Mary Wollstonecraft: Philosophical Mother Of Coeducation 9781472541451, 9780826484147

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Series Editor’s Preface

Education is sometimes presented as an essentially practical activity. It is, it seems, about teaching and learning, curriculum, and what goes on in schools. It is about achieving certain ends using certain methods, and these ends and methods are often prescribed for teachers, whose duty, it is assumed, is to deliver them in the classroom with vigor and fidelity. With such a clear purpose, what is the value of theory? Recent years have seen politicians and policy-makers in different countries explicitly denying any value or need for educational theory. A clue to why this might be is provided in a remarkable comment by a British Secretary of State for Education in the 1990s: ‘having any ideas about how children learn, or develop, or feel, should be seen as subversive activity’. This pithy phrase captures the problem with theory: it subverts, challenges and undermines the very assumptions on which the practice of education is based. Educational theorists, then, are trouble-makers in the realm of ideas. They pose a threat to the status quo, because they lead us to question the common-sense presumptions of educational practices. But this is precisely what they should do, because the seemingly simple language of schools and schooling hides numerous contestable concepts that in their different usages reflect fundamental disagreements about the aims, values and activities of education. Implicit within the Continuum Library of Educational Thought is the assertion that theories and theorizing are vitally important for education. By gathering together the ideas of some of the most influential, important and interesting educational thinkers, from the Ancient Greeks to contemporary scholars, the series has the ambitious aim of providing an accessible yet authoritative resource for a generation of students and practitioners. Volumes within the series are written by acknowledged leaders in their field, who were selected both for their

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scholarship and their ability to make often complex ideas accessible to a diverse audience. It will always be possible to question the list of key thinkers who are represented in this series. Some readers may criticize the inclusion of certain thinkers; some may disagree with the exclusion of others. That is inevitable. There is no suggestion that the list of authors included in the Continuum Library of Educational Thought is in any way definitive. What is incontestable is that each one of them has fascinating ideas about education, and that as a whole, the Library will be a rich source of information and inspiration for those committed to the study of education. Richard Bailey Roehampton University London

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Foreword

Who says things never change? In 1982 the Harvard Educational Review published ‘Excluding Women from the Educational Realm’, in which I documented the exclusion of women as both the subjects and the objects of educational thought. Look at the indexes of the standard texts and anthologies in the field, I said, and you will find almost no discussion of the education of girls. Look at the table of contents and you will be hard-pressed to find chapters on the ideas of any woman philosopher other than Maria Montessori. Twenty-five years later I am sitting at my computer composing the foreword to a volume in the Continuum Library of Educational Thought entitled Mary Wollstonecraft: Philosophical Mother of Coeducation. In my 1982 essay I credited feminist scholars with uncovering the existence of women who had thought systematically about education and I cited, as examples, Catherine Macaulay, Mary Wollstonecraft, Catharine Beecher, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. I also pointed out that analytic and evaluative inquiries were needed to determine if their work was significant enough to be preserved. Now Susan Laird has produced a magnificent study that makes it perfectly clear that Wollstonecraft deserves a place in the pantheon. Drawing upon Wollstonecraft’s letters and novels as well as her more formal treatises, capitalizing on the insights contained in the secondary literature, and taking into account the many critical judgments in those commentaries, Laird provides us with the first comprehensive reading of Wollstonecraft’s philosophy of education. Examining Wollstonecraft’s work in relation to her life, locating it in its immediate historical context, and placing it also in the long tradition of Western educational thought, she shows her subject to have

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been a powerful educational thinker whose ideas were far ahead of her time. One should not be misled by the title of Laird’s volume. As the study of gender has sometimes mistakenly been thought to be only about women, inquiries into coeducation have often been thought to be just about girls. What Laird refers to as Wollstonecraft’s ‘philosophy of coeducation’ can equally well be described, however, as an inclusive philosophy of education. Going far beyond those few predecessors who advocated that the sexes be educated together to formulate a ‘thick’ concept of coeducation, Wollstonecraft addressed questions of vital concern to both sexes. Working out a coherent rationale for a universal, publicly funded system of schools that educates not merely males and females but also rich and poor together, she developed a wide-ranging philosophy of education that is as relevant to the first decades of the twenty-first century as it was to the last decade of the eighteenth. Needless to say, Wollstonecraft did not write the last word on coeducation; in fact, one great virtue of Laird’s book is that it illuminates gaps in Wollstonecraft’s text. Nor does the present volume represent the last word on Wollstonecraft, for Laird shows Wollstonecraft’s ideas to be sufficiently original and complex to warrant new readings by successive generations. As for my last word here, it is the hope that Laird’s groundbreaking book will cause those men and women who plan future libraries and encyclopedias of educational thought to remember the women. Although it has been a genuine pleasure to write this foreword, I am puzzled that Wollstonecraft is the only woman besides Maria Montessori to be represented in Continuum’s twenty-five-volume project. Have there really been no other female educational thinkers in the last two millennia whose ideas are worthy of sustained study in the twenty-first century? The citations in the present book, a recent volume on the educational philosophy of Catherine Macaulay,1 and shorter discussions of a number of other women philosophers of education suggest otherwise.2 May Susan Laird’s Mary Wollstonecraft inspire even more analytic and evaluative studies of female educational thinkers. May it, indeed, serve as a spur to so many that,

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twenty-five years hence, the pantheon itself will begin to exemplify the ideal of gender equality. Jane Roland Martin Professor of Philosophy Emerita University of Massachusetts, Boston

Notes 1. Titone, Connie (2004), Gender Equality in the Philosophy of Education: Catharine Macaulay’s Forgotten Contribution. New York: Peter Lang. 2. See, e.g., Titone, Connie and Maloney, Karen (eds) (1999), Women’s Philosophies of Education. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall; Martin, Jane Roland (1985), Reclaiming a Conversation. New Haven: Yale University Press; Charlene Haddock Siegfried, ‘Learning from experience: Jane Addams’s education in democracy as a way of life’ in David T. Hansen (ed.), Ethical Visions of Education (2007). New York: Teachers College Press.

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Acknowledgments

Beth Darlington not only inspired my love for scholarly work as my undergraduate thesis adviser; she changed my thinking and my life when she assigned Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in her ‘Blake to Keats’ seminar. Jane Martin first opened my eyes to the fact that this work is ‘philosophy of education’ and that I might contribute to that field myself. I am grateful also to Harvey Siegel, who recommended me for this volume’s authorship. The University of Oklahoma made work on this volume possible by financing my research in summer 2005 and my sabbatical leave in fall 2005. Jon Pedersen provided generous administrative assistance and hosted a College of Education symposium on Part One of this volume. Amy Bradshaw lent me her library study. Robin Stroud labored resourcefully at Bizzell Library, most often through Interlibrary Loan, as she compiled the project’s initial working bibliography; Lady Branham and Shawn Pendley in the Center for Educational Development and Research labored with care over the manuscript’s documentation and final bibliography. Ella Burkhalter, Nance Cunningham, Kristen Holzer, Steven Mackie, Shawn Pendley, Robin Stroud, and Michael Surbaugh informed my thought with their own readings of Wollstonecraft, educational autobiographies, and alarming research on the educational status of women worldwide, as students of ‘Gender, Values, and Education’ in summer 2006. Shatora Bryant, Geraldine Evans, Shirley Hodges, and Trudy Rhodes provided cheerful, efficient office assistance as needed. John Covaleskie, Bob Fox, Irene Karpiak, Susan Marcus-Mendoza, Grayson Noley, Larry Rossow, Joan Smith, Courtney Vaughn, and others in both College of Education and Human Relations Department supported this effort in various ways. The Educational Studies Colloquium group buoyed

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me with their enthusiasm and deserve profuse thanks for protecting my time in summer 2007. In Women’s Studies, Martha Skeeters provided relevant historical articles and insights as well as incomparable intellectual friendship, even writing me encouragement from Mary Wollstonecraft’s graveside. Jane Martin and Susan Franzosa gave extensive constructive criticisms and suggestions in response to my prospectus for this project after the earliest phase of reading and research. Charlie Ellis, Catherine Hobbs, and Kate Scantlebury provided helpful sources. Cherrie Banks, Susan Birden, Susan Franzosa, Huey-li Li, Joe Meinhart, Al Neiman, Paula Salvio, Deborah Shinn, Barbara Stengel, Robin Stroud, and Lucy Townsend contributed insightful commentary and suggestions as participants in various symposia at which I presented pieces of this project to the American Educational Studies Association, Philosophy of Education Society, National Women’s Studies Association, and regional Society of Philosophy & History of Education. Deanne Bogdan, Lady Branham, John Covaleskie, Nance Cunningham, Jane Martin, and Shawn Pendley closely reviewed the manuscript, thereby much improving this volume, whose remaining faults are all mine. I am thankful also to Pickering & Chatto for permission to quote extensively from The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft edited by Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler. Richard Bailey has been a helpful editor. Medical crises threatened the necessity of aborting the project altogether – were it not for his compassionate patience, as well as the sustaining friendship of Amy Bradshaw, Chris Carter, Mary Dolan, Carmen and Ray Eppler, Ellen Frank, Linda Gaither, Irene Karpiak and Wayne Scarth, Ghislaine Rabin, Betty Robbins, and Martita Stearns; the loving wisdom of Kay Greenshields, Hal and Marcia Greenwood, Owen Pollard, and Nancy Schneider; and the incredible resilience of my best friend and spouse, John Green. He has not only proven himself a medical miracle; he has survived traumas and remade his entire life since 2005, nonetheless actively supporting this project by taking historical interest in it, reading, listening, commenting, questioning and, not least, keeping the world at bay for me while enduring my neglect when he most needed my attentive presence at home.

