A keen and vital concern with education, especially the education of girls and women, runs throughout Mary Wollstonecraft’s writing and remains a dominant theme to the abrupt end of her career. The title of her first book, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, speaks for itself; her single most important work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, begins as a plea for the equal education of women and includes an ambitious and farsighted proposal for a national schools system. Both of her novels, Mary and the unfinished Maria, centrally address the self-education of their heroines while seeking to fill a pedagogical role in relation to their female readers.1 More directly, Wollstonecraft produced a book for children (Original Stories) in the innovative, progressive mode of the day, edited an innovative reader specifically designed for the use of girls, and frequently commented on children’s books and educational treatises for the Analytical Review. Among the projects left unfinished at her death were a treatise on the “Management of Infants,” barely begun, and a primer, provisionally entitled “Lessons,” that, if completed, might have changed the early history of the British children’s book.
Education was critically important to Wollstonecraft both as a liberal reformer and as a radical theorist and proponent of women’s rights. A broad spectrum of reformist writers and activists – from conservatives wishing to shore up the status quo to “Jacobins” wishing to overturn it – saw education as a, if not the, key locus for promoting social stability or engineering social revolution.2 According to associationist psychology, influentially applied to schooling and pedagogy in Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) and subscribed to by nearly every important writer on education in Wollstonecraft’s time, childhood was the crucial period for the formation of individuals, and hence of social groups. As Wollstonecraft herself writes (in a chapter of the second Vindication on the “Effect which an Early Association of Ideas has upon the Character”), early education has a “determinate effect” upon later character, and the associations built up over the course of childhood can “seldom be disentangled by reason” in later life (VRW 5:185–6). Not simply the consciously held ideals but the unconscious habits, prejudices, and character traits of men and women are established during childhood.
The efforts of parents and teachers cannot do everything, following associationist logic, since dominant social manners and institutions have a large formative effect in themselves. Yet education could at least do something to form rational and virtuous moral subjects who could then, in turn, help set a better social tone and establish more progressive social institutions. In contrast to skeptics like Anna Barbauld, who noted the contingencies and uncontrollable aspects of the child’s early environment, most liberal and radical intellectuals of the time viewed education as the cornerstone of any movement for social reform.3 This was especially true for Dissenting intellectuals, “non-conformist” Protestants excluded from the educational institutions (including both English universities) under official Anglican control. Left to build their own network of schools and academies, with considerable success, Dissenters had a practical stake as well as a theoretical and political interest in education. Although Wollstonecraft came from an Anglican family, her intellectual career brought her into sustained contact with Dissenting culture, from Richard Price’s circle at Newington Green to Joseph Johnson’s celebrated group in London, and her thought on education and childhood shows a good deal of coherence with leading non-conformist ideas.4
If education was preeminent in forming individual subjects, it was equally powerful, Wollstonecraft eventually argued, to deform the subjective lives of women. Building on Catharine Macaulay’s Letters on Education, Wollstonecraft came to see the history of female education as a virtual conspiracy of male educators and writers seeking to render women more weak and less rational than they would otherwise have become. For the amelioration of women’s abject social condition, then, and for the rise of a revolutionary generation of rational, freethinking, independent women, educational reform was crucial. Moreover, women could argue from their traditional role as nurturers and early educators of children for a sounder and more rational education. If women were to be wholly or largely consigned to the domestic sphere, that is, they could make this domestic form of subjection the very ground for educational reform, since only a thoughtful, well-informed, strong mother could be expected to provide her children with a truly adequate rearing and education.5 Such arguments, made by Wollstonecraft in company with a wide range of female reformers, running the ideological spectrum from conservatives like Hannah More to radicals like Macaulay and Mary Hays, were inevitably double-edged. They challenged a key aspect of patriarchal domination – the subordination of women through an invidious education meant to confine them to the domestic sphere – through urging a revised conception of that very domestic role.6
In addition, their traditional role as mothers, nurturers, and educators of the young gave women writers an experiential base from which to draw on in writing about – and to – children. Wollstonecraft herself worked as a domestic companion, a schoolmistress, and a governess, three of the few “respectable” (if “humiliating”) careers then open to women (VRW 5:219). These experiences resonate throughout her completed books, as her experience as a mother (to Fanny Imlay) informs the tantalizing fragments published by William Godwin after her death. The two years Wollstonecraft spent managing and teaching in her own school on Newington Green left an indelible mark on Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, the book that first established her as an author.
Published by Johnson in 1787, Thoughts owes a good deal to Wollstonecraft’s reading in earlier educational treatises (the title itself echoes Locke’s Some Thoughts on Education) and in the conduct-book tradition. In fact, if Wollstonecraft had not gone on to write the two Vindications, it is doubtful that anyone now would find Thoughts a “radical” text.7 For the most part, the book reads like the work of a young author wishing to appeal to mainstream taste by reiterating received ideas, more interested (as Harriet Jump writes) in “selling the book” than in developing original views.8 Many of the leading ideas are familiar from the Lockean tradition: the ideal of a domestic education supervised by parents; the bourgeois distrust of servants, for the most part an “ignorant and cunning” lot; the banishment of “improbable tales” and “superstitious accounts” (like fairy tales) from the children’s library; the importance of an “inflexible” adherence to rules, once set, on the part of parents, along with due affection and an avoidance of “needless” restraint (TED 4:8, 10, 22, 38). Sound habits and “fixed principles” do far more in educating children than empty precepts can, best inculcated by example rather than by rote (TED 4:42). In other words, “I wish them to be taught to think” (TED 4:11). As throughout the Lockean tradition, this mental independence must be tightly constrained by the habitual and principled adherence to things as they are: Wollstonecraft summarizes the “main articles” of early education as “a strict adherence to truth; a proper submission to superiors; and condescension to inferiors” (TED 4:11).
