think, but natural institutions which are easily explained, and from which all the other moral differences can readily be deduced”41 Thus it is not, Rousseau claims, prejudice or convention that makes him prescribe for Sophie an education that, in complete contrast to Emile’s, is designed exclusively to form her into a highly alluring sex object for her man, his chaste and obedient wife, and the devoted mother of children that are unquestionably his. To the contrary, that Emile should be educated to be his own man, while Sophie is educated to be his own woman, is in accordance with the dictates of nature.
A grand summary of this view of the place of the “natural” woman in a patriarchal world is made near the beginning of Book 5 of Emile, and warrants quotation in full:
Man and woman are made for each other, but their mutual dependence is not equal: men are dependent on women on account of their desires; women depend on men on account of both their desires and their needs; we could do without them better than they could do without us. In order for them to have what is necessary for their station in life, we must give it to them, we must want to give it to them, we must find them worthy of it; they are dependent on our feelings, on the price that we place on their worth, on how we esteem their charms and their virtues. By the law of nature herself, women, as much for themselves as for their children, are at the mercy of men’s judgment.42
Here we have a very obvious case of the selective use of the concept of the natural, employed to justify and legitimate what the author deems to be good and useful for mankind. It is of course the very method of reasoning for which Rousseau had attacked Locke. The nature which lays down as law all the above aspects of woman’s dependence on men is clearly not the original state of nature, in which the sexes were scarcely differentiated, with regard to life style or capacity for self-sufficiency. It is, rather, the “natural” state of patriarchy, the golden age of isolated families, with their sexual division of labor and their rudimentary property owned by the male, that is the reference point used to define the natural woman. Moreover, the transition between the two eras had been accomplished in Rousseau’s mind without the least concern about why women would have agreed to such a change. If, indeed, “all, being born equal and free, alienate their liberty only for their own advantage,”43 one might well ask how the patriarchal family, in which the woman’s equality and freedom are sacrificed to the man’s need to assure himself of his children’s paternity, could ever have come into being. While he felt it was necessary to postulate a contractual origin, albeit a fraudulent one, for the first civil society, in order to refute the idea that “proud and unconquerable men” would ever have rushed into slavery,44 Rousseau did not feel at all compelled to explain why proud and unconquerable women should have done that same unreasonable thing.
The whole issue of whether or not the patriarchal family is natural or conventional is therefore of critical importance for Rousseau’s treatment of the subject of women,45 Since the works in which the subject is most thoroughly aired, the Discourse on Inequality and Emile, are both works aimed at penetrating beyond all social and cultural institutions and practices in order to find out what the human race is originally or “naturally” like, the fact that he ignores all other possible types of sexual and marital custom—all forms of polygamy, polyandry, communal tribalism, and matriarchal or matrilineal forms of society—and concludes that the patriarchal nuclear family is natural and inevitable, is even more striking than it would be otherwise. There is no recognition in Rousseau’s later works, in spite of his attack on Locke for the same prejudice, that this type of family system, with the radical division of labor between the sexes, the dependent position of the woman, and the overriding concern with female chastity, has any relation to particular social and economic arrangements and power relationships. It is all presented as according to nature. Thus when Rousseau refers to the natural man and to the natural woman, he has two distinct reference points in mind. Natural man is man of the original state of nature—totally independent of his fellows, devoid of selfishness, equal to anyone else, and imbued with the natural goodness of pity for any suffering fellow creature. Natural woman, however, is woman defined in accordance with her role in the golden age family—dependent, subordinate, and naturally imbued with shame and modesty. Thus, the very minimal functions which would necessarily follow from the physiology of femaleness without this assumption of the patriarchal family are expanded to such an extent as to make Rousseau accept entirely different models of perfection for women and for men and consequently radically different methods for socializing the two sexes.
