Equality and Freedom—for Men
The two most prevalent values that coexist, however uncomfortably at times, in Rousseau’s social and political philosophy are equality and freedom. While he considered these characteristics to be essential for men, he denied their relevance for women. This contrast in approach is the subject of the following chapter.
One of Rousseau’s most abiding concerns was the inequality that prevailed in the society around him, and one of the most constant objects of his philosophy was to discover the principles of a political system that would minimize inequality between persons. His deep hatred for inequality originated in his own experience. As Judith Shklar has said, “Inequality for him was always an intensely personal experience, a display of cruelty on one side and corresponding servility and fear on the other.”1 The shock of the subservience required of him first as an apprentice and then as a valet, after a childhood in which, as he says, “I was accustomed to living on terms of perfect equality with my elders,” brought him quickly to the conclusion that “every unequal association is always disadvantageous to the weaker party.”2 He felt that he knew the darker side of inequality intimately, and it repelled him.
The Discourse on Inequality is the result of Rousseau’s reflections “upon the equality nature established among men, and upon the inequality they have instituted.”3 Certainly there were natural differences among individuals in any setting—differences in their bodily and mental strengths and talents, and therefore in their capacities for production and acquisition. However, the various political relations established among men could either exaggerate and perpetuate, or minimize and compensate for, these original inequalities.
As has been noted, the golden age of independent and therefore substantially equal patriarchal families was regarded by Rousseau as “the happiest and most durable epoch” and “the best for man.” Surely only some fatal accident, he thought, could have brought man out of this state of “real and indestructible equality.”4 The fatal events which had resulted in ever-increasing inequalities among the members of the male sex were, he concluded, the institution of private property, the division of labor and the exchange of commodities, for the combined effect of these developments was that some men possessed what others needed, and thus grew rich at their expense. The step from here to political and institutionalized inequality is explained in the second part of the Discourse on Inequality as having originated from the seduction of the poor by the rich into a false, pseudomutual contract. The poor, who “ran to meet their chains, thinking they secured their freedom,” merely succeeded in legitimizing the exploitation of themselves by the rich. Rousseau concludes:
Such was, or must have been, the origin of society and laws, which gave new fetters to the weak and new forces to the rich, destroyed natural freedom for all time, established forever the law of property and inequality, changed a clever usurpation into an irrevocable right, and for the profit of a few ambitious men henceforth subjected the whole human race to work, servitude, and misery.5
The result is that all existing governments, in spite of their various claims to legitimacy, are based on fraud. In spite of the “vain and chimerical equality of right”6 that civil societies claim to have substituted for the real but unguaranteed equality of the golden age, in fact the power of the community is co-opted by the strongest, so as to enable them to oppress the weak both more thoroughly and quasi-legitimately. Thus:
The multitude will always be sacrificed to the few, and the public interest to private interest. Those specious words, justice and subordination, will always serve as the instruments of violence and the weapons of injustice; thus it follows that the upper classes which claim to be useful to the rest are in fact only serving themselves at the others’ expense.7
Greater strength or wealth, Rousseau argues, can in no way create legitimate right. “To yield to force is an act of necessity, not of will; it is at the most an act of prudence. In what sense could it be considered a duty?”8 Thus, since no man has by nature authority over any other, and no authority can derive from force, he concludes that the only legitimate solution to the problem of political authority is the true social contract, which makes the will of the people sovereign. Without such a contractual foundation, the undertakings of a political system can only be “absurd, tyrannical, and subject to the grossest abuse.”9 To the contrary, as the first book of The Social Contract concludes:
Instead of destroying natural equality, the fundamental compact… substitutes a moral and legitimate equality for that physical inequality that nature has established among men, and which, though they may be unequal in strength or intelligence, makes them all equal by convention and right.10
By giving everybody an equal share in legislative power, therefore, a properly constituted political system could make civil society a state of greater equality than naturally exists among men.
It is clear from his advice to the Polish leaders about the lack of representation of the mass of their people, still serfs, in the legislature, that Rousseau regarded political inequalities as never legitimate, and to be tolerated only temporarily. While acknowledging that emancipation would not be easy to accomplish, he asserts that
the law of nature, that sacred and imprescriptible law … does not permit us to confine the legislative authority in such a way, and to make the laws binding on any person who has not cast his vote on them in person, like the deputies, or at least through chosen representatives….11
Since the serfs, too, were men, he tells the nobles, who “have in them the makings of becoming everything that you are,” they must be freed first in soul, then in body, and raised to full political equality.