Insofar as girls specifically are concerned, Wollstonecraft argues for a reasoned assent to reigning social values, urging (like most contemporary writers on female education) the development of a sound moral understanding over the mindless cultivation of “exterior” accomplishments like drawing and music (TED 4:12). Unfortunately, rote accomplishments, empty “manners,” and “vicious” examples are what can be expected from most girls’ boarding schools, which should be avoided – unless the children would otherwise be left with servants, “where they are in danger of still greater corruptions” (TED 4:22). The primary object of early education is to “prepare a woman to fulfill the important duties of a wife and mother,” best taught by the children’s mother herself. The emphasis throughout on “domestic duties,” however, does not mean that there are no glimmers in Thoughts of Wollstonecraft’s later feminist views (TED 4:21–2). Early marriage, for example, is to be avoided because mothers cannot be expected to “improve a child’s understanding, when they are scarcely out of childhood themselves” (TED 4:31). Wollstonecraft will later argue that women, within patriarchal society, are kept in a “state of perpetual childhood” and that the entire “false system of education” must be dismantled as a result (VRW 5:73, 75). As several critics have noted, Thoughts is unprecedented in passionately decrying the paucity of careers for women, and in lamenting the “disagreeble” lot of the governess, the “humble companion,” and the school teacher – “only a kind of upper servant, who has more work than the menial ones” (TED 4:25). Here, as in the trenchant remark that schools cannot be well managed given the “low” fees parents currently expect to pay, the voice of experience can be heard (TED 4:12). Although marriage and motherhood remain the default goals of female education, Wollstonecraft notes that the contracted compass of the wife’s “province” tends to result an underdeveloped subjectivity, for “nothing calls for the faculties so much as the being obliged to struggle with the world” (TED 4:32). The security of the married state will not be available to all educated women, and it will come at a distinct cost at least to some.
Thoughts veers away from the Lockean mainstream in other ways as well. One is the strong note of piety that brings Wollstonecraft, perhaps surprisingly, closer to the devout Sarah Trimmer than to secularists like Richard and Maria Edgeworth, whose influential Practical Education (1798) has nothing like the stress on the “promises of the Gospel” and “presence of the Deity” that marks Thoughts (TED 4:24, 41). Despite her general adherence to associ ationist principles, Wollstonecraft also departs from the Lockean consensus in giving a formative role as well to “innate” principles of truth and to “feelings which nature has implanted in us as instinctive guards to virtue.” These inborn principles and feelings give children a certain “artless” and “beautiful” simplicity which vicious habits and harmful associations should not be allowed to override (TED 4:9). Artificial manners obscure natural “sincerity” and conceal the “genuine emotions of the heart”; fine clothes and “made-up” faces should not take the place of “unaffected manners” and natural play of thought and emotion revealed by a “‘mind-illumined face’” (TED 4:14, 17). As will Joanna Baillie a decade later, Wollstonecraft criticizes the theater of the time for the “false display of the passions” characteristic of the period’s acting, missing the “delicate touches” that convey real emotion (TED 4:46).9 Wollstonecraft employs a standard of nature as well as a standard of reason in seeking to improve on the artful and ornamental female education retailed by boarding schools and fashionable governesses.
Even writing, instrumental for forming “rational and elegant” habits of conversation, should strive for a certain nakedness of expression. “Young people are very apt to substitute words for sentiments, and clothe mean thoughts in pompous diction” (TED 4:18–19). The ideal of artlessness recurs in The Female Reader (1789), a collection of short pieces and extracts edited by Wollstonecraft but published by Johnson under a popular writer’s name (“Mr. Cresswick”). Taking William Enfield’s Speaker – designed for use in the Dissenting academies – as her model, but aiming at the “improvement of females,” Wollstonecraft again advocates “simplicity and sincerity” in style as well as behavior, with “natural and touching” extracts from “the Scriptures, Shakspeare, etc.” as prime examples (FR 4:55). The anthology (along with the translations of European books for children Wollstonecraft produced for Johnson at about the same time) has been described as “hack-work,” fairly enough, but the “Preface” is by no means without interest.10 In addition to advocating a “pure and simple style,” Wollstonecraft recommends “works addressed to the imagination” over “cold arguments and mere declamation,” and characterizes children formed by “rote” learning as miseducated “monsters,” as William Wordsworth more famously will in The Prelude (FR 4:56, 58).11 Well before Maria, one can detect a Romantic strain in Wollstonecraft’s writing.