Insofar as I am aware, Rousseau expressed doubt about the “natural” status of the requirement that women be subordinate and confined only twice: once in the very early essay, “Sur les Femmes”; and again in the Letter to d’Alembert, where the doubt is presented not as the author’s, but rather in the form of an additional argument to convince the skeptical. In the early essay he had written:
First, let us consider women deprived of their liberty by the tyranny of men, the masters of everything, for crowns, offices, employments, the command of armies, all is in their hands, they have monopolized them from the very earliest of times by some natural right that I have never been able to understand and which well could have no other foundation than greater strength.46
The patriarchal nature of society and the division of labor according to sex are certainly not regarded as the natural order of things in this youthful statement. Clearly, Rousseau later came to very different conclusions.
In the Letter to d’Alembert, addressing himself to those who objected that the domestic confinement of women is merely a dictate of popular prejudice, and that chasteness is “only an invention of the social laws to protect the rights of husbands and fathers and to preserve some order in families,”47 Rousseau at first argues at length, as above, that the female virtues and characteristics are dictated by nature. Then however, possibly out of concern that his case is not sufficiently convincing, he eventually seeks refuge in the argument of social expediency:
Even if it could be denied that a special sentiment of chasteness was natural to women, would it be any less true that in society their lot ought to be a domestic and retired life, and that they ought to be raised in principles appropriate to it? If the timidity, chasteness, and modesty which are proper to them are social inventions, it is in society’s interest that women acquire these qualities; they must be cultivated in women, and any woman who disdains them offends good morals.48
It is impossible to say how necessary Rousseau considered this supplementary, safeguarding argument to be, but it clearly reveals the motives behind his derivation of the natural man and the natural woman from different stages of his hypothetical history of mankind. Society requires the patriarchal family, in Rousseau’s judgment, and thus that is as far back as he will choose to look in defining the natural woman. The important point to note is that this method of reasoning, from social expediency to the rights and obligations of the individual, is in complete contradiction to Rousseau’s general philosophical method. There is only one other circumstance in which he argues in a similar manner, and that is when he considers the issue of Greek slavery.49 Just as his philosophical rejection of slavery is qualified by the requirements of the ideal republic and its citizens, so it is the same social expediency, rather than nature’s laws, that prevents Rousseau from postulating any theory of human nature and human rights that is independent of sex. If society is necessarily founded on the maleruled family, as he argues, then the inconveniences that result must inevitably be borne by women. His inflexible attachment to the patriarchal family results in a philosophy of woman that, in all its most important respects, contradicts his philosophy of man.
The second way in which Rousseau seeks to discover the natural man is by attempting to separate out those characteristics that are innate in the individual from those acquired in the course of rearing and education. Here again, his reasoning about women is radically different from his reasoning about men.
In his works, from the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality on, we can find innumerable instances of Rousseau’s strong belief in the power of the environment to alter human characteristics and abilities. The attribution to physical causes of what is in fact due to moral ones is, he says, in Emile, “one of the most frequent abuses of the philosophy of our century.”50 And in the discourse, the point is made at greater length:
In fact, it is easy to see that, among the differences that distinguish men, some pass for natural that are uniquely the work of habit and the various types of life men adopt in society. Thus a robust or delicate temperament, and the strength or weakness that depend on it, often come more from the harsh or effeminate way in which one has been raised than from the primitive constitution of bodies. The same is true of strength of mind; and not only does education establish a difference between cultivated minds and those which are not, but it augments the difference among the former in proportion to their culture.51
We therefore err seriously if we take civilized man as exemplary of the true characteristics of the species, for “in becoming sociable and a slave he becomes weak, fearful, servile; and his soft and effeminate way of life completes the enervation of both his strength and his courage.”52 Civilized children, for example, are weaker and attain self-sufficiency later than their primitive counterparts, who are required to fend for themselves as soon as possible.53 On the other hand, puberty and sexual maturity are reached earlier among educated and sophisticated races than among the primitive, since the cultural influences which impinge on the individual in the former cases stimulate his precocious development.54 Environment can be seen to win out over temperament, Rousseau argues, in countless such cases.
