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 