other proof of her inferiority. "The object of that cultivation is different. In the one sex it is the development of corporeal powers; in the other, that of personal charms," Rousseau asserts.8
Emile is not instructed in religious matters until he reaches adulthood. He has a natural sense of morality "from reason tempered by the heart."9 Presumably woman cannot reason, so she cannot maintain a state of morality, and must be guarded by men throughout her life. Rousseau proposes that Sophie must be made to love virtue, although she will never understand theological rationale for living uprightly. She must be made to feel subject to society's opinions of her. In fact, Sophie fails at this. In the fragmentary sequel to Emile, Les Solitaires, Rousseau tells of the infidelity of Sophie who had been "educated" to be Emile's ideal wife. Mary Wollstonecraft makes no mention of this book and probably never read it, but she would make the right assumptions about the likelihood of Sophie's fidelity.
Helen Misenheimer points out in Rousseau on the Education of Women that Rousseau leaves off the sexual education of Emile in describing Sophie. In fact, she is his sexual identity. Rousseau considers a man's union with a woman a debasement of his nature. While insisting on the importance of motherhood, he stumbles on women's role as mothers. In addressing mothers in Book I of Emile, he acknowledges their primacy in the education of youth. By denying women the ability to reason he denies them the ability to raise children, which Mary Wollstonecraft later attempts to prove.
Francis Gribble proposes, "Contemporary critics contended that Jean Jacques did not mean a word that he said; the difficulty of the modern critic is to discover that he ever said anything at all which he did not immediately afterwards contradict."10 When accosted by a father who informed him he was using the Emile method to raise his son, Rousseau replied that he was sorry for him but even sorrier for his son.11 Certainly he contradicts himself in Chapter V of 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 d