Probably the most striking example of Rousseau’s belief in the power of environmental influence occurs in his argument against slavery. In asserting that slavery was the natural condition of some men, he argues, Aristotle had mistaken the effects of slavery for the cause. “If there are slaves by nature it is because there have been slaves against nature. Force made the first slaves, their cowardliness perpetuated the condition.”55 The environment in which a man is raised, especially if it is one so differentiated from that of those around him, is bound to develop and accentuate some of his innate characteristics, at the cost of suppressing and distorting others. Thus, one certainly cannot tell from enslaved peoples, which all the civilized world must be considered, to a greater or lesser degree, what is the natural potential of man. We know only the point of departure, in the weakness and ignorance of infancy, and we cannot know all the possible destinations that man may achieve. Early in Emile, Rousseau makes this point very clearly. “I do not know of any philosopher who has yet been rash enough to say: here is the limit which man can reach but beyond which he cannot go. We do not know what our nature allows us to be; none of us has measured the possible distance between one man and another.”56 Thus we have no alternative but to acknowledge that the limits of man’s potential are unknown.
The objective of Emile is not to provide a treatise on educational method in any practical or positive sense; rather it constitutes a radical critique of what contemporary civilization and its socialization techniques have done to the natural man. Emile is to become a natural man, not in the sense of being reared for savagery, but by being educated in a way that is free from the prejudices and opinions of any particular time or place. The method followed is professed to be “nothing other than the course of nature.”57 At the beginning of the work, Rousseau pays homage to the great power of education in the broadest sense of the term: “Men are shaped by education as plants are shaped by cultivation…. We are born weak, we need strength; we are born lacking everything, we need help; we are born stupid, we need judgment. Everything that we do not have at birth and that we need when adult, is given us by education.”58 By assuming total responsibility for and authority over the child, the tutor’s task is to isolate him from the misleading and distorting prejudices of the world around him, and to use his natural tendencies, especially his curiosity, to develop in him powers of independent judgment.
One of the fundamental principles of Emile’s education, then, is that the child should never be told things on authority but should rather be helped to find them out for himself. For reason is not by any means a strong and natural human quality that will spring back up again if repressed, but a delicate potential that must be nurtured if it is to flourish. “Naturally, man thinks but little. Thinking is an art that he learns like all the others, but with even more difficulty. In both sexes I know only two really distinct classes; people who think and people who do not, and the difference is almost entirely due to education.”59 Only by guiding the child’s attention subtly away from popular prejudices and trivial concerns will the tutor be able to develop his precious powers of reason and prevent him from coming to rely on the opinions of others. For “if ever you substitute authority for reason in his mind, he will no longer reason; he will become simply the plaything of other people’s opinion.”60 The careful isolation of Emile and the painstaking care devoted to every aspect of his education are aimed, above all, at making him develop independence of judgment and his powers of reason.
