Emile. One must ask if woman is as "natural" as man, and nature is essentially good, then why should the same principles of "negative education" not apply to women? Misenheimer discusses the dichotomy of women in Rousseau's writings. She claims that Rousseau makes woman totally subservient to man, making her into a mere plaything for the superior sex. Yet by inserting Sophie in her place in his educational theories, he encourages others to give the question further thought at a moment in history when social revolution uniquely supports her. This is exactly the cause which Mary Wollstonecraft takes up. Furthermore, by speaking of all society and not just the elite, he becomes one of the first writers even to recognize the ordinary woman, giving her a foothold to independence. Rousseau certainly did not intend to liberate women; he advocated the freedom of man.
Mary Wollstonecraft reputedly tried to rear one of her charges, Ann Fuseli, as a child of nature. The experiment proved disappointing when she caught her stealing and lying.14 She considered herself a rationalist, but she greatly admired Rousseau's "pure sentiment." She did not, however, share Rousseau's admiration for primitive society, and took great exception to his views of women. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman she asserts, "Rousseau exerts himself to prove that all was right originally: a crowd of authors that all is now right: and I, that all will be right [sic]."12
Her most famous and controversial work, Rights of Woman, was not the first work to advocate better education for women. Among Wollstonecraft's contemporaries, there were several in France who had written in behalf of women. Olympe de Gouges spoke boldly in defense of her sex in several publications, one titled A Declaration of the Rights of Woman. Condorcet advocated better education for women in Memoirs on Public Instruction. Wollstonecraft had reviewed Catherine Macaulay's Letters on Education for the Analytical, and acknowledged her debt to the work in Rights of Woman. Letters denies any fundamental difference in character between the sexes, attributing women's weaknesses to faulty education and social position. Wollstonecraft repeats and develops almost every point of her work.
Like many English intellectuals, Wollstonecraft watched the French Revolution with interest, anticipating that the great social experiment would one day reach her shore. The Revolution "must have seemed like a happy fusion of all she had been taught to respect by her sage London friends, and all that she cherished by nature".And so she, like many of her countrymen, looked hopefully to France as the great proving-ground."13 She espouses the cause of freedom in her Vindication of the Rights of Men, written in reply to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France. She digresses occasionally in this work, criticizing the effects of wealth and rank and chiding Burke for his fondness for waifishness and weakness in women.
In her previous work, Wollstonecraft had shown an interest in women's status without directly addressing the matter. According to her husband William Godwin, she spent only six weeks in actual composition, but she had been developing the ideas for Rights of Woman all her life. She found that most writers showed either outright disdain or condescending praise of women's weakness. The immediate cause of Rights of Woman was Talleyrand's Report on Public Institution, an outline of the projected plan of national education under a new French constitution. Talleyrand declared that girls should be educated with boys only until the age of eight. Wollstonecraft prefaces her book with a letter to Talleyrand which urges him and his compatriots not to deny women their rights.13
Wollstonecraft seeks to find a rational explanation for the state of her sex. She questions whether women are really created for the pleasure of men:
[T]hough the cry of irreligion, or even atheism, be raised against, I will simply declare, that were an angel from heaven to tell me that Moses's beautiful, poetical cosmogony, and 