rawn into their discussions as a consultant. After publication Rousseau realized some recognition as a spokesman for the rights of people, although there was a decided rise in the intensity of demands for recognition of women's state.2
Rousseau describes his passionate feelings for several women in his life in his Confessions, the first of which was the strange feelings he had as a boy when Mademoiselle Lambercier punished him. "Who would have believed that the chastisement I received at eight from a thirty-year-old girl would have determined my tastes, desires, and passions for the rest of my life?"3 Having left Protestant Switzerland for Catholic France, Rousseau began to meet the women who would support and influence his work for the rest of his life. One of his first encounters was with Madame de Warens, whom he referred to as maman, also a convert to Catholicism and an escapee from Geneva. Because of her support he was able to take part in knowledgeable conversations, philosophical discussions, and intellectual pursuits. From her privileged position he was able to observe with fraternal pity the people whose fate he might have shared.
At the age of thirty, Rousseau left Madame de Warens' residence. He wished to be accepted in the intellectual circles of the salons, and to gain entrance to the Academie des Sciences. He succeeded at the Academie but failed to be accepted socially at the salons. One of his sponsors, P�re Castel, advised, "Since musicians and servants will not sing together with you, change your tactics, and try the women."4 He took this advice and made the acquaintance of several intelligent and influential women.
According to Claude Fervel in Jean Jacques Rousseau et les femmes, Rousseau's feelings of inferiority among these women induced his unnatural attachment to a twenty-three year old servant girl, Th�r�se Levasseur. "She is so limited," says Hume, "that she knows neither the year, the month, nor the day of the week; she is unaware of the value of money and in spite of all that, she has on Jean Jacques the empire of a nurse over her charge."5 Certainly Levasseur had some influence in Rousseau's concept of the ideal woman.
Rousseau primarily claimed that "[n]ature has created man happy and good, but society depraves him and makes him miserable."6 In the eighteenth century, morality took on a new meaning founded on the natural goodness of man. Happiness became a right supplanting the idea of duty. Sensual delights were natural and therefore rational. All of Rousseau's educational theories derive from his attempt to preserve nature's pure state. His concept of negative education allowed a child to discover for himself and to be punished by the nature he sought to defy. The tutor must not try to reason with the child or show authority. Books would not be forced on the child; at twelve Emile would hardly know what to do with a book. Positive education, or direct instruction, would only begin at approximately the age of adulthood, and then the studies would be based on the student's natural curiosity. Rousseau stressed utility, the need for teaching things with practical applications.
This concept of negative education as applicable to women was totally inconceivable to Rousseau. He viewed women's options as entirely limited to the roles of wife and mother. What need would there be to allow her to determine for herself when nature had already physiologically dictated her destiny? His scheme for Emile was radical; his scheme for Sophie was not radical enough. Rousseau demanded a reversion to primitivism in the education of women, offering minimal vocational training while insisting on her inability to reason and her inferiority to man. "A woman's education must be planned in relation to man".[S]he will always be in subjection to a man"and she will never be free to set her own opinion above his."7 He stresses freedom of movement and physical exertion for Emile, asserting that weak bodies contain weak minds. At the same time he discourages Sophie from too much physical activity and uses her weakness as an