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With my love, I dedicate this work to him and to our granddaughter, Marion Elbow. As she grows up, I hope that this volume may not only affirm her moral courage and imagination to continue educating herself (as she is already doing with joy at age five), but also give her historical perspective from which she may understand what remarkable parents she has in Heather Green and Steven Elbow, whom Mary Wollstonecraft would admire. S.L. August 2007 Norman, Oklahoma

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Introduction

Beyond assembling girl and boy students, women and men students, together in one place of learning, what can and should coeducation mean? What can and should define its distinctive ends and means? What values can and should it foster? What educational difference can and should sexual integration make? What challenges does it pose? How should age, class, race, and other differences affect coeducation’s ends and means? What institutions are most and least likely to enable fulfillment of its definitive values, ends and means?1 If Plato is the philosophical ‘father’ of coeducation, a concept that modern philosophers of education seem somehow to have dismissed as his illegitimate offspring unworthy of attention, then Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) is its philosophical ‘mother’ in England centuries later, as she takes up such complex and controversial questions about it. Wollstonecraft’s remarkable life as a self-educated English writer and philosopher in the last half of the eighteenth century has attracted countless biographers, but her thought in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) about the meaning and value, ends and means of coeducation has fared little better than Plato’s, since her other philosophical offspring, feminism, has monopolized academic study of her writing and thought. A few others (such as coeducation’s other seldom acknowledged philosophical ‘mother’; Catherine Macaulay)2 have written in English about both coeducation and feminism before Wollstonecraft. Yet the power of her writing voice at a revolutionary historical moment has conferred upon her posthumously both the honor and the burden of philosophical responsibility as these ideas’ acknowledged founding mother in modern English-speaking cultures. No major precedent in English has yet been claimed for her argument in favor of universal governmentfunded day schooling, although that too has largely escaped

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philosophical notice, even when prominent critics of that notion command philosophical attention. Indeed, the late modern field of educational studies – ‘late modern’ here referring to the era after World War Two into the first post-millennial decade3 – has produced only one major exposition of her educational thought. In 1985 Jane Roland Martin’s Reclaiming a Conversation features Wollstonecraft as an historically central participant in extended philosophical ‘conversation’ across time and space with Plato and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as well as two Anglo-Americans, Catharine Beecher and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, about the ideal of the educated woman. Martin’s critical exposition of Wollstonecraft’s Rights of Woman restores Wollstonecraft’s significance to the history of educational thought while also calling attention to philosophical neglect of women’s education – and of coeducation. Since then a few others have taken up Martin’s challenge to philosophical study of women’s education and of coeducation, while she has substantially developed her own thought on those topics, without continuing her study of Wollstonecraft. Educational theorists have often cited Wollstonecraft in passing as an important forerunner of late modern educational gender studies – just as, a decade after Reclaiming a Conversation, for example, Nel Noddings does in Philosophy of Education, and Jane Miller does in School for Women.4 But few, if any, Anglophone educational theorists have taken up Martin’s open invitation to further conversational inquiry concerning Wollstonecraft’s thought or its legacy. In 1989, however, Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler edited and published a seven-volume set of The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft that stimulates development of Wollstonecraft scholarship and expands the range of primary sources for possible studies of her educational thought, beyond the now classic treatise Rights of Woman upon which Martin’s 1985 exposition has focused almost exclusively. Meanwhile, scholars across other fields have engaged ‘the strong sense of unfinished business’ and of ‘unreconciled emotion’ that British literary scholar Cora Kaplan accurately sees hovering about Wollstonecraft’s thought and its legacy.5 She recounts a series of interdisciplinary conversations between 1951 and the twenty-first century present, rife with scholarly disagreements, ‘on questions of affect and imagination and the place they held in Wollstonecraft’s life and work’.6 Kaplan cites Wollstonecraft’s conception of ‘the most perfect education’ as ‘such

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an exercise of the understanding as is best calculated to strengthen the body and form the heart’ (W5, 90), as the central provocation for such ongoing critical conversation about Wollstonecraft. But while literary, biographical, otherwise historical, political, feminist, and even philosophical studies of Wollstonecraft have proliferated around that conception of ‘the most perfect education’ since Martin’s contribution to Wollstonecraft studies in 1985, educational thought on Wollstonecraft has stood still, oblivious to the prolific new Wollstonecraft scholarship – as if Wollstonecraft studies were educationally irrelevant, as if Martin had given out the last word on Wollstonecraft’s educational thought instead of inviting further conversation about it. Therefore this volume underscores Martin’s invitation over two decades ago, to take Wollstonecraft seriously as a significant figure in the history of educational thought – to join in the ‘conversation’ with Wollstonecraft and thus develop coeducational thought further. Wollstonecraft scholarship’s interdisciplinary terrain can present daunting challenges to practitioners of educational thought – whether students, teachers, or authors – who want to enter its conversation, however. This volume aims to make such challenges less daunting by introducing specifically educational dimensions of Wollstonecraft’s life, thought and legacy, while pointing toward scholarly resources for pursuit of educational questions they pose. It aims for explanatory clarity and provocation to further inquiry, to engage in coeducational thought. This volume therefore cites conflicts of scholarly opinion, poses questions, points out problems, signals important gaps, discloses apparent contradictions, and suggests points of potential controversy or investigation not yet undertaken – in most cases merely in passing. At the same time, it does reflect a serious effort to survey Wollstonecraft’s complete educational oeuvre and to trawl through prolific and wide-ranging multi-disciplinary Wollstonecraft scholarship, in order to discern which sources may be more helpful and reliable than others for specific purposes that might advance Wollstonecraft’s corner of the larger ongoing conversation that Martin has invited. Part One, Intellectual Biography, reflects broad investigation of biographical, historical, political, feminist, and literary scholarship on Wollstonecraft as well as study of her collected letters and

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works, and William Godwin’s Memoirs of the Author of ‘The Rights of Woman’ (1798), with most extensive reliance upon Janet Todd’s and Lyndall Gordon’s recent biographies. Chapter 1, ‘A Revolutionary Self-Education – Wollstonecraft’s landscapes’, locates her socially and historically and tells the story of how she educates herself. In Part Two, Exposition of the Work, Chapter 2, ‘Coeducational Thought – First of a New Genre’, explains particular gender-andgenre challenges that Wollstonecraft’s educational oeuvre has posed for philosophical readers and that writing in the new genre of coeducational thought has posed for her – complicating the relationship between reason and emotion in her thought and prose. Aiming to ease those challenges for twenty-first century readers without over-simplifying that complicated relationship, Chapter 3, ‘Monarchist Miseducation – A Critical Caveat’, and Chapter 4, ‘Republican Coeducation – A Thought Experiment’, reflect an effort to read Wollstonecraft’s educational oeuvre as Virginia Woolf, a later author of coeducational thought, advises in her essay, ‘How Should One Read A Book?’ ‘Do not dictate to your author,’ she instructs: ‘try to become him. Be his fellow-worker and accomplice.’7 She suggests looking at what an author has written ‘and see whether it reads differently in the presence of the author’ – a suggestion here taken in light of various encounters with Wollstonecraft’s presence, sketched in Parts One and Four (Woolf, 1932, 259, 263). Part Two’s reconstruction of her educational thought reflects such an empathetic effort to translate the logic of her arguments into a philosophical idiom that twenty-first-century readers might find accessible and that she herself might consider accurate, an effort premised upon Woolf’s insight that ‘If you hang back, and reserve and criticize at first, you are preventing yourself from getting the fullest possible value from what you read’ (Woolf, 1932, 259). In order to maximize the possible range of philosophical value to be gleaned from Wollstonecraft’s educational oeuvre, this volume presents an exposition as much as possible de novo, in the light of biography and history glossed by Part One, attentive to the primary works themselves, and as much as possible unburdened by critical commentary, personal dispositions or affections, present needs or wants. (Even the most rigorous application of such restraint cannot perfectly sanitize any reading. Undeniably, this formulation of