Original Stories, however, is often seen as the antithesis to the nascent Romantic cult of childhood innocence and imagination, and has been typically described as a “series of harsh moral tales.”12 Published by Johnson in 1788, reissued in 1791 (with illustrations by William Blake) and in several further editions through 1835, Wollstonecraft’s book for children was her first commercial success. Its full title gives a sense of the book’s openly didactic purpose: Original Stories from Real Life; With Conversations, Calculated to Regulate the Affections, and Form the Mind to Truth and Goodness. Two recent experiences left a profound mark on Original Stories: Wollstonecraft’s stint as governess to the daughters of Lord and Lady Kingsborough in Ireland, from late 1786 through the summer of 1787, and her enthusiastic reading of Rousseau’s Emile during the same period.13 At the Kingsborough estate, Wollstonecraft strove to reform her spoiled, aristocratic charges, through a program based on personal example, rational conversation, and affectionate bonding, much like that of her fictional Mrs. Mason in Original Stories. The form and many of the discursive strategies of that book, however, owe a great deal to the literary example of Rousseau, whose influence on the late eighteenth-century children’s book is almost as great as that of Locke.
Like other British admirers of Rousseau – Thomas Day, David Williams, John Aikin, and the Edgeworths among them – Wollstonecraft found Emile extravagantly idealistic yet accepted a number of its arguments concerning education. The most important, as she states in a sympathetic review of Williams’s Lectures on Education, is Rousseau’s guiding principle of “instructing by circumstances, instead of wasting time . . . in formal lessons and severe rebukes.” Children learn by active experience guided by a wise and uncompromising parent or tutor. “Dry lessons” and “cold precepts” are at best useless, at worst liable to “form artificial characters”; one cannot truly “cultivate the mind without exercising it” (AR 7:142–3). The difficulties of translating Rousseau’s pedagogical program in Emile into a children’s book format should be immediately obvious, for what is didactic fiction if not a series of dry lessons culminating in cold precepts? As Day had before her in the first two volumes of Sandford and Merton (1783–6), Wollstonecraft attempts to overcome this paradox by building the text around a series of fictionalized but credible experiences – “stories from real life” – with the precepts gradually emerging from simulated “conversations” rather than bluntly spelled out as moral tags. Reviewing the third and final installment of Sandford and Merton in 1789, Wollstonecraft places it “conspicuously foremost” among the recent spate of “useful books” in the new, post-Emile mode, seeking to unfold the minds of their young readers through “questions, conversations, and lively representations of actions, leveled to their comprehensions” (AR 7:174). The characterization of Day no less aptly fits her own innovative children’s book, published the year before.
Wollstonecraft acknowledges the inherently compromised nature of the fictionalized object lesson in the book’s preface, noting the vast superiority of proper habits, “imperceptibly fixed” by daily experience, over the “precepts of reason” found in books. But given the “present state of society,” parents, with their “own passions to combat” and “fastidious pleasures to pursue,” can hardly be expected to correctly form the “ductile passions” of their children (OS 4:359). (The Kingsborough family had given Wollstonecraft ample evidence to the contrary.) The “cruel necessity” of teaching by precept rather than parental example recurs in the basic outline of the book’s plot, with Mrs. Mason, a family friend rather than paid governess, seeking to reform the characters of two girls left to the care of servants, “or people equally ignorant” (OS 4:361). Having caught “every prejudice that the vulgar casually instill,” the girls must be broken of their invidious habits and false associations before these grow too deeply rooted in their “infant minds” (OS 4:361, 383). (Caroline and Mary are aged twelve and fourteen.) Guided by the living example of Mrs. Mason through a series of dialogues and revelatory experiences and encounters, the girls will shed their vulgarities and, assisted by the reemergence of their innately good qualities, pursue a rationally independent future.
Readers’ reactions to Original Stories tend to be shaped by their attitude toward Mrs. Mason, who has been alternately described as “icy and merciless” and “compassionate,” a bloodless “monster” and a “woman of feeling.”14 One oft-quoted passage, concerning the first of the children’s many object lessons, can be read either way. In the course of breaking the girls of their habitual cruelty to animals (which, from the power of association, will inexorably lead to cruelty towards people), Mrs. Mason takes charge of a pair of larks shot by an idle boy. The female is worth trying to save; the male is doomed and in “exquisite pain” besides (OS 4:368–9). Pointing out that it would be cruel to leave him to suffer, Mrs. Mason “put her foot on the bird’s head, turning her own another way.” Cool, certainly; but also an unforgettable lesson in overcoming empty sentiment and weak-minded fastidiousness with rational (if unavoidably fatal) kindness. More chilling is an exchange a bit earlier in the same episode, when the girls try to defend their behavior after running “eagerly after some insects to destroy them.” “You are often troublesome,” Mrs. Mason tells them, “I am stronger than you – yet I do not kill you” (OS 4:367–8). Even if this is supposed to be uttered half-jokingly, it is probably not a sort of humor that children enjoy.