In the light of the above principles, it seems scarcely necessary to mention that Rousseau regarded slavery as totally illegitimate.12 It is degrading to his essence, and offensive to both nature and reason, for a man to give up his life, freedom, and right to himself, to another. Nature, which makes man’s self-preservation his first duty, and his conscience, which is responsible for regulating his behavior in accordance with morality, cannot possibly condone such a drastic renunciation of human autonomy. Existing slavery can be based on nothing but force confirmed by habit. However, as has frequently been noted,13 Rousseau’s favorite Greek republics, for all their civic equality, were founded on the enslavement of multitudes of people. Moreover, when he himself confronted this fact, he acknowledged that since civil society, like all departures from nature, must have its disadvantages, it might unfortunately be the case that the enjoyment of true self-government by some could be maintained only by means of the enslavement of others. “There are some such unfortunate circumstances,” he says, “in which people can only preserve their liberty at the expense of that of others, where the citizen cannot be perfectly free unless the slave is completely a slave.”14 As we turn to Rousseau’s treatment of women, and find that his most fiercely held principle of equality does not apply at all, it is worth remembering this conclusion. For it seems that, just as the liberty and equality of the Spartan citizens were dependent on the radical enslavement of the helots, Rousseau’s ideal republic of free and equal heads of patriarchal families is necessarily built on the political exclusion, total confinement and repression of women.
The principle of equality, together with its corollaries—the rejection of the right of the strongest and the legitimacy of those governments alone which were based on the general will—were all held by Rousseau to be of crucial importance for men. However, the violation of everyone of them where women were concerned was perpetrated without question.
First, Rousseau violates with respect to women his repudiation of the right of force. If women do not become the kind of sexual objects men want them to be, “the less they will be able to control them, and then men will be really the masters.”15 Being so much weaker and less able to provide for herself, characteristics regarded as independent of the economic and social structure, woman has only her charms, her wit and her intuition in order to compensate. Rousseau never suggests, of course, that men who are weaker than others need special natural talents in order to compensate, for it is the task of the social contract to substitute civil equality for natural inequality, among men. Any superiority of strength which nature has given men over women, however, clearly has a purpose, and is not perceived by Rousseau as requiring any kind of institutionalized alleviation or compensation. That men are stronger and women dependent on them for their subsistence are simply facts of life that the latter must learn to live with.
Second, the principle of political equality, as a means to self-government, is not applied to women. Clearly, Rousseau never envisaged that women should be enfranchised citizens whose voices contribute to the formulation of the general will. Though he told the “amiable and virtuous women of Geneva” that their fate was to govern men, from what follows this assertion it is clear that he saw only one legitimate way for them to use their influence, and that was through the agency of their husbands. No civilized man, according to Rousseau, could resist the exhortations to honor and reason voiced by a tender wife. Thus, the women’s “chaste power” was to be “exercised solely in conjugal union,” where they should “continue to exploit on every occasion the rights of the heart and of nature for the benefit of duty and virtue,” and “for the glory of the state and the public happiness.”16 It was, then, only through their domestic influence on their husbands, exerted through making full use of the latter’s feelings for them, that women were to have any power in Rousseau’s ideal republic. No contract-based civic equality was to replace the natural differences bestowed upon women. Unlike the Polish serfs, women had no right by virtue of their humanity to political participation, and that “sacred and imprescriptible” law of nature which mandates participation, or at least representation, for all who can legitimately be obliged to obey the laws, apparently was seen by Rousseau as having no application to any member of the female sex.
Finally, within the sphere of the family, Rousseau was most explicit in denying women equal partnership with men. Like Aristotle, Locke and Hegel, to name three obvious examples, he made a clear typological distinction between the family and the state. Apart from the occasion examined above, in which the natural status of the family is denied, the family is consistently referred to in his works as a natural institution, founded on feeling, and thereby distinguished from all larger, political associations, which are based on conventions and reciprocal rights and duties. Those who claimed, as Filmer had, that political authority is based on the prior authority of the family patriarch over his children were therefore committing a seriously misleading fallacy in their attempts to legitimize absolute government.
Thus the rule of husbands over their wives is claimed to be a natural order in no way comparable with the requirements of equality in the political realm. For “the law of nature bids the woman obey the man” and a wife must “keep her person always under the absolute law of her husband”17 Any power that the woman wields within the family is to be acquired by her manipulation of her husband to do what she wants, and by her use, specifically, of her status as “arbiter of (his) pleasures.”18 When Rousseau actually enumerates the three reasons for this immense violation of his dearly held principle of equality, however, we can see clearly that they owe far more to the requirements of an orderly, property-based, patriarchal society, than to any state of affairs that could reasonably be construed as natural.19
Authority in the family cannot be divided between the father and the mother, Rousseau argues, because in every division of opinion there must be a single will that decides. One might perhaps expect that the creator of the concept of the general will would be the last of political philosophers to require absolute government within the family. A very intimate group of people—one that is distinguished by Rousseau himself from the larger society by the fact that it is held together by affection and mutual concern—would seem to be an exemplary context in which to apply the principle of rule by the general will. Surely a nuclear family should be able to establish what is in the best interests of the whole, if a republic of many thousands can do it. But no, one alone—the man—must govern.
The second reason given for familial patriarchy is that women have periods of inactivity, because of their reproductive function. Though these may admittedly be slight, Rousseau says, “it is a sufficient reason for excluding [women] from this authority,” and for placing permanent rulership over the family in the husband’s hands. Needless to say, Rousseau does not resort to similar reasoning in order to exclude certain groups of men, who may be inconvenienced by lameness, for example, or by the fact that they live too far from the meeting, from sharing in decision-making. The argument is, at any rate, fatuous, except perhaps in the case of decisions which must be made during the final stages of childbirth. We can only conclude that the actual process of self-government, so important according to Rousseau for men and their character, is considered of no value for women.