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Wollstonecraft’s educational thought is the construction of a classically educated, twenty-first- century Anglo-American philosopher of coeducation8 – memorably introduced to Wollstonecraft’s life and work while studying English Romantic poetry with Wordsworth scholar Beth Darlington at Vassar College. Then, in October 1972, Vassar was still making its gradual but controversial, profoundly transformative transition from the first US women’s liberal arts college to a coeducational one. It remains unusual even if not unique, however, in its explicit aim of continuing to honor its feminist heritage.) The first actively empathetic, largely self-negating reception of a text or oeuvre ‘is only half the process of reading’, of course (Woolf, 1932, 266). Part Two ends by posing questions to start Wollstonecraft’s readers in educational studies on the other half of their reading process, critique: ‘to continue reading without the book before you’ (Woolf, 1932, 266). In Part Three, Reception and Influence of the Work, Chapter 5, ‘Coeducational Thought After Wollstonecraft’, continues that reading process, relying upon biographical and other historical scholarship to narrate private reception of Wollstonecraft’s educational work immediately after her death, as well as its public reception throughout the nineteenth century. Chapter 5 closes with an expository survey of modern coeducational thought that provides evidence of Wollstonecraft’s explicit and enduring influence. This chapter poses many critical questions for Wollstonecraft readers to pursue, and introduces more primary sources worthy of conversational engagement, in order to develop further imaginative and critical inquiry on coeducation prompted by Wollstonecraft’s oeuvre. In Part Four, Relevance of the Work, Chapter 6, ‘The Art of Coeducational Thought’, argues that corrective attention to two significant gaps within Wollstonecraft’s thought on ‘education of the heart’ – arts coeducation and coeducational childrearing – may illuminate the continuing relevance of her critique of monarchist sexual character, and lay the groundwork for future coeducational analysis of global corporatism comparable to her coeducational analysis of monarchism. This volume does not include visual illustrations of Wollstonecraft or her historical context, but its last chapter’s argument does integrally include her visual biography. Wollstonecraft’s educational writings are now available in various paperback editions listed in the Bibliography, for readers’ cost-sensitive

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convenience; this volume neither details nor depends upon any fine distinctions one might make among such different editions. Parenthetic citations within the text refer only to primary sources. Citations of Wollstonecraft’s own writings refer to library volumes edited by Todd and Butler (‘W5’, for example, means their volume 5) and to Todd’s The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft (designated ‘CL’). Other parenthetic primary-source citations include Richard Holmes’s edition of Godwin’s Memoirs (designated ‘M’) and works by other philosophers of coeducation (designated by their surnames, with texts’ dates). Secondary sources worthy of readers’ further investigation are cited in endnotes to each Part. This volume’s text stays deliberately close to its sources in order to direct readers toward them, for further study.

Notes 1. Susan Laird, ‘Rethinking coeducation’, in James Garrison (ed.) (1995), The New Scholarship on Dewey. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 193–210. 2. Connie Titone (2004), Gender Equality in the Philosophy of Education: Catharine Macaulay’s Forgotten Contribution. New York: Peter Lang. 3. The term ‘late modern’ is here preferred to ‘postmodern’ because of the latter more fashionable term’s vagueness, abundant persuasive theoretical arguments that postmodernism reflects many significant continuities with modernity, and the uncanny resonance that Wollstonecraft’s ‘early modern’ thought still has. 4. Nel Noddings (1995), Philosophy of Education. Boulder, CO: Westview, 181–2; Jane Miller (1996), School for Women. London: Virago, 17, 54, 226–7. 5. Cora Kaplan, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’s reception and legacies’, in Claudia L. Johnson (ed.) (2002), The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 246. 6. Kaplan, Cambridge Companion, 259. 7. This is, of course, even if ‘embodied’, a modernist, indeed ‘high modern’ theory of reading, not chosen in literary-theoretical naivet´e, but deemed both epistemologically and pragmatically

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appropriate to this volume’s informative purposes; it begs for some comparison and contrast with Deanne Bogdan’s late modern notion of ‘embodied reading’, in Re-Educating the Imagination (Portsmouth: Boynton-Cook/Heinemann, 1992), beyond the scope of this work, albeit highly relevant to Wollstonecraft’s possible future reception by readers of this volume, as briefly explained in Part Four. 8. Susan Laird, ‘Food for coeducational thought’, in Barbara Stengel (ed.) (2008), Philosophy of Education 2007 . Urbana, IL: Philosophy of Education Society, Presidential Essay.

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Chapter 1

A Revolutionary Self-Education Wollstonecraft’s Landscapes

Born just a year before George III ascends the throne, on 25 April, 1759, in a merchant’s house in Spitalfields, a ‘rather shoddy, overcrowded area of London noted for its shifting immigrant populations and its weavers’,1 Mary Wollstonecraft experiences both urban and rural English life as a child. Many times she moves with her downwardly mobile family – to Essex, to Yorkshire, back to London, to Wales and Middlesex – before making the unconventional choice to leave home in 1778 to provide for her own living. As an independent young woman she works for a short time in Bath and Windsor and then also in Ireland, trying the few respectable occupations then available to Englishwomen (lady’s companion, cottage seamstress, aristocrat’s governess); thus she witnesses a wide range of differently situated women’s lives. Besides working briefly in Dublin, she travels alone to her beloved friend Fanny Blood’s deathbed in Lisbon, to France as a correspondent writing on the Revolution, and to Scandinavia as a commercial emissary, travel writer and single mother. She fantasizes about moving to Kentucky with her infant daughter, Fanny’s American father, Gilbert Imlay, and her sisters Everina and Eliza, but never does. Despite her many moves and travels and despite the Yorkshire dialect expressions she retains from living in Walkington and Beverley between the ages of nine and fifteen, Wollstonecraft is ‘always a Londoner’:2 sharing her family’s lodgings in Hoxton and Walworth before leaving home, later making her home in Islington and then in Newington Green as a schoolmistress, making her life as a writer first in the vicinity of Blackfriars Bridge and finally with political philosopher William Godwin in Somers Town. There she gives birth to their daughter, the future novelist Mary Shelley, on 30 August, and dies on 10 September, 1797. Wollstonecraft’s tomb in Old Pancras

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Churchyard is now empty, but its carved stone marker immortalizes her still as ‘Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’. That work is the English-speaking world’s first widely read argument for women’s full independence and citizenship. Premised upon an educational critique of the Divine Right of Kings and concluding with a revolutionary thought experiment proposing a national system of coeducation that includes government-funded universal schooling, it is also her most significant educational legacy. No less concerned to examine what devotion to a rational and loving God may require,3 to challenge the ethics of commercialism or of militarism, or to vindicate the rights of men denied by monarchy, Wollstonecraft may also be the first writer to link revolutionary sexual politics with opposition to the colonial slave trade.4 She plays a leading (but by no means solo) part in what Eve Tavor Bannet has called ‘the domestic revolution’ of Enlightenment feminisms.5 In an epoch largely shaped by the English Revolution of 1688, Wollstonecraft also commends and criticizes effects of both the American and French Revolutions. Literati have canonized her as a prolific early modern ‘woman writer’ of fine travel narrative and brilliant polemics, as well as of experimental novels that ‘point to the specificity of the body’ and ‘imagine a “proto-lesbian” space’.6 She has achieved recognition, too, as ‘one of the most distinctive letter writers of the eighteenth century’.7 By what means can such a common woman in Georgian England have become educated to make such uncommon contributions to educational thought and culture? In St Paul’s Churchyard, London, in a garret near the shop where her generous patron Joseph Johnson prints, publishes, and sells serious books on religion, law, and medicine, as well as some fiction and poetry, she dines often with him and other prominent authors whose work he publishes also – mostly men, but also a few women. They don’t call her ‘Mary’, Virginia Woolf explains: just ‘Wollstonecraft’ (1932, 157). Although Wollstonecraft has familiarized herself with Georgian Englishwomen’s meager educational landscape through her work as governess to titled Irish aristocrats and as mistress of a small village school for religious dissenters’ children, she has had little schooling herself. Indeed, she is mostly self-educated. Janet Todd depicts Wollstonecraft as ‘poor and severe’ at age nineteen:

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. . . a tall young woman with auburn hair. She had light brown eyes, one lid of which was slightly paralyzed, giving her a sometimes mocking, leering look. She was not conventionally pretty but, when stimulated by company, became vivacious and striking, and she was thought handsome enough.8