Rousseau’s stress on the importance of education is also strikingly apparent in his advice to rulers, whom he considered to have a great deal of responsibility for the character of the people they govern. “Make men, therefore, if you would command men,” he advises the would-be preservers of a republic. The only way to make citizens is to educate them as children. For “it is too late to change our natural inclinations when they are developed in us, and when selfishness is reinforced by habit.”61 The intensely community-oriented socialization which Rousseau designed for the Polish children would be so effective in instilling in them virtuous, republican ways of thinking that, after such an education, strict laws would scarcely be necessary to make them do what was best for their country as a whole.62
Rousseau had little feeling but contempt for the men of his day, but it was not their innate faculties he denied; rather he saw the education they were given and the environment in which they lived as the source of their failings. In particular, Rousseau attributed men’s lack of manliness and creativity to women, who, due to their sexual hold over men, always dictate the environment in which they live. How could contemporary men achieve great and noble works, as the ancients had, when they were so bound up with the trivial business of amusing women? It was the insidious influence of women which was making men into effeminate gallants, devoid of physical exercise or mental stimulation, and incapable of sustaining themselves against the elements. The result of all the time spent in female society was that the men around him seemed to Rousseau to be turning into a breed of lap dogs. “Given to these puerile habits,” he says, “to what that is great could we ever raise ourselves? Our talents and our writing savor of our frivolous occupations.” “Men were coarser in my time,” he laments, and it was their rearing that made them so.63
Thus, without going as far as Helvétius’ “l’éducation peut tout,” Rousseau thought that education in the broadest sense of the term was responsible for most of the characteristics of the adult male, and for the difference between the peoples of various times and places. With regard to the natural versus the current prevailing qualities and abilities of women, however, he declines to apply his theories in anything like the same way. The statement quoted above64 is certainly not consistent with what he says about women’s talents. Just as he had refused to seek as far back in primitive time for the natural woman as he did for the natural man, so he does not acknowledge for girls to the same extent as for boys that their behavior, abilities and achievements are a function of the total environment in which they are reared.
Rousseau considers a lengthy list of “feminine” qualities to be indisputably innate in women. Shame and modesty, love of finery and embellishment, the desire to please and to be polite to others, and skillful shrewdness tending to duplicity—all these characteristics are presented as inborn and instinctive in the female sex.65 As for the quality that makes a woman submit to injustices and wrongs done to her, this, too, “is the natural amiability of her sex when unspoiled.” Boys, on the other hand, could never be accustomed to such treatment: “Their inner feelings rise up and revolt against injustice; nature has not made them able to put up with it.”66 Rousseau was unable to perceive the relevance of the objection he had made to Aristotle’s argument for natural slavery, to his own conclusion that servility is natural in all women. This selective blindness persists in spite of the fact that in a number of passages Rousseau makes it very clear that unless a woman possesses all the characteristics he has labeled innate or natural in the female sex, she is unlikely to fare at all well, or perhaps even to survive, in the male-dominated culture in which she has to live. At times, indeed, Rousseau suggests in teleological fashion that such characteristics as duplicity and tolerance of injustice are innate in women because of the subordinate position in life for which they are naturally destined. Since a woman in love, for example, has the same desires as a man, but not the same right to express them, she must be equipped with the alternative language of deceit with which to make her feelings known indirectly. Similarly, since “woman is made to submit to man and even to put up with his injustice,” it is useful for her to have an innate capacity for amiability in order to cope with such treatment.67
In direct contradiction to his emphasis on nurture and life style, to explain why contemporary men and little boys were the way they were, Rousseau tended to accept much of the character of contemporary women and little girls as immutable fact. Thus, even in spite of his recognition that the Spartan women were strong and healthy because of the physical education they underwent, and its undeniable corollary that indeed women’s bodies might be very different from those of the eighteenth-century French ladies, he ignores this possibility when arguing that women are incapable of engaging in occupations outside the domestic sphere. Instead, he draws the ridiculous picture of a woman “who has never been exposed to the sun and who scarcely knows how to walk after fifty years of indolence”68 attempting to transform herself overnight from a nursing mother into a soldier.
In the same vein, the tastes of the two sexes in toys and entertainment are treated as innate and not conditioned by surrounding attitudes: “Boys seek out movement and noise,” whereas “the doll is the girl’s special toy; there we see her taste obviously determined by her purpose in life.” “Almost from birth,” girls love adornment, and as soon as they can understand what people say, they can be controlled by what people will think of them. However, anyone who is silly enough to try this means of control with a small boy will fail completely, since “provided they can be free and enjoy themselves they care very little about what people think of them.”69 This distinction between the sexes seems hardly consistent with the fact that a great deal of care is taken to isolate Emile from the effects of opinion. Moreover, it proves nothing at all about the innate characteristics of boys and girls and merely testifies to the fact that little girls are very soon made aware that it is by pleasing and being pretty that they will achieve attention. It leads to no conclusions about how they might behave if given the same treatment, the same freedom and opportunity to enjoy themselves, as little boys. The dubious foundation of all Rousseau’s conclusions about the innate difference between the sexes is illustrated by the fact that, when he invites the reader to look at a boy and a girl who are “so to speak, only just born,” in order to see how differently they handle a given situation, his examples turn out to be no less than six years old.70 Apparently, environmental influences up to the age of six are, in this context though not in others, considered trivial.