The third reason is undoubtedly the most important one, since Rousseau returns to the issue again and again20—“the husband must be able to supervise his wife’s conduct: because it is essential for him to be certain that the children, whom he is compelled to recognize and maintain, belong to no one but himself.” Rousseau does not recognize certainty of paternity as the prescript of a certain type of society, with its sacred institutions of private property and inheritance;21 he attaches so much importance to it that in order to assure it, he, of necessity, excludes women from all the otherwise inviolable rights to equality and self-government.
However, neither Emile’s conduct with regard to his family, nor that of Julie’s father, Baron d’Etange, nor Rousseau’s own, constitutes any evidence for Rousseau’s claim that not only the children in their stage of dependency but the wife throughout her life can safely be trusted to the absolute authority of the patriarch, because of his natural family feelings. Emile, deserting his innocent son no less than his guilty wife, could scarcely be said to demonstrate paternal affection: he would rather see his son dead, he says, than Sophie with another man’s child. Julie’s father’s record of habitual adultery, subsequent harshness to his wife (which we are told is a frequent accompaniment to a husband’s infidelity), violence to his daughter sufficient to provoke a miscarriage, coercion of her into a marriage against her will, and claim that he would have killed her if he had known she had lost her virginity—all this is no more encouraging. And whether or not Rousseau actually did dispose, as reported, of Thérèse le Vasseur’s children, against her will, into a foundling home, he does not regard the act, despite his subsequent guilt, as an instance of tyranny toward either the children or their mother.22
Just as there are conflicting interests within civil society, which Rousseau was only too well aware of, so in any group of individuals, not excluding the family, there must of course be times when there are radical conflicts of interests. In fact Rousseau indicates that he is under no illusion as to the abuses of paternal power that were perpetrated without compunction in the society of his day.23 However, whereas with regard to political inequalities, he acknowledges that “in general it would be very foolish to expect that those who are in fact the masters will prefer any other interest to their own,” and that tyranny will necessarily exist “wherever the government and the people have different interests and consequently opposing wills,”24 he refuses to recognize, even in the light of his own fictional and personal examples, that such conflicts of interests, and such resulting tyranny, require as radical reform of the family as he advocates for the state. To the contrary, the overriding need for paternity to be certainly established abolished any notion he may have had that justice or equality is pertinent in this context also.
There are many indications in Rousseau’s writings that he had an additional reason for refusing to apply his principle of equality to women. This was his strong fear that if women were not subordinated to men in certain important ways, they would predominate over them altogether. For, since woman, he believed, has the capacity to stimulate man’s sexual desires to the extent that they can never be fully satisfied, and since nature has made her strong enough to resist his advances when she chooses to, it follows that, with respect to his sexual needs, man is “by an unvarying law of nature” dependent on the good will of woman.25 As he says in the Letter to d’Alembert, “Love is the realm of women. It is they who necessarily give the law in it, because, according to the order of nature, resistance belongs to them, and men can conquer this resistance only at the expense of their liberty.”26 Thus woman was clearly, as Rousseau saw it, in command of a critical area of man’s life. This tremendous sexual power over man was what made him so adamant that women should not, in addition, “asurp men’s rights,” or, in other words, make themselves the equals of men in those other areas which men have traditionally reserved for themselves. “For, to leave her our superior in all the qualities proper to her sex and to make her our equal in all the rest, how is this different from transferring to the wife the primacy which nature has given to the husband?”27
Fear of the power of women, and the related belief that the female sex is the source of the major evils of the civilized world are not, of course, peculiar to Rousseau. They are, however, very strongly articulated in his writings. In a poem entitled “Sur la Femme,” he addresses woman as the “seductive and deadly one, whom I adore and detest,” and goes on to say that she “makes man into a slave, … makes fun of him when he complains, … overpowers him when he fears (her), … punishes him when he defies (her), … and raises storms that torment the human race.”28 It is interesting to note in this context that, like Hesiod in his womanless Age of Gold, like Plato in the Statesman and the Timaeus, and recalling the Garden of Eden before the creation of Eve, Rousseau in the Discourse on Inequality looks back to an original state of nature which, although not without women, was a period in which the isolated life style meant that there was no social relationship between the sexes. Men were not only free of dependence on other men, they were also in a significant way independent of women, or at least of any particular woman, since their sexual urge was spontaneously satisfied by any passing female.