Writing for school-aged readers, Miriam Brody reports that at age thirty Wollstonecraft . . . made a striking impression: Her hair was not carefully combed, her dress was simple and not always tidy. She came from barely furnished rooms that had been put together with little money or interest in comfort or luxury. She was similarly uninterested in her appearance. But whatever plainness there was in her clothing, there was nothing shy about her presence.9

According to Lyndall Gordon, ‘She combined a dreamy voluptuousness with quick words, fixing brown eyes on her listener. The eyes didn’t quite match, as though the right eye lingered in thought while the left drew one into intimacy with that thought’.10 Thus Wollstonecraft’s most scholarly twenty-first-century biographers make vivid her engaging presence in exhilarating conversations that continue often late into the night around Johnson’s dinner table, weekly set for his authors with wine and plain food such as boiled cod, roasted veal, vegetables, and rice pudding.11 Here they argue about deism and atheism and discuss the possible progress of human nature, both intellectual and moral. They talk about what reason and education might do to bring happiness and virtue together. While working with them to educate the public via the print medium, Wollstonecraft learns much from these conversations and thus claims for herself something like an advanced higher education, otherwise inaccessible to her. Noting her ‘talents for conversation’ (M, 260), Godwin reports in his Memoirs of the Author of ‘The Rights of Woman’ that ‘The society she frequented, nourished her understanding, and enlarged her mind’ (M, 229). She develops ‘a new aesthetic appreciation of imagination and genius’,12 and ‘The prejudices of her early years suffered a vehement concussion’ (M, 229), for frequently those conversations turn to the revolutionary

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landscapes of France and the brand-new United States, whose slavery Wollstonecraft deplores. At Johnson’s, she gets a hint of what power such friendly ‘jostlings of equality’ among women and men who love learning might do to improve women’s lives, as well as national life more generally (W5, 245). In the empire-building landscape of Georgian England, this is the uncommonly hospitable milieu within which Wollstonecraft writes A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the milieu within which she becomes the philosophical mother of coeducation.

A. Wollstonecraft’s Philosophical Landscape (1787–92): Writing to Educate Johnson publishes all of Wollstonecraft’s works, beginning in 1787 with Thoughts on the Education of Daughters; with Reflections on Female Conduct in the more important Duties of Life, as she closes her school and embarks upon new employment as a governess. When her employer fires her, she begins to write extensively for Johnson’s journal Analytical Review, later serving also as its assistant editor. Besides reviews and translations, he subsequently also publishes her autobiographical novel of self-education, Mary: A Fiction (1788); her collection of moral-educational fiction for children, Original Stories from Real Life; with Conversations Calculated to Regulate the Affections, and Form the Mind to Truth and Goodness (1788); and her curriculum, The Female Reader (1789, under the pseudonym ‘Mr Cresswick’). Johnson publishes her critique of Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), anonymously. But the following month he re-publishes it with her by-line, establishing her as a revolutionary political thinker. Her Real Life achieves extreme popularity also, justifying its later republication by Johnson with six illustrations engraved by mystical artist, poet, and social critic William Blake (1791), who admires Wollstonecraft enough to write a poem to and about her. During this period of her prolific authorship for Johnson, Wollstonecraft makes some significant friendships, not least with Johnson himself and, far less prudently, also with his close friend, Swiss painter Henry Fuseli. Immediately following Johnson’s second publication of Rights of Woman (1792), Wollstonecraft

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leaves London to undertake work as a correspondent during the Revolution in France. She meets Godwin at Johnson’s dinner table before leaving London, but they do not become friends until after her return from her European travels, when Johnson publishes her writing based on them. Those are the last works she completes for publication before her death in 1797: An Historical View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution (1794) and Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796). Although Wollstonecraft’s fame rests upon Rights of Woman, literati have, like Godwin, judged Sweden, Norway, and Denmark to be her finest written work. Godwin reports that Johnson invites her ‘to make his house her home’ for a couple weeks initially (M, 225); then he finds modest, safe, and comfortable lodgings for her, and manages her commerce with tradesmen. All her work sells well, and despite many loans he makes to her and other members of his circle, without harassing any debtors, his business flourishes, making her modest but apparently sufficient means for living more reliable than she ever could otherwise have hoped. Although she remains poor, in debt to Johnson throughout her life, the living he provides is secure enough for her often to help her younger siblings and also, circa 1791–2, to house and care for an Irish friend’s motherless seven-year-old niece Ann, until shortly before leaving London to work as Johnson’s correspondent in Paris (M, 228; CL, 182, 189–90, 197–98, 213, 221).13 The sine qua non of Wollstonecraft’s life’s work is beyond doubt her enduringly loyal, affectionately intimate, but clearly asexual friendship with this liberal publisher, an asthmatic bachelor sexually uninterested in women, who develops ‘a great personal regard for her, which resembled in many respects that of a parent’ (M, 228). He nurtures her developing revolutionary and educational thought in a multitude of thoughtful ways, and she even comes to regard him at times as her ‘only friend’, as she writes to him with gratitude (CL, 166). Besides publishing her writing, Johnson affectionately offers Wollstonecraft his time and his ear no less than his money and other material help. She confides in him, and he understands her; they dine together regularly, and she corresponds with him whenever she is away from London. Johnson’s long-time close friend Fuseli, a multi-lingual artist from Zurich, convinced of his own genius and of ‘the divinity of genius’

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(M, 234), visits him two or three times a week, and thus becomes for a time Wollstonecraft’s creative ‘soul-mate’ in learning.14 Her instantly close and uncommonly intense friendship with this bisexual and philandering married man, famous for his ‘malevolent wit’ and for his betrayals of friends,15 seems to have been platonic, according to her most recent and thorough scholarly biographers, despite her ‘personal and ardent affection for him’ (M, 234). Heretofore a womanloving marriage resister, Wollstonecraft remains ‘self-protective’,16 convinced that ‘true virtue would prescribe the most entire celibacy’ (M, 235). But the sexual (some say pornographic) explicitness of Fuseli’s art may eroticize their friendship, which responds to her emotional neediness and thus pulls her into an immature emotional vortex of naive foolishness nonetheless. Nursing a life-long hunger for intellectually intimate friendship and loving family life, she cannot understand why he and his beautiful uneducated wife would not welcome her as a friend living in their household, a proposal that ends their friendship, devastating Wollstonecraft. Between 1789 and 1792, however, she visits Fuseli’s studio, learns much about art from him, meets other artists, scrutinizes the aesthetics of her own living, and becomes more sophisticated in her aesthetic appreciation generally. Godwin explains that, between Wollstonecraft and Fuseli, ‘Painting, and subjects closely connected with painting were their almost constant topics of conversation; and they found them inexhaustible’ (M, 233). At the same time, Johnson’s bookshop is a gathering place for radical Londoners and travelers. He assembles there a vibrant circle of authors, aiming to improve society by educating the public. That public education through print media is radically ‘coeducational’ insofar as his authors include several women – Anna Barbauld and Mary Hays, as well as Wollstonecraft – who address audiences of both sexes. Claire Tomalin explains that: There were not many oppressed groups among his contemporaries who did not find a champion under his imprint: slaves, Jews, Dissenters, women, victims of the game laws and press gangs, little chimney sweeps, college fellows barred from matrimony, animals ill-used, the disenfranchised and the simply poor and hungry.17

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He invites these authors, significant free thinkers who are ‘English versions of the French philosophes’,18 around his dinner table weekly, among whom Wollstonecraft makes her place as a vocal independent woman of intellect. At the turn of the twentieth century to the twenty-first, the philosophers in Johnson’s circle of writers – including Wollstonecraft – would be called public intellectuals, but ‘philosophy’ in that late-eighteenth-century era of Enlightenment includes ‘reasoned arguments of all sorts’ by all sorts of ‘miscellaneous . . . intellectuals’.19 These ‘philosophers’ in Johnson’s circle are therefore not only political theorists like Thomas Paine and Godwin, but also poets, scientists, mathematicians, novelists, playwrights, preachers, physicians, lecturers, and educators, variously inspired by the French people’s revolution against monarchy and the English people’s religious dissent against the monarchic Church of England. The philosophers in Johnson’s circle do not write as late modern philosophers typically do, technically, for narrowly specialized, elite academic audiences; more democratically, their published writings aim – as Wollstonecraft’s written works do – at moral and intellectual improvement of as many people as possible, of people actively engaged in their own self-education. Thus, besides Blake, Fuseli, and Godwin, she meets also poet William Wordsworth, philologist Horne Tooke, novelist-playwright Thomas Holcroft, lecturer-physician George Fordyce, and still others, most especially Paine. His famous Rights of Man follows her earlier Rights of Men in similarly critical response to Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, thus associating Paine and Wollstonecraft with each other in the public mind. Of Quaker origin, Paine is ‘the only revolutionary leader in America to promote women’s rights in a sustained way’,20 and Wollstonecraft’s later Rights of Woman reflects the influence of his argument in Rights of Man that despotic states and despotic households constitute each other. Johnson’s circle makes these heady years leading into the composition of Rights of Woman, 1787–92, richly self-educative for Wollstonecraft. Generalizing from her previous experiences and entering into then-lively debates, all Wollstonecraft’s early writing addresses the subject of education. She learns both deliberately and quickly the discipline of educational thought, becoming an authority on teaching morality to the young, not only on the strength of her own teaching