Rousseau treats intellectual capacities similarly. His emphasis on the importance of education and environment does not apply to women, in spite of his isolated assertion that the ability to think is, in both sexes, almost entirely the result of education. In a footnote to the very paragraph in which he attributes the lack of solid intellectual achievement of contemporary men to their life style and the trivia that occupy their minds, he says categorically that “women, in general, do not like any art, know nothing about any, and have no genius. They can succeed in little works which require only quick wit, taste, grace, and sometimes even a little bit of philosophy and reasoning,” but they never have the “celestial flame” of genius.71 Even though the environmental theory was surely most applicable to the almost entirely uneducated women of his day, Rousseau could only see their comparative lack of achievement as an immutable fact.
Rousseau does not, however, first assert that woman is mentally inferior to man and then draw conclusions from this about her proper function and position in society. Rather, his method is to begin by assuming that woman’s role is to be a desirable and faithful sexual object for man, his wife and the mother of his children, and then to draw conclusions as to what her intellectual capacities should be like, in order to fit her for her proper function. It seems quite likely, in fact, for several reasons, that Rousseau was by no means completely convinced that women are necessarily and innately inferior in mind to men.
First, it is interesting to note that in the early essays on women he had expressed ideas about the abilities of women that are very different from those he espoused later. He had argued that, if history had not been written with such a masculine bias, there would not have been such a vast preponderance of heroes over heroines in its pages, and the balance would have been much more even. Although, given the conditions that prevailed, the number of men who had excelled would still be greater, “we should see in the other sex models of civic and moral virtue that are as perfect in every way”72 Moreover, the remaining disparity could be explained in terms of the lesser opportunity afforded women to demonstrate their courage or heroism in positions of leadership. Of those who had the honor of being advanced to such positions, almost all distinguished themselves brilliantly. Thus, with a final flourish, Rousseau concluded: “I repeat that, with due allowance made, women would have been able to show the highest examples of greatness of soul and love of virtue, and in greater numbers than men have ever done, if our injustice had not taken away with their liberty all the occasions on which they might have manifested it in the eyes of the world.”73 In addition, he pointed to the existence of a number of talented female writers to suggest that, with greater opportunities women could show their true intellectual potential. At this stage of Rousseau’s thought, then, it was clearly lack of opportunity that explained the discrepancy between the achievements of men and women throughout history.
Second, unlike Locke,74 Rousseau did not cite the inferior abilities of women as a reason for giving absolute rule over the family to the man. Instead, asserting that there must be a single source of authority and that women are sometimes indisposed by their reproductive functions, he concluded that the man must rule because “when the balance is perfectly even, a straw is sufficient to turn the scale.”75 It would be strange to regard the balance as so even, surely, if he had thought that women were always and innately less capable of reason than men.