This simple and unemotional version of sexuality was to come to an abrupt end with the appearance of the monogamous family at the beginning of the golden age. Significantly, woman’s economic dependence on man is introduced simultaneously with man’s dependence on one woman for his sexual pleasures. The power she consequently would have over him must apparently be counterbalanced. Thus, although Rousseau did not postulate, like the Manichaeans, a hermaphroditic period of human innocence, at the end of which all the evils of sexuality emerged as mankind was divided into male and female, he did see the original state of nature as a time of purely instinctive and conflict-free sexuality. Only later, with settled living patterns, the comparison of oneself and one’s woman with others, and the consequent onset of selfishness, did the combination of sexuality and individual love begin. This was the fatal connection that resulted in jealousy, conflict, and “duels, murders and worse things.”29 In line with St. Augustine’s account, then, Rousseau postulated an event in history, equivalent to the Fall, which had transformed sexual feelings and behavior from a simple and conflict-free means of procreation into a furious passion intimately bound up with envy, guilt, fear, and sin. What he referred to as the moral as opposed to the simply physical element of love was to some extent the inevitable result of the move from nomadic isolation to the settled living patterns of society. However, it was women who were accused of having nurtured carefully the emotional side of love and of playing up its importance, so as to establish their dominance over men.30 The blame for the guilt and fear experienced in relation to sexuality was laid on the female sex, as the arouser of the passions.
Thus the vast influence that women in society derived from their sexual power over men was held to be a fact independent of time and place. However, its particular direction and its consequences were not. In contemporary France, Rousseau considered the dominance of bold and licentious women to be not only responsible for the poor quality of the artistic and intellectual achievements of the time, but the root cause of all social evil. This evil influence of women is a major theme of the Letter to d’Alembert. It was because the real world offers no examples of virtuous women that the idealized ones depicted on the stage were so dangerous, for they seduced men into believing in the romance and innocence of something that was in reality so likely to lead to their damnation. In the actual world, it would be a miracle if a single truly pure woman could be found in London or Paris, as Saint-Preux’s lengthy letter from the French capital confirms. Though intelligent and educated, the women of Parisian society shocked and repelled him on account of their boldness and lack of modesty. Being so much like men, they might make a good friend, but never a wife or a mistress.31 Rousseau’s only commentary on this judgment is to remark that it is hardly likely to please the ladies themselves, since it credits them with qualities they scorn, and denies them those they most aspire to.32
Since he believed that “men of sound morals are those who really adore women” and “women are the natural judges of a man’s merit,”33 Rousseau considered that the depravity of the women around him had dire consequences. The only way to preserve the adolescent Emile’s character, therefore, was to isolate him scrupulously from all married women and prostitutes, who are bundled together in the same debauched category. Since all other women in French society are depicted as a multitude of whores, the only women with whom he can safely come into contact are chaperoned virgins.34
However, Rousseau wavered between blaming women themselves for the faults and evil influence he attributed to them and acknowledging, more in line with his reasoning about contemporary men, that social and legal circumstances were to a large extent the cause. On the one hand, in the Letter to d’Alembert and a subsequent letter to a M. Lenieps, it is made clear that women alone are to blame. When Lenieps comments in criticism of Rousseau’s position in the former work, that perhaps it is not women’s fault, but men’s own fault, if they are corrupted, Rousseau answers: “But my whole book is taken up with showing how it is their fault, and I don’t think there is anything to answer to that.”35 According to this account, women have abused their powers, in order to corrupt men and undermine the morals of society. In Emile, however, Rousseau’s ambivalence about whether to blame women or whether to blame the conditions and institutions of the time is obvious, as in a single sentence he appears to do both. “Under our senseless institutions,” he says, “the life of a good woman is a perpetual struggle against herself; it is right that her sex should share the pain of the evils that she has caused us.”36 Here, woman is depicted as the victim, but legitimately so; she is the justly banished Eve, the rightly burned witch.
On the other hand, probably because he obviously felt sympathy for his heroine, Julie, in her hopeless predicament, Rousseau is far more prepared in La Nouvelle Héloise to recognize that if women have strayed far from his chaste ideal, this is to a large extent due to the abuse of the powers wielded over them, particularly by their fathers. Allowing them to be forced into ill-assorted marriages for the sake of property and snobbery, the laws and customs which deprive women of the disposal of their own hearts and persons can to a large extent be blamed for their subsequent misconduct. Lord Bomston, who serves as a confidant for Saint-Preux and also at times as a kind of Greek chorus, argues at length against the right of fathers to give their daughters in marriage against their wills. He concludes that “there is no knowing to what extent women in this brave land are tyrannized by the laws. Need we be surprised that they revenge themselves so cruelly by means of their morals?”37 The confirmation that these are indeed the opinions of the author can be found in the Second Preface to the work, which is of invaluable help in clarifying some of the major morals and messages of the novel. Agreeing with his critic that the morals of married women are scandalous, Rousseau, in contrast to his response to M. Lenieps, answers: “But be fair to women; the cause of their misconduct lies less in them than in our evil institutions.”38 Natural feelings, he continues, are being stifled by the extremes of inequality in society, and it is the “despotism of fathers” that leads to the sins and misfortunes of their children. According to this account, then, the bad conduct of contemporary women and the consequent evil of the influence they exerted over the whole of society were by no means unchangeable, since they could, at least in large part, be traced to specific and identifiable causes.