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experience, but also by translating educational works and writing critical reviews of others’ educational works for Johnson to publish. One of her published translations from German, Christian Salzmann’s Elements of Morality, for the Use of Children; with an Introductory Address to Parents, includes an additional moral story of her own, enjoining British children to consider Indians their brothers, as well as an address to parents suggesting that sexual impurity would disappear if adults would only speak with children about ‘the organs of generation as freely as we speak of the other parts of the body, and explain to them the noble use which they were designed for’ (W2, 9). Wollstonecraft writes her first novel Mary in the context of reading Rousseau’s philosophical-educational novel Emile in French. Mary depicts a pious self-educating female hero much like herself, reflecting his idea in La Nouvelle Helo¨ıse that ‘a genius will educate itself’, which Harriet Devine Jump aptly regards as an odd view coming from a recently published educational writer.21 Despite her experimental novel’s sentimental excesses and other literary flaws, it does critique Rousseau’s characterization of Sophie in Emile, representing Wollstonecraft’s earliest attempt at a ‘feminist revision’ of Rousseau’s educational theorizing.22 Adapting the form of popular educator James Burgh’s The Art of Speaking for an audience of girls, she compiles and publishes anonymously The Female Reader , an ‘improving’ curriculum for oral reading and memorization, which encourages girls to be pious and humble, but also intelligent and self-reliant. Drawn largely from her experiences as teacher and governess, her Real Life makes an original narrative argument that education can develop inner qualities and improve the mind and heart.23 Jump cites Real Life as ‘the first of Wollstonecraft’s works to contain examples of women who have succeeded in making satisfactory lives for themselves despite their single status’.24 All these early works document the rapid, rhetorically experimental, and philosophically critical development of Wollstonecraft’s educational thought even if they neither take the recognizable form of theoretical discourse nor make any acknowledged contribution to educational thought generally. Johnson’s book-review, translation, abridgment, and other writing assignments present Wollstonecraft with on-the-job opportunities for advanced higher learning. Her reviewing is prolific and hurried, on

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topics ranging from education and morals to religion, politics, fiction, history, and travel; each review for this journal involves summarizing the book, selecting excerpts, and commenting critically. She also attends and reviews theater for the Analytical Review. Wollstonecraft takes advantage of Johnson’s translation assignments to improve her French and German and learn other languages. In her intellectual labors for her publisher, she resembles somewhat the late modern, well-directed, clever and industrious doctoral student, as she reads both voluminously and purposefully, and she seeks her own writing voice by experimenting freely with diverse genres as if they were different jargons, exploring their potentials and limitations for probing her own mind and understanding the society that shapes her life. She eventually begins also to translate, review, and write works on other subjects such as religion, politics, and history. This topically digressive move makes her educational thought more sophisticated, akin to the embodied and interdisciplinary philosophical practice cultivated by late-twentieth-century feminist scholars within Educational Studies. Finally integrating her reflections upon these various subjects with her educational reflections in 1791–2, Rights of Woman takes a revolutionary stance with its reasoned defense and theoretically elaborated vision of coeducation, the first in English to generate controversy and claim an enduring influence on educational thought. It never falls out of print. That work does reflect, however, the profound influence of one educational theorist outside Johnson’s circle whom Wollstonecraft never meets: Catherine Macaulay, coeducation’s ‘other’ philosophical mother. While reviewing Macaulay’s Letters on Education, with Observations on Religious and Metaphysical Subjects for Johnson’s Analytical Review, Wollstonecraft comes to admire her work, indeed to such an extent that she writes Macaulay a letter expressing her admiration and sending her a copy of her own Rights of Men, to which Macaulay replies with praise for that work. But Macaulay dies in 1791, so the two mutually admiring educational theorists never meet each other in person, although Wollstonecraft learns much from Macaulay. Moira Ferguson and Janet Todd note many ‘striking similarities’ between the two women’s educational thought, but find ‘differences of opinion’ as well as differences of style between them ‘worth noting’.

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Judging Wollstonecraft to be ‘more forceful and audacious’, they point out that Wollstonecraft’s critique of contemporary women’s ‘vices’ is much harsher than Macaulay’s, and also explain that ‘Wollstonecraft emerges as more of a pragmatist in education and rationalist in religious matters than Macaulay, who depends for belief entirely on revelation’.25 In Analytical Review, Wollstonecraft expresses concern about Macaulay’s proposed curriculum’s excessive expectations of children. Acknowledging the ‘foundation’ that Macaulay provides for Wollstonecraft’s coeducational thought, Alan Richardson argues nonetheless that Rights of Woman is ‘unprecedented in the systematic character of its analysis of female subjection and in the vigor and precision of its critique of earlier prescriptions for women’s education’.26 But having praised Macaulay’s work in Johnson’s Analytical Review, she cites it both prominently and favorably also in Rights of Woman, while harshly criticizing the educational thought of many other men and women: The very word respect brings Mrs Macaulay to my remembrance. The woman of the greatest abilities, undoubtedly, that this country has ever produced. – And yet this woman has been suffered to die without sufficient respect being paid to her memory. Posterity, however, will be more just; and remember that Catharine Macaulay was an example of intellectual acquirements supposed to be incompatible with the weakness of her sex. (W5, 174 – 5)

Wollstonecraft’s innovative coeducational thought grows also out of the friendly, educative, conversational experience at Johnson’s dinner table. To that experience she brings a psychologically afflicted familial character as well as a difficult life history marked by all-too-common educational deprivation, as well as uncommon resourcefulness and risk-taking. Those formidable challenges – along with her early voracious appetite for reading, writing, thinking, and learning – give rise to her later practical and philosophical interests in revolutionary sexual politics and education. Her educational critique of monarchism in Rights of Woman has autobiographical sources in her own girlhood experience and in her early experiences as an educator.

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B. Monarchist Home Landscapes (1759–83): Learning to Survive and Refuse Abuse Wollstonecraft does not directly criticize monarchism until 1790, in Rights of Men, but she begins resisting monarchism’s cultural effects as soon as she embarks upon her career as an educator. Her girlhood and young womanhood mired in monarchist domesticity inspire the critique of monarchist miseducation that she makes integral to her argument for coeducation in Rights of Woman. Plagued by domestic violence, economic and psychological instability, her family moves many times during her childhood. As Godwin succinctly explains in his Memoirs, ‘The despotism of her education cost her many a heart-ache’ (M, 206). While living in Beverley as an adolescent, Wollstonecraft briefly attends a day school and takes advantage of all educative cultural opportunities she can. Inwardly intense at menarche, starved for parental affection and substantial learning, she reads avidly, seeks divine parental affection and guidance, and particularly seeks friendships that offer her both affection and learning: from Jane Arden and her family, Rev. Mr and Mrs Clare, and Fanny Blood and her family. At age 19, she leaves home to work for two years as a lady’s companion, to Sara Dawson in Bath and Windsor, until her mother’s health fails. After her mother’s death, Wollstonecraft quits her family’s home forever, determined to maintain her independence, although she continues to care for her younger siblings and to search for domestic affection mingled with intellectual friendship that might sustain her. The monarchist political economy clusters propertied classes narrowly at the top, widely distributes impoverished classes at the bottom, with many minute gradations between those extremes, and defines a woman’s class by her primary male relation’s social rank. Wollstonecraft’s father, Edward John Wollstonecraft, aspires to the ranks of England’s landowning class. With hopes of climbing the social ladder as he abandons the silk-weaving trade that had made his own father prosperous, Edward has married her mother, Elizabeth Dickson, a woman from a Protestant wine-merchant family, prosperous and connected to Irish landed gentry. Abandoning that textile trade perhaps in part because the Industrial Revolution is rendering

