ints 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 he