Thus, although there is no hope of escape from the influence of women, it need not be an influence for evil. On the contrary, as Rousseau asserts in the Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, “I am far from thinking that this ascendancy of women is in itself an evil. It is a gift given them by nature for the happiness of the human race; better directed, it could produce as much good as today it does harm.”39 Women have been respected by every virtuous nation, and the age in which they lost this position and in which men no longer looked to their judgment would be “the last stage of degradation.” What great things their influence might achieve if it were properly directed, both on the individual and the national levels! The inspiration of being loved by a really good woman is seen by Rousseau as able to work miracles in a man: “It is certain,” he says, “that only women could bring back probity and virtue among us.”40
It is clear, however, that Rousseau could envisage only one way in which women should exercise their vast influence for good. Only by being chaste, retiring, and devoted wives and mothers, should women exert their proper “subservient domination” over their men, and restore virtue to society. Governed absolutely in their domestic lives and excluded totally from civic life, Rousseau’s women were to be the permanent subordinates of men. For this generally egalitarian philosopher, sex was the only legitimate ground for the permanent unequal treatment of any person.
Closely related to the ideal of equality, in Rousseau’s works, is the importance of freedom. He stresses continually the value of freedom from dependence on other persons or on their opinions and prejudices. “It is only among free people,” he says, “that man’s worth is apparent; freedom [is] the most noble of man’s faculties”; and “To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to give up the rights of humanity, and even its duties. Such a renunciation is incompatible with man’s nature, and to take away all his freedom of will is to deprive his actions of all morality.”41 Both in the original state of nature hypothesized in the first part of the Discourse on Inequality, and in the education prescribed for Emile, independence from others and their opinions is clearly the central value. Like equality, freedom was also a very personal ideal for Rousseau. In The Confessions and The Reveries of a Solitary, he expresses his repugnance at being dependent upon anyone, or obligated to do anything, even if the required activity in itself might be a pleasant one.42 Eventually he concludes that his need for independence in fact renders him quite unsuited to the needs of civil society: “So long as I act freely I am good and do nothing but good; but, as soon as I feel the yoke, whether of necessity, or of men, I become a rebel or, rather, restive; then I am nothing….”43
Although in his political theory Rousseau had to try to reconcile man’s natural need for independence with the requirements of life in a social state, his original state of nature is an idealization of complete independence. It was designed to prove that man is naturally good when he lives in isolation from and independence of his fellows, and that it was the development of society, with its multiplication of needs and conflicts of interests which, by making men mutually dependent, had fostered their selfishness and caused all the harm they inflict on each other. As Rousseau asserts:
Everyone must see that, since the bonds of servitude are formed only from the mutual dependence of men and the reciprocal needs that unite them, it is impossible to enslave a man without first putting him in the position of being unable to do without another; a situation which, as it did not exist in the state of nature, leaves each man there free of the yoke and renders vain the law of the stronger.44
However, the state of nature was fated to come to an end, and, as soon as one man needed another, “slavery and misery were seen to germinate.”45
The principal concern of Rousseau’s political philosophy is the restitution of man’s freedom within civil society.46 For, while any constraint laid on a person’s will by another individual makes the former no longer free, constraint of some kind is of course necessary for social harmony. The only solution to the great social problem of the dependence of man on man, which, according to Rousseau “causes all manner of vices and depraves both master and slave,”47 is through the substitution of the rule of law for that of any individual will. For when the general will is sovereign, “every man in obeying the sovereign is only obeying himself, and … we are freer under the social pact than in the state of nature.”48 Anyone who, within civil society, sets aside the law which accords with the general will and claims to subject another person to his personal will, thereby puts himself and the other back into the pure state of nature, in which the latter has no obligation to obey him. The state of war exists between them.49 Personal absolutism and subservience then, in principle, have no place in Rousseau’s political theory.
Just as abhorrent to Rousseau as personal dependence, was dependence on the opinions of others or on the prejudices of one’s time and place.50 Eventually, he found it necessary to retreat from almost all personal contacts and into the realm of nature, in order to free himself from “the yoke of opinion.”51 Likewise, according to the Discourse on Inequality, one of the most regrettable things that the end of the golden age brought with it was the need to impress others, which led to deception, dissimulation, and all the vices that follow from these.52 Since then, our fate has been sealed, “all our wisdom consists in slavish prejudices; all our customs are nothing but subjection, coercion and constraint. Civilized man is born, lives and dies in slavery.”53
The roles people were obliged to play in contemporary society were regarded by Rousseau as the most intrusive and personal form of tyranny. What disgusted him so much about actors was their prostitution of themselves by slavishly taking on roles and becoming the toys of the spectators—an occupation far too debasing for a creature as noble as man.54 What repelled him above all about Parisian society was its slavish conformity to the prevailing prejudice or fashion of the moment. The customs of contemporary city life were altogether a sham; politeness, decorum and the art of pleasing had so far taken over that one no longer had any way of distinguishing the genuine from the assumed. The inevitable result was that there were “no more sincere friendships; no more real esteem; no more well-based confidence.”55 The appalling decline in morals that Rousseau perceived around him, he attributed very largely to this cancerous servility to opinion and dissimulation that was taking over society. It was only by leaving behind the cities, the empire of opinion, and living in rural isolation—as he himself did, as his ideal Wolmar family did, and as, he urged Emile and Sophie to do—that one could hope to be truly happy. Only thus could one freely reject that false conception of honor and virtue that was based on prejudice, and discover and devote oneself to the true and eternal principles of morality. “What good is it to seek our happiness in the opinion of others if we can find it within ourselves?”56