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it obsolescent, Edward sires seven legitimate children and mimics the leisured gentleman’s life. He also drinks to excess, becoming ‘subject to alternate fits of kindness and cruelty’ (M, 205–6), and neglects work necessary to make farming prosperous, thus becoming progressively poorer, angrier, more melancholy, and more tyrannical – with tragic consequences for all women and most children in his family. His attempt to pass for gentility and his unregenerate downward social mobility are both common phenomena in Georgian England. One sibling may escape the tragic consequences of Edward Wollstonecraft’s economic, psychic, and social descent – Ned, the much-favored eldest child. Male primogeniture ensures that only eldest sons may legally inherit titles and estates, leaving younger sons to fend for themselves in professions, overseas trade or finance, and the armed forces. Wollstonecraft’s father inherits his grandfather’s property in 1765 after an apprenticeship as a clerk in his silk-weaving business, and Ned also receives a handsome legacy, whereas Mary Wollstonecraft receives nothing. Eventually Ned is apprenticed to study law, while their father squanders his inheritance, and younger brother Henry is apprenticed to an apothecary-surgeon before disappearing from the family record (perhaps into an insane asylum). Ironically, as their father becomes destitute, Wollstonecraft herself, not Ned, seeks the connections necessary to get her two younger brothers settled into respectable means for their self-support. Charles emigrates from England to the United States while struggling with a drinking problem, and James enlists in the navy despite a disposition at odds with seafaring life, both through her efforts. Sadly, her parentally favored brother Ned lacks the loving generosity to make his three unmarried sisters as comfortable as he could, though he does send Everina and Eliza to a Chelsea boarding school. Forbidden to own real property, even upper- and middle-class women of eighteenth-century England are property, subject along with money and other items to contractually negotiated exchange between their fathers or eldest brothers and their prospective husbands. All three Wollstonecraft girls come of age as young women without dowries that might render them marriageable in genteel circles, although Eliza does make an early marriage whose challenges exceed her strength. Throughout their lives, they struggle to

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overcome constant debts, which ‘haunt’ Wollstonecraft ‘like furies’ (CL, 69), against a realistic terror of their own destitution. Largely because of wars and emigration, women vastly outnumber men, and bachelorhood is popular among men who now have easy access to prostitutes and want to avoid the expenses and other obligations of family life. Wollstonecraft intends to consider the lives of such working-poor women at length in a second volume of Rights of Woman, which tragically she does not live to write. Although her family upbringing does not allow her to escape some troubling class prejudices (especially evident in her echoing of John Locke’s caveats about servants’ participation in middle-class child rearing), even her earliest aspirations are intensely spiritual and intellectual, in no way concerned with her own class ascendancy, marriage, or wealth. From an early age, she casts herself as an independentminded, ‘self-improving’ outsider to the social-climbing scene. Alienated from conventional femininity as well, she hates doll-play, loves boys’ sports, and loves to run wild in Yorkshire’s hills and dales – an experience that she will later theorize as educationally significant in several of her works. As eldest daughter, Wollstonecraft responds with early strength of mind and body to the alcoholic strife within her home. She helps her mother by giving her younger siblings basic instruction in letters, with counters and cards, and by assuming more than her fair share of maternal responsibility for them. Occasionally hit but apparently never whipped by her father, she sleeps sometimes at night on the landing near her mother’s bedroom – in order to shield her mother against her father’s battering. English law has allowed men to beat their wives since 1632, and will not convict such violent husbands until 1853. Although not pious, the social-climbing Wollstonecraft family belongs to the Church of England, the monarchy-established church of polite society, whose canon law forbids divorce, an issue Wollstonecraft takes up in her unfinished Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman; divorce is otherwise legally possible only by a husband’s (not a wife’s) appeal to the House of Lords if supported by a court’s finding of adultery and additional injury such as incest, bigamy, or extreme cruelty. English law also excludes women from nearly all professions in the eighteenth century,

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an exclusion against which Wollstonecraft argues in Rights of Woman. Workhouses owned and run by callous profiteers become means of subsistence for poor and fatherless children along with the aged, chronically ill, infirm, and mentally disabled, as well as rogues and vagrants – with children’s mortality in such settings vastly in excess of their (almost negligible) survival. No wonder that, with seven children’s lives to sustain, Wollstonecraft’s mother remains married, in weak submission to Edward Wollstonecraft, thereby earning Wollstonecraft’s filial scorn. But to Elizabeth Wollstonecraft’s credit, all seven of her children survive well into adulthood, at a time when infant mortality is high (although on the decline due to medical advances). Yet Wollstonecraft’s biographers note a keenly felt lack of loving attention from her mother. English authorities have advocated the child-developmental benefits of mothers’ breastfeeding their own babies since the seventeenth century, but the popularity of wet-nursing persists in England well into the eighteenth century, as it relieves infants’ biological mothers from the onerous obligation to breastfeed them while recovering from prevalent postpartum illnesses or while also raising older children and keeping house, responsibilities that impose severe social constraints even upon genteel mothers of the employing classes. Although Elizabeth Wollstonecraft breastfeeds her favored eldest son at home, she sends her less favored subsequent children, including Mary Wollstonecraft, out for wet-nursing. Premised on that fact and on her mother’s evident lack of affection for her, Wollstonecraft attributes the development of maternal love to the practice of breastfeeding – an argument she makes more subtly in Rights of Woman. Wollstonecraft does suffer some parental restraint that her brothers need not endure; her parents make her sit silently in their presence for three or four hours at a time as punishment for trivial childhood transgressions. Although the Georgian era is often celebrated (rightly or wrongly) as the first to demonstrate a substantial interest in children, Georgian children nonetheless suffer countless unchecked abuses, both public and private, and they have no legal right to education. Rosemary O’Day cites research that, defining literacy as no more than the ability to sign one’s own name in a marriage register, documents a male literacy rate of 60 per cent in both

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1754 and 1800, beside a female literacy rate of 35 per cent in 1754, raised to 45 per cent in 1800 – in a society that still often depends upon mothers to teach basic literacy to children at home.27 Although schooling plays an important part in battling illiteracy, government takes a laisser-faire stance toward education for both sexes, leaving its unregulated administration to propertied elites, religious charities, and commercial entrepreneurs. Schooling is thus a haphazard and inevitably unjust affair, sex-segregated and sex-defined for the rich and woefully limited even if occasionally coeducational for the poor, with no thought of sex equality or other social justice. Parents who school their daughters generally aim to prepare them for life in the social class to which they aspire, but like many other parents, Edward scorns the notion that women should be educated. During her adolescence in Beverley, Wollstonecraft does attend a day school – from which time her incipient transcendence as a self-educating girl becomes apparent. Middle-class but poor, she is offered little or no chance to learn French at this school, an educational deficit then serious in an educator, and she spends years trying to correct this disadvantage; the school also leaves her with little confidence in her knowledge of grammar or in her skill as a writer. But her few years at this day school do enlarge her world beyond her home’s oppressive confines. In Rights of Woman, she argues that government-funded day schools should become one key institutional feature of a national system of universal coeducation. Even as a girl Wollstonecraft starts to search elsewhere for loving guidance: she turns simultaneously inward to her imagination of God, and outward to friendships with other girls as well as neighbors’ affectionate, educational generosity. She also begins to write. Thus she learns as a young woman to survive and resist abuse, to insist upon her independence, and to take adventurous risks in order to liberate herself from oppressive situations. From this time forward, Wollstonecraft’s letters document her dynamic and difficult processes of self-invention and reinvention – a rigorously, morally examined life in the making without available worthy models to emulate. Marked both by her belief ‘in getting to truth through her own experience’ and by her ‘wish to be true to the complexity she felt’, her letters, re-collected by Todd in 2003, ‘reveal flashes of genius’.28

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Especially in girlhood, Wollstonecraft’s letter-writing seems to show the influence of the eighteenth-century cult of sensibility upon her development. Women’s increased literacy in the eighteenth century – together with Newton, and Locke’s psycho-perceptual theorizing – gives rise to this cultural phenomenon. Inextricably intertwined with the construction of femininity that Wollstonecraft critiques as ‘sexual character’ in Rights of Woman, ‘sensibility’ may indeed be the ‘key term’ of the Georgian period, popularized and gendered by both commercial and religious discourses and especially by women’s sentimental fiction (although famously satirized by Jane Austen). It denotes a ‘faculty of feeling’ or ‘receptivity of the senses’ and connotes ‘the operation of the nervous system, the material basis for consciousness’ and ‘the capacity for extremely refined emotion and a quickness to display compassion for suffering’.29 Despite Wollstonecraft’s observation in Education of Daughters that girls who imitate sensibility depicted in novels ‘make themselves very ridiculous’ (W4, 20), that work commends the piety, resignation, and benevolence that constitute ‘feminine’ sensibility. Initially this new culture promises women’s ‘equal mental development’30 – hence its attraction for Wollstonecraft. Eventually, however, it restores the notion of ‘innate sexual difference’ and thus becomes conventional and moralistic. According to G.J. Barker-Benfield, ‘the history of sensibility is one of increasingly self-conscious conflict, culminating in the work and reputation of Wollstonecraft’.31 By informally teaching Wollstonecraft both sensibility and reason, the Georgian-English cultural landscape imposes upon her an intensely experienced contradiction, implicit in any classification of sensibility as feminine and reason as masculine. Although Wollstonecraft heaps rational disdain especially upon religious sentimentality of the sort often associated with women in the eighteenth century, Barbara Taylor argues, she protests against cultural denial to women of ‘that inner mirroring of God’s virtues which leads to ethical fulfillment’,32 an inner mirroring that figures prominently in her theory of moral education and in her advocacy for coeducation. Jump defines such sensibility as ‘the faculty which, through a response to the beauties of nature, leads the mind to a conviction of union with the divine order which underlies the outer