In spite of this, however, both in Emile and in the Letter to d’Alembert, Rousseau asserts, in accordance with a long tradition that extends at least as far back as Aristotle and is still very much alive,76 that women have a kind of intellect different from and inferior to that of men, and lack the capacity for abstract reasoning and creativity. “Reason in women is a practical reason,” he says, “which enables them easily to discover how to arrive at a given conclusion, but which does not enable them to reach the conclusion themselves.”77 Women cannot discover principles, as men can, but they have better heads for detail. However, as is obvious from the following quotation, the paradox in Rousseau’s thought about the abilities of women can at least partly be explained by the fact that he was far less interested in what they could achieve than in what they should achieve:
The search for abstract and speculative truths, for principles, for axioms in science, everything that involves the generalization of ideas, is not within a woman’s province: their studies should concern practical things; it is their task to apply the principles discovered by man, and it is up to them to make the observations that lead man to discover these principles.78
Here, and again when we are told that “the art of thinking is not foreign to women, but they should only skim the surface of the science of reasoning,”79 we realize that for Rousseau, in the main body of his writings, woman’s potential is in fact irrelevant. What is important is that she should be, in mind as well as in body, what man wants her to be—his laboratory assistant no less than his concubine—and that she will certainly not benefit by attempting to be anything else. Julie, writing to her lover, Saint-Preux, is undoubtedly expressing Rousseau’s position when she echoes this functionalist, rather than descriptive, account of the qualities of women. Fiercely rejecting Plato’s argument that since the differences between men and women are minimal, they should be educated alike, Julie protests that it is clear from “the purpose of nature” and the “intentions of the creator” that the two sexes should not be alike. Since God and nature have clearly destined women for wifehood, child-rearing and domestic affairs, and men for labor and the pursuits of the outside world, “these vain imitations by one sex of the other are the height of foolishness; they make the wise man laugh and they banish love. … A perfect woman and a perfect man should be no more like each other in soul than in face.”80
It is clear that Rousseau in his maturity was not at all interested in discovering what woman’s natural potential might enable her to achieve, but was simply concerned with suiting her to her role as man’s subordinate complement in the patriarchal family. Beyond this narrow and purely prescriptive view of woman’s capacities he does not look. Several times, Rousseau asserts that the intelligence of little girls is more precocious than that of little boys and the explanation given is a purely functional one; it all has to do with that precious jewel of virginity that a girl is entrusted with guarding. As Julie explains: “If reason is ordinarily weaker and fades sooner in women it is also formed earlier, as a frail sunflower grows and dies before an oak. We find ourselves from the very beginning entrusted with such a dangerous treasure that the care of preserving it soon awakens our judgment….”81 Once woman’s reason has developed sufficiently for her to know how to preserve her virginity and to realize how essential it is for her to do so at all costs, we may infer that it can then safely be allowed to stagnate, except insofar as it is required to make her a good wife and mother. Again, when the question “Are women capable of solid reason?” is explicitly asked, it is immediately followed by: “Is it essential for them to cultivate it…. Is this culture useful for the functions imposed on them, is it compatible with the simplicity that suits them?”82 If women are capable of reason, clearly they should be trained to reason only if it helps them to perform their proper functions better and does not make them any less appealing to men.
Rousseau sees the fitting characteristics of the two sexes in both the moral and the intellectual spheres as essentially complementary. Individually incomplete, together they form a whole and harmonious being. With regard to intellect, “woman has more wit, and man more genius, woman observes while man reasons; from this cooperation results the clearest enlightenment and the most complete knowledge that the human mind on its own can achieve.”83 This is no less true in the moral realm: “The social relation of the sexes is a wonderful thing. From this association results a moral person of which the woman is the eye and the man the arm, but with such dependence of one on the other that the man teaches the woman what she should see and the woman teaches the man what he should do.”84 Likewise, in the supposedly admirable marriage of Julie and Wolmar, Julie says that the two have but a single mind, of which “he is the understanding and I the will.”85 Julie feels, and motivates and inspires people, while Wolmar reasons and makes decisions. As Judith Shklar has pointed out, Rousseau, while eschewing the traditional medieval use of the “body politic” metaphor in the political sphere, applies it in a slightly adapted form to the sphere of the family, to describe the complementary nature of the sexes in marriage.86 If men and women were not complementary in nature, Rousseau argues, the institution of marriage would be in danger, and with it the basis of social stability. For if men and women were each endowed with a complete set of talents, instead of being mutually dependent, “they would live in never-ending discord, and relations between them would be impossible.”87
Thus the reason for Rousseau’s refusal to apply his beliefs about the vast influence of environmental factors to women as he did to men, and to conclude as he would have had to that their potential was equally undiscovered, was that his strong conviction of the virtues of the patriarchal family made him unwilling to consider women as independent persons or in any other context than the family. Arguments about the equality or inequality of the sexes are simply vain disputes, he asserts, once one recognizes what a woman should be like, in order to fulfill her natural sexual and maternal function.88
Whereas Rousseau stipulated two distinct and very different educational systems for boys, depending on whether it was intended to turn them into citizens or into independent and natural men, he set out only one type of education as suitable for women. As we shall see, it did not fit her to be a citizen, in Rousseau’s sense of the word, and it certainly did not fit her to be an independent person. What is called the education of the natural woman is a training in modesty, domesticity, and complete submissiveness to prevailing opinion. The education of Sophie, complete failure that it turns out to be, is the logical consequence of the narrow role that Rousseau considered to be the only legitimate one for women.