Emile’s education is designed to make him into an independent man in a corrupt world. This is not as paradoxical as it seems, since ultimately, Rousseau believed that “liberty is not found in any form of government, it is in the heart of the free man, he bears it everywhere with him.”57 Emile is to be such a man. First, although of independent means, he must be self-sufficient in a more personal way. He must never need to be economically dependent on anyone or any circumstance, and so is trained in the universally useful trade of carpentry. Secondly, and of far deeper significance, he is to be educated in such a way that he never feels subjected to another person’s authority. The result of this is that, at the time his intellectual education begins, Rousseau tells us that the boy has “the confidence of independence,” “he follows no rule, yields to no authority or example, and acts and speaks only as he pleases,” for “does he not know that he is always his own master?”58 In fact, as the whole of Book 2 testifies, he is controlled in many ways by his tutor throughout his childhood, but this control is exerted in such a way as to disguise the fact that it emanates from another person. In order to preserve him from dependence on the opinions or authority of others, he is not told what he ought or ought not to do, nor influenced by what people will think of him or by the prevailing prejudices.59 Instead, his tutor contrives to manipulate circumstances in such a way that Emile learns how to behave by responding to the fortunate or unfortunate results of his actions. Children should never receive punishment as such, Rousseau teaches; the harm that befalls them should always appear to be the natural consequence of their fault. Thus, while the tutor is, covertly, very much in control of Emile’s training, this is not perceived by the child. His independence of judgment suffers far less from his submission to consequences which seem to be “the heavy yoke of necessity under which every mortal being must bow” than from obedience to “the caprices of man.”60 Only because he is artificially preserved from the influence of authority and prejudice is Emile enabled to develop his own reasoning powers and to become able to distinguish for himself between good and evil. With this background, when the time comes for him to respond to the society around him, since he is “free from the yoke of prejudice, but ruled by the law of wisdom,” he will care only about the opinions of the most honorable people, those most like himself.61 He will be an independent man, so far as circumstances permit.
In society, Rousseau asserts, sexuality leads inevitably to the deep and extensive dependence of each sex on the other. “In every station, every country, every class, the two sexes have so strong and so natural a relation that the morals of the one always determine those of the other.”62 However, in the cases of both Emile and Sophie, and in general, Rousseau was far less inclined to stress the effects on their morals and character of women’s dependence on men, than the influences of the dependence of men on women. As for the first—a dependence vastly intensified of course by the economic and social disparities between the sexes in a patriarchal society—he was completely unconcerned. He recognizes it, admittedly, in several passages, but only to confirm its necessity, not at all to question its rightfulness or its social effects. Several times he threatens women with the prospect of becoming merely the slaves of men, if they do not assume the sex-defined role and character required of them. Without her cunning wit, which compensates for her lack of physical strength, “woman would be man’s slave, not his partner…. She has everything against her, our faults and her own weakness and timidity; her beauty and her wits are all that she has.” Since beauty must inevitably fade, her only lasting resource is her wit, and the only way she can control man is by “manipulating us and taking advantage of our own strength.”63 Thus the only route to power that a woman has is to use her sexual hold over man to persuade, trick or cajole him into deciding to do what she wants.
Similarly, when he advises mothers to be sure to make their daughters into well-socialized women, and not to try to defy nature and make them like men, Rousseau says “be sure it will be better both for her and for us.”64 It is made very clear, however, that women are in no position to consider anything better for themselves if it is not also what men want of them, for women’s complete dependence on men’s approval is thrown up at them in the same discussion. Having suggested, ironically, that there is nothing to stop mothers from educating their daughters in any way they please and that men are not responsible for the fact that girls are educated only for trivia and flirtation, Rousseau proceeds to acknowledge at length that it is only by successful exploitation of their feminine charms that women can exert any power at all. Thus the philosopher who abhorred the rule of force and the reign of public opinion over the individual could acknowledge without any sign of disapproval that unless women educate themselves, structure their personalities and regulate their lives totally in accordance with man’s liking, they can expect only to be enslaved by their more powerful opponents.
Rousseau’s fear of women and their influence undoubtedly provides an important part of the explanation for this paradox. He was so convinced of the extent of man’s sexual and emotional dependence on woman that he felt it was only by disadvantaging and oppressing her in other areas that his supposedly natural predominance could be restored to the male. Thus, in direct contrast to his assertion that the central need of the man is to be free, Rousseau argues that a woman is formed by nature for dependence and constraint.65 Since he depicts her life as necessarily controlled by the requirements of the patriarch, the family is the one place where Rousseau’s principled stand against personal power and subservience is not applied. Clearly, no woman can be enabled to live her own life as Emile is educated to live his. To the contrary, she can find her happiness only via the happiness of a good man, and thus she must direct all her energies toward pleasing and being respected by men, necessarily submitting to all their judgments, their needs and their injustices. Thus “the first and most important quality in a woman is gentleness; created to obey a being as imperfect as man, often so vicious and always so full of faults, she must learn at an early age to suffer injustice, and to put up with the wrongs of a husband without complaint.”66 Opposition or bitterness can only make things worse for her. While many of the qualities needed for this role were seen by Rousseau to be innate in women, Sophie’s entire education is designed to reinforce them, and above all, to ensure that she will fulfill the requirements and never wish to upset the hierarchy of the patriarchal family.