In the course of their pursuit of instructive experiences and moral examples, Mrs. Mason’s charges, like Day’s Sandford and Merton before them, receive an incidental education in liberal and radical causes as well. They hear the story of a prisoner in the Bastille, meet a Welsh harper driven off his land by a tyrannical landlord, meet a shopkeeper ruined by wealthy customers too lofty to pay their bills. They also encounter a series of exemplary women, who (along with Mrs. Mason) provide them with models of female virtue, rationality, and autonomy. The village schoolmistress, Anna Lofty, maintains her valued “independence” through minimizing her desires and devoting her time to the improvement of others (OS 4:428). Mrs. Trueman, in contrast, embodies rational domesticity, providing her children with a model education while enjoying a companionate marriage. Mrs. Mason herself, having lost her spouse and “darling child,” prefers to continue single and bestow her considerable energies upon the larger community (OS 4:432). Negative examples are provided as well. Mrs. Mason tells the story of a “gentle girl” who, terrified of poverty, marries a wealthy “old rake” only to be reduced to the mad-house by his vices and “ill-humour” (OS 4:405); this cautionary figure recurs as the “lovely maniac” in Maria (WWM 1:95).
The radical politics and proto-feminist portrayals found throughout Original Stories should not blind criticism, however, to its pronounced disciplinary character. In keeping with much literature written for the “new child” of the 1780s and 90s, Original Stories seeks to reengineer the child reader’s subjectivity along lines of self-surveillance and openness to adult control, and constructs a rational autonomy carefully delimited by habits of “oeconomy and self-denial” and guided by religious “duty” (OS 4:445, 449).15 In addition to the virtual object lesson and the scripted “conversation,” Wollstonecraft helps develop two strategies for disciplining the juvenile reader that become widespread in British children’s fiction: convincing the child of her own legibility and leading her to construct a moral narrative out of her daily life. Both strategies amplify the Lockean view of the infant mind as a sheet of “white Paper” into a full-scale textualization of the child’s developing subjectivity.16 Throughout the book Mrs. Mason urges the children (and, by implication, the book’s young readers) to view themselves as objects of constant surveillance, accountable for all of their actions, however seemingly trivial. Mrs. Mason herself exemplifies the penetrating gaze of authority, inescapable even in the dark: “I declare I cannot go to sleep, said Mary, I am afraid of Mrs Mason’s eyes” (OS 4:389). Even their inmost thoughts and desires are subject to the all-seeing eye of God. “You must recollect,” Mrs. Mason enjoins the girls, “that the Searcher of hearts reads your very thoughts; that nothing is hid from him” (OS 4:383). Construed as texts open to authoritative reading, the girls strive to bring their actions and “very thoughts” into line with Mrs. Mason’s teaching. This ongoing program of textualization becomes explicit at the book’s conclusion, when Mrs. Mason presents the girls with the written record of their experiences and discussions, presumably a version of Original Stories itself. “Recur frequently to it, for the stories illustrating the instruction it contains, you will not feel in such a great degree the want of my personal advice” (OS 4:449). The book is offered as a means to facilitate the girls’ internalization of Mrs. Mason’s pedagogy, by reconstructing their lives as a series of moral “stories” calculated to illustrate her precepts. For the future, Mrs. Mason urges the children to “write often” to her, again seeking to hide nothing: “but let me have the genuine sentiments of your hearts” (OS 4:450). The girls no longer require the constant presence of a monitor only because they have learned to monitor themselves.
Readings of Original Stories as a work of ideological “subversion” tend to downplay or ignore altogether its starkly and pervasively disciplinary tenor.17 Yet in its treatment of gender, its advocacy of female “fortitude” and rationality, its condemnation of the “frivolous views” – “littlenesses” in the first edition – that “degrade the female character,” Wollstonecraft’s book for children is strikingly progressive (OS 4:410, 437). A passage from her 1789 review of Sandford and Merton suggests how isolated Wollstonecraft felt in her pursuit of an equal, more substantial, and rational education for girls. “Mr Day, above prevailing prejudices, recommends a very different mode of education for females, from that which some late writers on the subject, have adopted; . . . he wishes to see women educated like rational creatures, and not made mere polished play things, to amuse the leisure hours of men” (AR 7:176). A review of another work of educational reform published only a year later, however, shows Wollstonecraft possessed of a major new ally and her thinking given a significant new impetus. Described as the “turning point” in her intellectual career, Wollstonecraft’s reading of Catherine Macaulay’s Letters on Education provided her with the germ of the arguments on female education and conduct that she would develop to such lasting effect in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792).18
“Perfectly coinciding in opinion with this sagacious writer,” Wollstonecraft reviewed Macaulay’s Letters at unusual length, eliciting and endorsing its more iconoclastic views on gender and education (AR 7:309). As Rousseau had insisted in Emile, “hardy habits” should be developed from infancy, with the important addition that the “amusements and instructions of boys and girls should be the same.” The judicious reading program recommended in Letters is “equally designed for girls and boys”; in place of the submissiveness and other “negative” virtues enjoined by nearly every conduct writer, girls like boys should develop “habits of independence” (AR 7:311–12). Women are miseducated rather than educated under the reigning system, debilitated and “depraved” physically from lack of exercise and excessive restraint, debased morally by being taught only to “abstain” from vice but not how to attain to virtue. Summarizing this aspect of Macaulay’s views as “no characteristic difference in sex,” Wollstonecraft comments that her “observations on this subject might have been carried much farther, if Mrs M.’s object had not been a general system of education” (AR 7:314). Within a few years, Wollstonecraft would herself draw out the implications of Macaulay’s radical critique, in her book-length investigation of the “rights of woman and national education” (VRW 5:65).