As has been suggested, Emile is a critique, not just of contemporary educational practice, but of all that civilization has done to the natural man: “Everything is good when it leaves the hands of its creator. It degenerates in the hands of man…. He mutilates his dog, his horse, his slave…. He wants nothing to be as nature made it, not even man; he breaks him in like a horse, and makes him conform to his taste like a tree in his garden.”89 Emile, an unexceptional but healthy male child, is to be educated so as to be free of the prejudices of the world around him—the world that would strip him of his natural goodness and honesty, and shape him to the tastes and needs of a corrupt civilization. The only way to find out what man’s potential is, is to look to his origins, in infancy, and to encourage him to develop all his natural capacities as they manifest themselves. Thus, Rousseau’s definition of a natural man is an extremely open-ended one; he must be free to become whatever he can and will.
Woman, by contrast, is defined in a totally teleological way, in terms of what is perceived to be her purpose in life. Her education, therefore, is totally dictated by her function and by the characteristics considered essential in her life if she is to fulfill it properly. Having argued that the family is essential to society, and assuming, as he does, that woman’s subordinate position within it is dictated by the necessity that paternity not be in doubt, Rousseau concludes that the prescriptions for female education follow from this directly. As has been acknowledged by several Rousseau scholars, the consequent education proposed for women is based on principles that are in direct and basic conflict with those that underlie his proposals for the education of men.90 This contrast between the education of Emile, founded on man’s unknown potential, and that of Sophie, founded on her narrowly defined female function, is clearly summarized in the following quotation, which should be compared with the philosophy of the first four books of Emile:
The entire education of women must be relative to men. To please them, to be useful to them, to be loved and honored by them, to rear them when they are young, to care for them when they are grown up, to counsel and console, to make their lives pleasant and charming, these are the duties of women at all times, and they should be taught them in their childhood. To the extent that we refuse to go back to this principle, we will stray from our goal, and all the precepts women are given will not result in their happiness or our own.91
Having considered the possibility of not giving woman any intellectual education at all, but confining her training solely to “the labors of her sex,” Rousseau concludes that this solution would be satisfactory only for a very simple, uncorrupted, and isolated living situation. A woman’s duties are simple enough, to be sure. Her subordination to her husband’s absolute authority and the devotion she owes her children are such natural consequences of her position in life that it requires no complex reflection on her part to recognize them. Thus, in a rural and moral environment, a woman might without danger to her virtue be left in profound ignorance. However, in the corrupt world of the city, with so much to tempt her and so many subversive prejudices to lead her astray, she would require a somewhat more sophisticated education, involving both the development of her own conscience and a thorough knowledge of the prevailing value system. Since she must necessarily preserve all the proprieties, as her husband’s honor depends upon it, she must be educated to a level where she can reconcile the dictates of her own conscience with the demands of public opinion, consider all prejudices seriously, and reject them only when her conscience is in definite conflict with them. This difficult reckoning “cannot properly be done without cultivating her mind and reason.”92 As will be argued below in chapter 8, moreover, the fates of Rousseau’s two heroines suggest that the reconciliation of conscience and public opinion is indeed an impossible task.