Far from being an autonomous or even a distinct person, Rousseau’s ideal woman should be strong only so that her sons will be strong, reasonable only to the extent required to preserve her chastity, converse with her husband and rear his children wisely, and even attractive only to the point where she appeals sexually to her husband but does not threaten his peace of mind. All her thoughts, “apart from those directly related to her duties, should tend toward the study of men or toward that pleasant learning which has the formation of taste as its aim.”67
Thought, or the use of her reason, for any other purposes than these, are not only unnecessary but distasteful in a woman: “A female wit is a plague to her husband, her children, her friends, her servants, and everybody. From the exalted height of her genius, she scorns all her duties as a woman, and always sets out to make a man of herself….”68 Thus women “should learn many things, but only those things that are suitable.”
Sophie is educated, therefore, just to the point where it is agreeable for Emile to converse with her without being in any danger of being threatened by her. Her mind is “pleasing but not brilliant, and thorough without being profound, a mind that inspires no comment, because it never seems brighter nor duller than one’s own.” She is deliberately left with great gaps in her knowledge which Emile, tutor as well as lover and husband, will have the pleasure of remedying.69 Intended solely as a wife and mistress for man, any woman who was not considered desirable according to these criteria was judged by Rousseau to be worth nothing at all, however happy or successful she might be in her own right. Such a woman was willfully defying nature and trying to be a man.70
Only once in his mature writings does Rousseau consider Plato’s radical proposals about the equal education of women in a positive way, and it is noteworthy that on this occasion, too, his concern is entirely with the implications that such a change would have for men. Perhaps, he speculates in a footnote to the Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, since “men will always be what is pleasing to women,” it would only be by educating women to recognize and appreciate greatness of soul and virtue that these ancient qualities might be reestablished among men. Thus, even in suggesting that Plato’s thought on the issue should be further developed, Rousseau held to his basic principle that women and their education must be suited to what were their only proper functions in a patriarchal culture.71
Because of her natural and predestined station in life, chastity is by far the most important moral quality for a woman to possess. Whereas the dignity of men consists in their freedom, the dignity of women “consists in modesty, [and] shame and chasteness are inseparable from decency for them.” A woman who has lost her honor must be regarded as totally lacking in morality of any sort.72 While virtue is a concept that, as Pierre Burgelin has pointed out, is scarcely mentioned in the context of Emile’s education, since it always implied to Rousseau struggle against the self and a threat to freedom, it is the central value in the education of Sophie.73 For it is only through the successful struggle against the self, or at least the passionate part of the self, that a woman can hope, by guarding that precious treasure, her chastity, to acquire and keep a husband. Love of virtue “is a woman’s glory,” it is “the only way to true happiness, and … she sees nothing but poverty, abandonment, unhappiness and infamy in the life of an unseemly woman.”74 Indeed, Sophie’s ultimate fate is the clearest possible confirmation of this belief.
Rousseau had two reasons for considering it essential that woman’s moral code should be not only different in content but also based on an entirely different principle from that applicable to men. First, she can achieve satisfaction in life only to the extent that others, notably men, find her pleasing. Secondly, not only must she be scrupulously chaste, but her chastity must be utterly unquestioned, by her husband or anyone else. Since the least breath of scandal is an “indelible stain” on a woman’s character, and a man’s honor depends less on his wife’s actual conduct than on what people think about it, she must be sure not to compromise her reputation in any way. Thus, for women,
it is not enough to be estimable, they must be esteemed; it is not enough to be beautiful, they must please; it is not enough to be good, they must be recognized as such; their honor is not in their conduct alone but in their reputation, and it is impossible for a woman who is really virtuous ever to allow herself to be thought vile. In order to act rightly, a man is his own master and can defy public opinion, but by doing the right thing a woman has only completed half her task, and what people think of her matters to her as much as what she really is. It follows from this that the principle of her education must be in this respect contrary to that of ours: opinion is the tomb of man’s virtue and the throne of woman’s.75
Thus, unlike Socrates and Plato but like the rest of the Greek world, Rousseau clearly regarded female morality and male morality as essentially different. It is not simply a matter of the familiar “double standard”; what he thought to be necessary was not two standards on the same ethical scale, but the construction of two radically different scales. Because women were viewed by him entirely in terms of the function they perform in a male culture, their standard of goodness is defined solely in terms of the requirements and prejudices of that culture, whereas goodness in men, who were not viewed functionally in this way, is defined as independently as possible of social prejudice. While there are many more or less equivalent ways in which a man might manifest his morality and worth, the preservation of her chastity is a woman’s all-important moral goal.