Writing in the brief period between the fall of the Bastille and the full-blown British reaction against the French Revolution, Wollstonecraft attacks the inequitable system of female education for its subversion of the republican values of liberty and equality. Having developed a defense of the ideals of the Revolution – “the rights of men and the liberty of reason” – two years before in A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), Wollstonecraft now demands civil rights and equal educational provisions for women in the name of those same ideals (VRM 5:7). Adapting (as had Macaulay) Rousseau’s standard of education for active citizenship developed throughout Emile, Wollstonecraft nevertheless relentlessly attacks Rousseau for limiting such an education to boys, consigning girls to a subservient “education for the body” alone (VRW 5:150). Even in their traditional role as mothers and nurturers, however, women require a much more substantial education. “If children are to be educated to understand the true principle of patriotism, their mother must be a patriot; and the love of mankind, from which an orderly train of virtues spring, can only be produced by considering the moral and civil interest of mankind” (VRW 5:66). Virtue must be “nursed by liberty,” both positive freedom of intellectual inquiry and negative freedom from undue restraint (VRW 5:264). The proper mother is not an amiable, fashionable house-slave but a reasonable, liberated intellectual.
Wollstonecraft’s radical reconceptualization of the maternal role overlaps with the reformist agendas of most of the period’s writers on education for women, but goes much further in demanding a complete overhaul of the “false system” recommended by “all” writers on “female education and manners” from Rousseau to Gregory (VRW 5:73, 91).19 In place of incremental reforms, she calls for “civil” equality and economic independence, as well as an “independence of mind” scarcely to be expected from women “taught to depend entirely on their husbands” (VRW 5:216–17, 222–3). Such independence demands in turn that women be free to step out of their seemingly natural role as wives and mothers, in order to pursue traditionally male professions, such as medicine, politics, and business (VRW 5:218–19). Moreover, the entire slate of “negative” virtues recommended throughout the conduct-book tradition must be repudiated for their morally as well as physically debilitating effects, including the cardinal virtue of female modesty. In the Female Reader Wollstonecraft had recommended “diffidence and reserve” as the “most graceful ornament of the sex,” praising the modest blush as “more eloquent than the best turned period” (FR 4:56, 59). There is no longer a place in Wollstonecraft’s thought for such temporizing. “I here throw down my gauntlet, and deny the existence of sexual virtues, not excepting modesty” (VRW 5:120). Her uncompromising dismissal of uniquely “feminine” virtues – which would facilitate her demonization in the reactionary period soon to follow – allowed Wollstonecraft to revise the existing system of female socialization, from the cradle up.
An education for mental independence and “strength, both of mind and body,” begins with a freer and more vigorous infancy and childhood (VRW 5:75). Swaddling, bodily constraint, and close supervision should be kept to a minimum while infancy passes in “harmless gambols” and “almost continual” playful exercise (VRW 5:110). In Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, Wollstonecraft had praised the “diffidence” of a “sweet young creature, shrinking as it were from observation,” in contrast to the girl who, left too much with servants, “soon grows a romp” (TED 4:11). Now she hopes, in riposte to Emile, that a “girl, whose spirits have not been damped by activity, or innocence tainted by false shame, will always be a romp,” lively and athletic, less interested in dolls than in running “wild” (VRW 5:112). Growing girls should take the “same exercise as boys,” and once they do so the alleged “natural superiority of man” in point of strength will prove to have been culturally exaggerated, if not altogether socially produced (VRW 5:155). In place of the sedentary, repetitive, and confining occupation of needlework, older girls should practice “gardening, experimental philosophy, and literature,” likely to improve their conversation along with their health (VRW 5:144). More “good sense” and active virtue can be found among “poor women,” despite their “few advantages of education,” than among those of the middle and higher ranks, simply because their desperate situation demands activity verging on “heroic” exertion (VRW 5:145).
