d by the advocates of "Republican Motherhood" in the first years of the new American republic.22
Mary Wollstonecraft's ideas were savagely attacked after her death, when the horrors of the French Revolution had convinced most Englishmen that all revolutionary theories were dangerous. However, there is little doubt that her ideas live on, and like Rousseau's, still have an impact on education. Public education, teaching by the exploitation of natural curiosity, practical applications, are all ideas descended from Rousseau and Wollstonecraft. Most distinctive of these is Wollstonecraft's radical notion that women and men be educated together.
1As cited in Ralph M. Wardle, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Critical Biography (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1951), p. 143.
2Helen Evans Misenheimer, Rousseau on the Education of Women (Washington, DC: University Press of America, Inc., 1981), p. 64.
3Confessions, I as cited by Misenheimer, p. 21.
4Ibid., p. 24.
5Claude Fervel, Jean-Jacques Rousseau et les femmes, as cited by Misenheimer, p. 26.
6Misenheimer, p. 19.
7Rousseau, pp. 322, 325.
8Rousseau, as cited by Wollstonecraft, p. 176.
9Rousseau, as cited by Misenheimer, p. 39.
10Francis Gribble, Rousseau and the Women he Loved, as cited by Misenheimer, p. 4.
11William Boyd, The Minor Educational Writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau, as cited by Misenheimer, p. 8.
12Wardle, p. 178.
13Wollstonecraft, p. 22.
14Wollstonecraft, pp. 173-174.
15Ibid., pp. 403-404.
17Ibid., p. 189.
18Ibid., p. 379.
19Ibid., pp. 380, 381.
20Ibid., p. 389.
21Matthew L. Davis, Memoirs of Aaron Burr, as cited by Wardle, p.158.
22Linda K. Kerber, "The Republican Mother," Women's America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 87-95.
Last modified 2005-01-20 03:11 PM