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material or physical world’.33 The sublimity of Beverley’s Gothic church architecture awes Wollstonecraft as a girl, as does the natural world in which she freely plays out of doors. Throughout her life, Wollstonecraft experiences serious psychological difficulties that may pragmatically incline her toward such sensibility – difficulties wrought by her undeniably oppressive family upbringing as well as by possible psycho-genetics. Her father and siblings seem to experience some similar difficulties, with one younger brother possibly committed to an insane asylum. Mary Poovey has observed that Wollstonecraft uses both religion and reason as means of countering and controlling ‘this dreaded volatility’ in her own feelings.34 Raised by parents unworthy of that filial worshipful regard in which young children customarily hold their loving parents, Wollstonecraft develops a vivid religious imagination by means of which she seeks divine rather than human parental love and guidance as the foundation for growth of her self-respect. Thus embracing ‘Creative originality’ as ‘literally the God within’,35 she becomes a devoted self-educator. Although Wollstonecraft’s parents have her christened in the Church of England shortly after her birth, their religious life is otherwise inactive; receiving few religious lessons in her youth, she becomes devout quite early in her life nonetheless, attending church until age 28. But Godwin explains in his Memoirs that ‘her religion was, in reality, little allied to any system of forms . . . When she walked among the wonders of nature, she was accustomed to converse with her God . . . In fact, . . . her religion was her own creation. But she was not on that account the less attached to it, or the less scrupulous in discharging what she considered its duties’ (M, 215). By means of such religious imagination and practice, Wollstonecraft learns early to let go of awful family difficulties she is powerless to alter, without ever ceasing to care for her afflicted loved ones whenever she can do so with some practical efficacy. Through continuing life-long emotional struggles, she learns to focus sufficiently on her own survival and growth with dignity and meaning to avoid allowing her resentments to consume her character and cloud her otherwise remarkable imaginative sense of her life’s possibilities – although often her resentments threaten to do precisely that. Wollstonecraft’s

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early learning of such exceptional inner strength for ongoing emotional struggles has a strongly religious dimension. Perhaps in this one respect her earliest self-education is at least pragmatically akin, even though not identical in either conception or practice, to that which late modern ‘Twelve Step’ groups cultivate in families afflicted by an intimate relative’s alcoholism – as Wollstonecraft’s family is obviously afflicted. Thus integral to her self-educative disposition, her religious imagination seems to strengthen rather than weaken her disposition to reach out to the community around her for the domestic affection and learning opportunities that she craves. With education by family, schools, and universities either unsatisfactory or inaccessible to her, Wollstonecraft’s self-education depends upon other, multiple institutions, which variously engage one another and constitute Georgian England’s educative culture for adolescents and adults generally. This educative culture flourishes even in provincial towns like Beverley: ‘assembly rooms, concert series, theatre seasons, circulating libraries, clubs, urban walks and pleasure gardens, and sporting fixtures’.36 Wollstonecraft attends local lectures and meets her first documented close girlhood friend, Jane Arden, at one of them, a lecture given by Jane’s father. Well respected in Beverley, though poor, Mr Arden is an itinerant lecturer on Newtonian experimental science. Calling himself a philosopher (in accord with the Georgian idiom), he owns a portable laboratory of elaborate scientific instruments that he uses to teach a course on electricity, gravitation, magnetism, astronomy, optics, and expansion of metals, in which his students learn to read maps and globes showing the earth and other planets. In this way, Wollstonecraft begins to compensate for the lack of science in her meager day-school curriculum and to develop her rational powers, as advocated by Locke. Later, as a frequent visitor to the Arden home, far more nurturing than her own family’s home, Wollstonecraft witnesses Mr Arden’s assiduous supervision of Jane’s education and becomes the beneficiary of his intellectual generosity as he encourages her learning with praise, includes her in lessons that he teaches Jane, and lends her essays to read, especially one concerning friendship. Such male mentorship for intellectually hungry young women, perhaps most prominently exemplified by Dr Samuel Johnson (who later befriends Wollstonecraft too), is a

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distinguishing feature of Georgian educative culture, and this early encounter with it even in her own provincial cultural environs proves formative for Wollstonecraft as she learns from the experience how to construct the self-educative pattern of her adult life thenceforth. Dependent upon circulating libraries to reach a broad public, actively educative cultural institutions also include various sorts of advice manuals, deliberately educative new enterprises like Johnson’s publishing business as well as newspapers and periodicals like the Tatler and the Spectator . Despite Edward Wollstonecraft’s despotic disdain for the notion that women should be educated, his children do apparently read newspapers instead of sentimental novels, and talk together at home about current events and issues of both national and local significance. In some sense akin to the internet at the millennium, such robust development of a literate popular culture is profoundly educational insofar as it enables otherwise uneducated women’s self-educative and mutually educative exchanges of periodicals, pamphlets, papers, poems, and novels. Wollstonecraft’s earliest surviving letters document such exchanges of reading materials between herself and Jane in 1773 as well as her habit of turning to books as parental substitutes, as sources of nurture, comfort, authoritative advice about conduct, and instruction. Walking in woods, meadows, and commons, Jane and she recommend books to each other, talk about what they read, and confide in each other. Enthusiastically appreciative of Beverley’s local poetry, Wollstonecraft reads the Restoration poets Gray, Pope, and Dryden, but as a young woman reader she is unusual insofar as she seems to take no interest in the sentimental romance novels then so popular among Englishwomen: in Education of Daughters she scorns their ‘wrong account of the human passions’ (W4, 20). When Wollstonecraft is sixteen, living in Hoxton, the London suburb to which her family moves from Beverley, she seems to have learned much from her past friendship with the Ardens about how to proceed with her self-education. She turns to her next-door neighbors Rev. John Clare and Mrs Clare as her surrogate family, and they begin teaching her much as Mr Arden has done previously. They recommend books to her and invite her to read aloud to them. A learned and reclusive, perhaps chronically ill, Anglican clergyman,

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Rev. Clare shares his great love of poetry with Wollstonecraft, who herself acknowledges the Clares’ having taken ‘some pains to cultivate my understanding (which had been too much neglected)’ (CL, 24). Through the Clares, she meets and befriends eighteen-year-old Fanny Blood, whose intellect she instantly admires and studies. The two young women read and talk at the Clares’ home, where Wollstonecraft escapes from her own family for whole days and even weeks. Like Wollstonecraft herself, Fanny has claimed responsibility for nurturing her younger siblings in a family mothered by a submissive woman and fathered by an unproductive, improvident man. Skilled at painting and needlework, Fanny uses those conventional Georgian ‘feminine accomplishments’ to help her mother earn a meager living for their family through a cottage sewing business. But Fanny is remarkably clever and also has the artistic talent to illustrate published books. Although the Blood family’s poverty is worse than that of the Wollstonecraft family, she is nonetheless better educated than Wollstonecraft, who praises Fanny’s ‘masculine understanding, and sound judgment’ along with her ‘feminine virtue’ (CL, 25), thus signaling Wollstonecraft’s early critical alertness to ‘sexual character’ – ‘masculine’, ‘feminine’ – as a consequence of education. When Wollstonecraft makes the courageous move to leave home and take her first employment, as a lady’s companion in Bath and later in Windsor, she and Fanny must live far apart, so the two young women write letters to each other. In this way Fanny becomes Wollstonecraft’s sensitive ‘instructor’ in writing, and they become devoted friends. Wollstonecraft later tells Godwin that her friendship with Fanny has been ‘the ruling passion of her mind’.37 This relationship may or may not be explicitly erotic or sexual, for Wollstonecraft scorns sexual activities among boarding school girls, but its passionate intensity is inextricably bound up with Wollstonecraft’s never-flagging desire to become educated, as she casts herself as Fanny’s student and writes of her to Jane: I enjoyed the society of a friend, whom I love better than all the world beside, a friend to whom I am bound by every tie of gratitude and inclination: To live with this friend is the height of my ambition . . . her conversation is not more agreeable than improving . . . (CL, 24–25)