Sophie’s moral education is, as a result, a travesty of that prescribed for Emile. Indeed, if Rousseau’s attitude to women were not so manifest, both in Emile and elsewhere, one might be tempted to interpret the description of her rearing as a satirical commentary on the contemporary culture and its educational methods, against which the work as a whole is directed.
Virtually everything Sophie does, and is encouraged to do, is for the sake of appearance. Unlike the free and casual child Emile, the girl takes endless pains over her toilet (in order to achieve the “natural look”), she learns the spinet for the purpose of showing off her white hands against the darkness of the keys, and everything she says is gauged, not according to its sense or usefulness, as Emile’s conversation is judged, but according to the effect it will have on the listener. Though she is quite lacking in originality, “she always says what pleases the people who talk to her.”76 Her moral education is devoted to reinforcing her innate female tendency to be submissive and constrained, and teaching her to dissimulate, in order to conform exactly to what society expects of her. For girls, in contrast to boys,
should be restricted from a young age…. They will be subjected all their lives to the most severe and per petual restraint, that of propriety: one must impose restraint on them from the start, so that it will never be a hardship for them, so as to master all their fantasies and make them submit to the wills of other people…. This habitual restraint results in a docility in women which they need all their lives, since they will always be in subjection to a man or to men’s judgments, and will never be allowed to set themselves above these judgments.77
One of the major paradoxes of Sophie’s education is due to the requirement that, while she must behave with the utmost reserve and self-control both before marriage and toward all men but her husband after marriage, she must be well versed in all the arts of coquetry and seduction, in order to maintain her husband’s sexual interest in her. Rousseau blames the teachings of the Church for the fact that women frequently lose their amiableness and cause their husbands to become indifferent to them. To solve this problem, he says, “I wish that a young Englishwoman would cultivate the talents which will delight her future husband as carefully as a young Eastern woman cultivates them for the harem…. Surely that will add happiness to her husband’s life and will prevent him, exhausted after he leaves his office, from seeking out amusements away from home?”78 In keeping with this wish, the education of the ideal woman includes advice on how to maintain and elevate the future husband’s sexual interest, alongside the strictest prohibitions against any other form of sexual expression. Sophie is indeed to be both concubine and nun.
In all respects, Rousseau argues that the constraints placed on women should be stricter after marriage than before. It is only among corrupt peoples, he asserts, that married women are allowed more freedom than young girls; with those who have preserved their morals, the opposite practice is followed.79 The correct status of a married woman is described by Julie, speaking of her cousin Claire:
When she was unmarried, she was free, she had only to answer to herself for her conduct … but now all is changed; she must account to another for her conduct; she has not only pledged her trust, she has renounced her freedom. … A virtuous woman must not only deserve her husband’s esteem but must obtain it; if he blames her, she is blameworthy; and if she has acted innocently, she is guilty as soon as she is suspected; for even preserving appearances is part of her duty.80
Thus upon marrying, woman, truly for Rousseau a “femme couverte” in the moral as well as the legal sense, loses all her autonomy of judgment and conscience.
The extreme to which Rousseau extends his denial of personal autonomy to women is his refusal to allow her to formulate her own religious beliefs. While Emile is, when old enough, encouraged to think for himself about religious matters, “just as a woman’s conduct is subject to public opinion, so is her faith subject to authority.”81 A daughter must unquestioningly adopt her mother’s religion (which is, of course, her father’s too), and a wife her husband’s. Rousseau assures his readers that no woman will be made to suffer for this, since “if this religion should be false, the docility which makes the mother and daughter submit to the natural order effaces the sin of error in the sight of God.”82 Faith and doctrine are apparently unimportant for women; they are redeemed through submission. This pronouncement, analogous to the Mohammedan belief that a woman has no soul, is to make her, of course, in a religious world, the ultimate non-person.
Although Rousseau could not conceive of any alternative to the rigid and prejudice-based code of ethics he prescribed for women, neither was he entirely comfortable with it. After laying down a pattern of conduct for Sophie which, totally in conformity with social prejudice, violates every principle of Emile’s education, he admits concern, briefly, about what he is making woman into:
Perhaps I have said too much already. What will we reduce women to if we give them no law but public prejudices? Let us not debase to that level the sex which governs us, and which honors us when we have not made it vile. There exists for the whole human species a more fundamental law than opinion…. This law is our inner conscience….83
Since the opinion of society should be obeyed only when it is in accordance with the dictate of conscience, he concludes, rather belatedly, that whereas women must do their best to reconcile the two, if this cannot be done, they should follow their consciences. “If these two laws do not coincide in the education of women” he acknowledges, “it will always be defective.” When one considers, however, that the conflict between what is right and good and the prejudices of a corrupt society is what Emile and most of the rest of Rousseau’s writings are all about, the results of Sophie’s education seem doomed. There appears to be not much hope that public opinion and conscience will constantly coincide, as Rousseau believes they must if the education of women is to be successful. If we consider the outcomes of the stories of Emile, Sophie and Julie and the results of the kind of socialization of women Rousseau advocated as the only proper one, we have to conclude that, for him, the problem of women remained an insoluble dilemma.