Turning to education proper, Wollstonecraft breaks both with the bourgeois liberal consensus of her time and her own earlier position in advocating an ambitious scheme of national education. Educational reformers from Locke to the Edgeworths recommend a “domestic” education supervised directly by parents – or a trusted, qualified tutor – over the boarding schools and day schools then available. Boarding schools regularly come in for special attack, and Wollstonecraft echoes this criticism in the chapter of the Vindication devoted to “national schools,” the first third of which concerns schooling for boys (VRW 5:229–35). Schools, “as they are now regulated,” are the “hot-beds of vice and folly”; too crowded for careful instruction and adequate supervision, their tone too often set by the worst impulses of the boys themselves. “The relaxation of the junior boys is mischief; and of the senior, vice.” But, acknowledging the significant shift in her views, Wollstonecraft can no longer support “private” (domestic) education either. Children best learn to “think for themselves” among other children, working in concert to solve problems rather than passively relying on adults. The “social affections” require an atmosphere of “equality” in order to develop, and the friendships, open discussions, and “confidences” shared by children provide the best foundation for a frank, benevolent, and ingenuous character. Seeking a middle ground between the inadequate pedagogy and supervision of boarding-schools and the confinement of an adult-dominated “private” education, Wollstonecraft calls for the provision of “proper day-schools,” where children can learn together while enjoying the domestic comforts – and maintaining the domestic ties – of home. Sounding rather like her old adversary Edmund Burke – the target of the first Vindication – she insists that “public virtues” must be rooted in domestic bonds: “if you wish to make good citizens, you must first exercise the affections of a son and brother” (VRW 5:234).20
As Wollstonecraft’s ambitious proposal for a national schools system develops, however, it becomes clear that the needs of daughters and sisters are foremost on her mind. Other radical writers, most notably Thomas Paine, had also concluded that day schools funded by the state would best promote the spread of literacy, knowledge, and ultimately social and political equality. But Paine, like Joseph Priestley, William Godwin, and other radicals from Dissenting families, worried about the potential of a system controlled by the (officially Anglican) state to shape ideological uniformity and religious orthodoxy.21 The national government should help parents meet educational expenses, but should have no part in establishing or directing the schools themselves. For Wollstonecraft, however, only a national system of day schools has the capacity to fundamentally change social relations between the sexes. She notes early in the second Vindication that “private education” can have only a limited effect in comparison to the implicit, insensible, constant education provided by the “opinions and manners” of society as a whole (VRW 5:90). But should education become a “grand national concern,” an entire generation could be produced under fundamentally altered social circumstances (VRW 5:234). Raising girls together with boys in “national” day schools established throughout the country and making female education not only equal, but indistinguishable from (a reformed) male education, could enable the “improvement and emancipation of the whole sex” (VRW 5:247).
By being educated together with boys in “public schools” (that is, state-managed day schools), girls will learn to become “free” and “independent,” the best foundation for genuine companionship with men in later life. Both sexes will learn true modesty together – that is, “modesty without those sexual distinctions” that make for an unequal social compact and “taint” both the male and female mind, rendering the former more sensual and the latter more cunning. Thanks to the “enlargement of mind” promised by a sounder education, women will learn to better appreciate the fine arts and the beauties of nature, in place of the “ignorance and low desires” all but guaranteed by the current system (VRW 5:237–8, 245). Wollstonecraft anticipates the stock charge that too much education will masculinize women by returning to her revisionary conception of motherhood and domesticity. Schooling in “political and moral subjects” will make women more rather than less “attentive to domestic duties,” by giving them the strength of an “active mind” and a compelling alternative to the “love of pleasure.” “Indolence and vanity,” not the higher pleasures of “literary pursuits” and the “steady investigation of scientific subjects,” poison domestic life (VRW 5:241). The scientifically trained mother will moreover be in a better position to “nurse” her family’s physical and moral health, and the schools should therefore cover not only the “elements of anatomy and medicine,” but teach the “anatomy of the mind” by “allowing the sexes to associate together in every pursuit,” studying the progress of civilization and the “political history of mankind” (VRW 5:249). Here the force (and iconoclasm) of Wollstonecraft’s critique of “sexual” virtues again becomes evident. Having dismantled the notion of a uniquely feminine “modesty,” Wollstonecraft can argue not only for coeducation, but for the pursuit of supposedly immodest subjects like human anatomy.
The specifics of her proposal for a national schools system show that Wollstonecraft wishes to promote social equality not only in relation to gender but in relation to class as well, though within certain parameters. In the “elementary” day schools (for children from five to nine years old), “boys and girls, the rich and poor” are educated together with a single curriculum. School uniforms and a single code of discipline function to minimize the appearance of class distinctions. A large playground allows for the physical exercise and “relaxations” that young children need, as well as providing a natural classroom for studying botany, mechanics, and the like. As in Original Stories and other didactic children’s books written in the wake of Emile, hands-on learning, active problem-solving, and “socratic” dialogues are the preferred forms of instruction (VRW 5:240). Older children, still unsegregated by gender, will be divided into two tracks. Those “intended for domestic employments, or mechanical trades,” will be given a predominately vocational education, whereas “young people of superior abilities, or fortune,” will pursue a version of the sound “liberal” education available in the great Dissenting academies: classical and modern languages, natural science, history, politics, and literature (VRW 5:242). This tracking may seem a concession to the starkly hierarchical class system of the time, and it is. Yet the possibility that children’s futures might be determined by “abilities” rather than “fortune” reflects the radically progressive character of Wollstonecraft’s imagined school of the future.