On the question of the proper position and assigned life style of women, Rousseau was sure that the Greeks (in this case, however, excluding the Spartans) had the only correct answer.93 Especially after marriage, “there are no good morals for women outside of a withdrawn and domestic life.”94 He cited with approval Pericles’ dictum that a good woman should never be spoken of, and quoted Aristotle’s views on women in a subsequently discarded passage of Emile. As the ancient philosopher had said, while woman alone should regulate the domestic aspect of life, she must limit herself to the home; while mistress of her own sphere, she herself must remain “under the absolute law of her husband.”95 The Greek pattern of complete seclusion and domestication, Rousseau thought, “is the mode of life that nature and reason prescribe for the female sex.”96
Nature, according to Rousseau, not only dictates a totally different education and life style for the two sexes, but also prescribes that they live for the most part separated from each other. As he says in the Letter to d’Alembert, “Let us follow the inclinations of nature, let us consult the good of society; we shall find that the two sexes ought to come together sometimes and to live separated ordinarily.”97 This, too, was the praiseworthy system of the ancients. It was also the reason Rousseau so much admired the Genevan clubs, for they constituted a way in which the men could free themselves of the shackling demands and chatter of their women, and talk about important things, while the latter could amuse themselves with gossip which, though probably malicious, was considerably less harmful than some alternative pursuits they might have devoted themselves to. According to Rousseau, too much association of the sexes leads not only to the decline of morality, but to the loss of men’s virility, since “unable to make themselves into men, the women make us into women.”98 When a critic objected to the clubs, Rousseau’s response was to tell him: “find some other way in which men can live separately from women, and I will abandon that one.”99
In La Nouvelle Héloise, this principle, “on which all good morals depend,”100 is developed at greater length. Although Julie and her husband live together, they never do the same things, since “the inclinations which nature gives them are as diverse as the functions she imposes on them.”101 Both Wolmar and Julie agree that this separation of life styles and complete division of labor is the best and the most natural way to live, both for love and for marital harmony. The servants, moreover, except for their meals and certain supervised festivities, live totally segregated according to sex, in order to ensure their honor and chastity, which are held to be the basis of all morality. The “admirable order that reigns” at Clarens testifies to the truth of the precept that “in a well-regulated house the men and women should have little association.”102
It is interesting to note that Saint-Preux, in praising the Wolmars’ segregated mode of living, argues that with the exception of the French and those who imitate them, it is in fact the universal custom of the people of the world. He concludes: “Such is the order the universality of which shows to be natural … and even in the countries where it has been perverted one still sees vestiges of it.”103 This argument is strikingly uncharacteristic of Rousseau, who, in many ways an iconoclast, was certainly not accustomed to argue that contemporary practice in the world exemplified what was natural and necessary for the human race. As he had said earlier of Locke’s claim that the family was natural, so also this argument of his would lead to the assertion that “nature also instituted civil society, the arts, commerce, and all that is claimed to be useful to man.”104
Rousseau had failed to apply in the case of women both types of argument he had used to define the natural man, instead finding her naturally located in her subordinate role in the patriarchal family and naturally endowed with all those qualities considered essential to her functioning in that role. Here he undermined his own reasoning about the natural once more, so as to use what he considered to be prevailing world practice as a support for his preferred, sexually segregated life style. Having proposed a form of education for women that would make them appealing sexual objects and submissive wives, Rousseau was faced with the dilemma that the women so educated were not fit to be the everyday companions of the type of men he thought society needed. His only solution was to conclude that it is not only socially expedient but according to the very dictates of nature for the two sexes to live, for the most part, separated from each other.