Much as Wollstonecraft’s vision of coeducational, state-supported, universally available schooling – at once utopian and prophetic – represents a significant shift in her educational thought, the second Vindication manifests a fundamentally new approach to considering the relation between children and adults generally. With its emphasis on “proper submission to superiors,” Thoughts had kept children in their traditional place of inferiority to adults, at least adults of the same or higher socioeconomic status. In Original Stories, despite its casual equation of the “lower class of mankind” with “children,” the girls are instructed to consider themselves “inferior” even to servants, at least those “whose understandings are arrived at some degree of maturity” (OS 4:390, 412). But by the time she publishes her translation of de Cambon’s Young Grandison (1790), Wollstonecraft has grown impatient with doctrines that “cramp” the child’s understanding in making it “submit to any other authority than that of reason” (YG 2:215). According to A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, the “Divine right” of parents to their children’s obedience is just as spurious as the divine right of kings to rule a people (VRW 5:228). In fact, these alleged “rights” equally make part of an overarching system of patriarchal despotism, both political and domestic, promoting the interest of “tyrants,” from the “weak king to the weak father of a family” (VRW 5:67). Rejecting the “arbitrary principle” of parental authority and the “blind obedience” that renders children “slavish” in character, Wollstonecraft urges that parent–child relations be predicated instead on a principle of “reciprocal duty.” Parents should earn their children’s respect through carefully attending to their education as well as basic needs, and children return the obligation through caring for parents in their old age (VRW 5:224–6). In her Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (1799) Hannah More had attempted to reduce the “rights of woman” to absurdity by anticipating a new treatise on the “rights of children.”22 But for Wollstonecraft, there is clearly nothing absurd about the connection between women’s and children’s rights to rational self-determination. Among the few “Hints” she left toward the planned second volume of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, one finds the thesis that “children should be taught to feel deference, not to practise submission” (Hints 5:273).
Two other works left in fragmentary form further extend Wollstonecraft’s thought on education and childhood: her “Letters on the Management of Infants” and her “Lessons” for small children, both published by Godwin with the Posthumous Works in 1798. In the second Vindication, Wollstonecraft had argued that rational, independent-minded women would be better able to see through the reigning “prejudices” concerning infant care that had “thinned the human race”; if this were the only benefit of reforms in female education, it would be worth setting up a national schools network simply to save infants from being sacrificed to the “moloch prejudice” (VRW 5:248). Following the birth of her daughter Fanny in 1794, Wollstonecraft refused to let her daughter be tightly swaddled, dressed her in loose clothing, exposed her to fresh air and a rich environment, and adopted a “natural manner of nursing,” all to the consternation of the local matrons.23 The letters on infancy, of which only part of the first survives, were meant to illustrate a program of infant care based on “simplicity” and the author’s own successful “practice” for women ready to depart from the conventional errors that contributed to the high infant mortality rate of the time (MI 4:459). Her healthy, vigorous daughter was a living argument both for rational motherhood and for giving children, even as infants, as much freedom and stimulation as possible.
Fanny also figures prominently in the fragmentary “Lessons,” which address a “little girl” her age and were designed for her use in learning to read (L 4:468–74). In the manner of Barbauld’s Lessons for Children (1778–88), Eleanor Fenn’s Cobwebs to Catch Flies (1783), or the Edgeworths’ Parent’s Assistant (1796), Wollstonecraft seeks to provide the beginning reader with age-appropriate, concrete, engaging material in a simple style and parental voice. The first lesson is simply a list of nouns, all naming concrete objects, in the best Lockean manner. Verbs, a few adjectives, more abstract nouns (day and night), numbers and colors are added in the second lesson. The third lesson introduces phrases of two to four words, and also begins to establish a warm, intimate relation between the child reader and the adult writer: “Shake hands. I love you. Kiss me now. Good girl.” The fourth lesson introduces a baby brother, enabling a series of comparisons that give the girl reader–protagonist insight into her own motoric, cognitive, and emotional development. She is steadily encouraged to take pride in her growing strength and mastery of the object world around her, while a life narrative develops that emphasizes the child’s affectionate bonds with her family in place of the moral self-scrutiny insisted upon in Original Stories.24 “You could only open your mouth, when you were lying, like William, on my knee. So I put you to my breast, and you sucked, as the puppy sucks now, for there was milk enough for you.”
In his brief preface to the extant lessons (ten in all), Godwin states that the author has “struck out on a path of her own,” a claim amply justified as the “Lessons” continue (L 4:467). For Wollstonecraft establishes a unique variant on the maternal voice of the “new” literature for children, one that includes a rare admission of parental vulnerability that contrasts strikingly with her own Mrs. Mason’s seeming omnipotence. “At ten months you had four pretty white teeth, and you used to bite me. Poor mamma! Still I did not cry, because I am not a child, but you hurt me very much.” The roles of parent and child are shown to be not fixed identities, but positions that shift with succeeding generations: “My mamma took care of me, when I was a little girl, like you.” The child’s growing autonomy is a source of parental pleasure rather than anxiety, something to endorse and encourage rather than qualify and circumscribe. “What you think that you shall soon be able to dress yourself entirely? I am glad of it: I have something else to do.” The tenth lesson shows first the mother, then the father, in moments of weakness, ill and needing rest and quiet, and demonstrates to the child that she indeed knows “how to think” because she has learned from one parent how to spare the other. “I did not bid you be quiet; but you thought of what papa said to you, when my head ached. This made you think you ought not to make a noise, when papa was resting himself. So you came to me, and said to me, very softly, Pray reach me my ball, and I will go and play in the garden, till papa wakes.” This is altogether a new voice in juvenile fiction. Had Wollstonecraft lived to complete “Lessons,” it would have made a pronounced contrast to the steely didacticism of Original Stories, and would have provided an innovative and compelling model for children’s writers to come.
The lasting impact of Wollstonecraft’s writing about education and childhood cannot, however, finally be separated from her feminism. It was as a revolutionary thinker on female education, and its intimate relation to women’s social, political, and domestic subordination, that Wollstonecraft both inspired and provoked her contemporaries. Although Macaulay had provided her with a foundation, Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is unprecedented in the systematic character of its analysis of female subjection and in the vigor and precision of its critique of earlier prescriptions for women’s education. Her willingness to attack the cultural edifice of feminine modesty, to advocate coeducation throughout the years of schooling, to demand political rights and economic independence for women, all made Wollstonecraft a ready target not just for criticism, but for demonization within the increasingly reactionary climate of the Romantic era. Yet even at a time when to name Wollstonecraft usually meant to mock or attack her, versions of her ideas on women’s education tacitly informed later works in an entire range of genres, from domestic fiction to tracts on educational reform.25 Wollstonecraft’s powerful analysis of the role of educational methods, institutions, and disparities in maintaining social inequalities still resonates today.
1. See Lisa Shawn Maurer, “The Female (As) Reader: Sex, Sensibility, and the Maternal in Wollstonecraft’s Fictions,” Essays in Literature 19 (1992), 36–54 and Mitzi Myers, “Pedagogy as Self-Expression in Mary Wollstonecraft: Exorcising the Past, Finding a Voice,” The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writings, ed. Shari Benstock (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 192–210.
2. For an overview, see Alan Richardson, Literature, Education, and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice, 1780–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
3. Anna Laetitia Barbauld, “On Education,” Works of Anna Laetitia Barbauld, ed. Lucy Aikin, 2 vols. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1825) 2: 305–20.
4. Virginia Sapiro, A Vindication of Political Virtue: the Political Theory of Mary Wollstonecraft (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 239–40.
5. Mitzi Myers first called attention to this strategy in “Impeccable Governesses, Rational Dames, and Moral Mothers: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Female Tradition in Georgian Children’s Books,” Children’s Literature 14 (1986), 31–59.
6. For a ground-breaking study of this dilemma, see Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, Their Fathers’ Daughters: Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth, and Patriarchal Complicity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).
7. Jane Moore, Mary Wollstonecraft (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1999), 10.
8. Harriet Jump, Mary Wollstonecraft: Writer (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994), 9.
9. Compare Baillie’s Introduction to the third volume of Plays on the Passions, in The Dramatic and Poetical Works of Joanna Baillie, 2nd edn. (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1853), 232–3.
10. Gary Kelly, Revolutionary Feminism: the Mind and Career of Mary Wollstonecraft (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), 74.
11. Compare The Prelude (1805 version), 5: 290–340, in The Prelude, 1799, 1805, 1850, eds. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (New York: Norton, 1979).
12. Janet Todd, The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing, and Fiction, 1660–1800 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 222.
13. Emily W. Sunstein, A Different Face: the Life of Mary Wollstonecraft (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), 139.
14. Mary V. Jackson, Engines of Instruction, Mischief, and Magic: Children’s Literature in England from its Beginnings to 1839 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 148; Moore, Mary Wollstonecraft, 29; Geoffrey Summerfield, Fantasy and Reason: Children’s Literature in the Eighteenth Century (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984), 229; Myers, “Pedagogy,” 206.
15. For children’s literature and the “new child” in late eighteenth-century Britain, see Jackson, Engines, 129–48.
16. Richardson, Literature, Education, and Romanticism, 127–42.
17. Moore, Mary Wollstonecraft, 28. Kelly, however, provides a refreshingly balanced view of the book’s disciplinary and radical tendencies in Revolutionary Feminism, 58–67.
18. Kelly, Revolutionary Feminism, 83.
19. See Claudia L. Johnson, “Mary Wollstonecraft: Styles of Radical Maternity,” Inventing Maternity: Politics, Science, and Literature, 1650–1865, eds. Susan C. Greenfield and Carol Barash (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999), 160–72.
20. Compare Burke – “In this choice of inheritance we have given to our frame of polity the image of a relation in blood, binding up the constitution of our country with our dearest domestic ties, adopting our fundamental laws into the bosom of our family affections” – in Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 30.
21. Richardson, Literature, Education, and Romanticism, 87–88.
22. Hannah More, Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, 6th edn., 2 vols. in one (London: Cadell and Davies, 1799), 1: 146–7.
23. Sunstein, Different Face, 257–63.
24. My reading of the “Lessons” concurs with that of Jump in Mary Wollstonecraft, 23–5.
25. For a subtle delineation of the indirect expression of feminist ideas in early nineteenth-century domestic fiction, see Claudia L. Johnson, Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). For an example of a contemporary writer on education making extensive, though unacknowledged, use of Wollstonecraft’s arguments, see Sydney Smith, “Female Education” (initially published in 1810 in the Edinburgh Review), The Works of the Reverend Sydney Smith (London: Longmans, Green, 1865), 175–86.