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Self-supporting at age nineteen and already longing to live with Fanny, she benefits from conversation with the well-traveled lady whom she serves as companion, Sarah Dawson. But she feels acutely the absence of sincerity in the frivolous society of Bath and Windsor within which Mrs Dawson moves, and deplores a lack of virtue in the fashionable education that Mrs Dawson’s sister is providing for her daughters. She works for Mrs Dawson two years, until her mother falls ill. Wollstonecraft returns home to care for her mother until her death in 1782. Then Wollstonecraft leaves home, resolved never to return, focused on her dream of living with Fanny. She makes herself at home with the Blood family for over a year after her mother’s death, helping them with their sewing business. She even calls Mrs Blood ‘our mother’ (CL, 144), finding in their family the affection she has never known in her own. Like the Ardens, the Bloods make a more peaceful household than the Wollstonecrafts do, but their family suffers serious poverty, dependent upon income from Mrs Blood’s and Fanny’s cottage labor as seamstresses. Many unemployed spinsters become economic burdens to their families, suffering deprecation as ‘old maids’ – fear of which may motivate Fanny’s desire to marry despite the affectionate bond between herself and Wollstonecraft. Indeed, prostitution, begging, and vagrancy become the options for women without other means of survival.38 These women face difficult struggles for survival, unsupported in illness, often dying from poverty. Married women – like Mrs Blood, whose husband does not fulfill his patriarchal responsibilities as family provider – must often struggle for their survival as well. Wollstonecraft witnesses Mrs Blood’s ruining her own health and eyesight to keep the whole family alive, just as Wollstonecraft’s own mother submits to her violent father in the midst of a similarly self-sacrificial struggle for her seven children’s survival. Eventually Wollstonecraft begins to chafe at Mrs Blood’s selfsacrifice and to scheme a means for herself and Fanny to strike out on their own together. Hoping to marry despite her lack of a dowry and not eager to abandon her poor but exasperating family, prudent, selfsacrificing Fanny cannot match Wollstonecraft’s imaginative genius for impulsive resistance against oppression through adventurously experimental, self-educative living. In 1782 Wollstonecraft writes of her own different life plan to her friend Jane,

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I will not marry, for I dont want to be tied to this nasty world, and old maids are of so little consequence – that ‘let them live or die, nobody will laugh or cry’. – It is a happy thing to be a mere blank, and to be able to pursue one’s own whims, where they lead, without having a husband and half a hundred children at hand to teaze and controul a poor woman who wishes to be free. (CL, 38)

Having witnessed the painful self-denial and submissive endurance of her mother and Fanny’s mother, Wollstonecraft learns to adopt a risk-taking, resilient attitude of refusal. She refuses to endure any oppressive situation very long after she has learned whatever she can from it. Faced with such an oppressive situation, she always searches for and risks an as yet untried alternative through which she might learn something new about living well. Each of her adult employments begins as such a risky untried alternative, even if it eventually becomes another oppressive situation impossible to endure. Such resourceful searches for ways out of oppressive situations, and the many risks she takes to try new situations in their stead, give her selfeducation its remarkable social breadth, just as new friendships she inevitably makes in such situations give her self-education much of its intellectual substance and spiritual depth. The breadth and depth of her self-education by oppressive life situations constitutes her preparation to write her critique of monarchist miseducation in Rights of Woman. Small wonder, too, Wollstonecraft imagines coeducation in that work with an explicit view toward its fostering moral and intelligent motherhood and mutual friendship between spouses, as well as women’s physical and rational capacities for independence.

C. Educational Landscapes (1784–7): Learning to Educate Praising Wollstonecraft’s patience, practical intuition, and ‘firm confidence’, Godwin writes in his Memoirs, ‘No one was ever better formed for the business of education’ (M, 218). Although initially plagued by class hauteur scornful of school teachers, she seeks her own

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liberation from monarchist domesticity, by continuing her selfeducation and supporting herself as a professional educator – as mistress of a school, as governess to titled aristocrats, and as author of her first book, Education of Daughters. Heedless of Mrs Clare’s and Fanny’s prudent admonitions, but with support from a new mentor, Mrs Hannah Burgh, Wollstonecraft leaves the Blood family to rescue her sister Eliza from her marriage to Meredith Bishop, and at the same time to improve her means of self-support and live with her beloved Fanny. For these purposes, she starts a new school at Newington Green, two miles north of London. Wollstonecraft interprets Eliza’s acute postpartum depression as insanity precipitated by Bishop’s abuse, fearing her sister’s descent into a miserable life like their mother’s. Everina soon joins her two sisters and Fanny as teachers at their new school, but Eliza’s child remains in Bishop’s custody and does not live to her first birthday. Both Mrs Burgh, whose own marriage has been one of ‘equality and joint benevolence’,39 and Rev. Dr Richard Price become Wollstonecraft’s mentors in Newington Green, where village suppers introduce her to the conversational culture of a vibrant intellectual community. In 1785 Fanny moves to Lisbon to marry Hugh Skeys, and Wollstonecraft travels there to assist with her childbirth. When Fanny and her child both die, Wollstonecraft returns devastated to Newington Green and closes the school. She begins writing Education of Daughters, and, with Mrs Burgh’s help, finds employment as governess for the Viscount Kingsborough family in Ireland. That employment is short-lived, but Johnson has published her book, and her writing life has begun. Besides authoring Education of Daughters and gaining critical insights for future arguments in Rights of Woman, she has through both teaching experiences generated much material for Real Life and The Female Reader . Cheaper to open than a small shop and in no way regulated, commercial schools for girls offer women of limited economic means – especially widows and other unmarried women without a benevolent patriarch’s support – a respectable new source of employment, business experience and reasonable hope of independence as teachers. Such girls’ schools are generally established all over rural and urban England – mostly as family businesses, established through

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partnerships between sisters, as in Wollstonecraft’s case, or between mothers and daughters. Some schoolmistresses prepare for the work through apprenticeships as elder pupils assisting teachers; some embark upon the school trade with experience as governesses. Wollstonecraft, her sisters, and Fanny all lack such preparatory experience. But, inspired by a letter from Jane Arden (who does have such experience), describing her scheme for starting her own school, as well as by advice from her persuasive friend Mrs Burgh, Wollstonecraft makes Eliza’s situation and her own into a new self-educative challenge and opportunity. Collectively, with benevolent and sensible assistance from Mrs Burgh, these young women support their all-female household by taking in lodgers and running a day school successfully for two-and-ahalf years, beginning in 1784. Fanny, Wollstonecraft’s sisters Eliza and Everina, and Wollstonecraft herself all teach reading, writing, and nature study; her sisters very likely teach feminine accomplishments recently learned at their Chelsea boarding school while Fanny teaches writing, sewing, and painting. They engage an assistant, Miss Mason, ‘whose bluntness’, according to Gordon, is ‘wholesome, not wounding’, and whose clear judgment ‘not overburdened with sensibility’ wins the Wollstonecraft sisters’ enduring regard.40 Although Wollstonecraft leaves behind no evidence of Mason’s intellectual companionship at this time, she does later bestow Mason’s surname upon the central pedagogical figure in Real Life. Meanwhile, Wollstonecraft herself not only teaches, she also organizes the school, designs its curriculum with an emphasis on morals before manners, hires and supervises domestic staff, and encourages her collaborators. Newington Green has attracted dissident intellectuals and educational reformers ever since Daniel Defoe’s residence there earlier in the century. In the 1780s, Dissenters make their community there – strait-laced, morality-minded Protestant gentlemen who resist the monarchy-established Church of England (in which Wollstonecraft remains a member throughout her life). Also known as Nonconformists, the Dissenters – Quakers, Unitarians, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Baptists, and others – resemble women insofar as English law denies them admission to the great universities, Oxford and Cambridge, whose students must be male members of the Church

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of England. Unitarian Dissenters’ self-educative sociability is also liberally congenial to women’s learning. Newington Green is therefore not the typical village dominated by its vicar and squire, but a more egalitarian community of Rational Dissenters who meet weekly in one anothers’ homes for a supper club. Thus, while developing new skills and strengths as a first-time head of household, businesswoman and educator, Wollstonecraft also encounters a rich opportunity to improve her argumentative skills in conversation among articulate liberal people of intellectual substance, many involved in producing newspapers and pamphlets to educate and influence the English public. At the heart of Newington Green’s community, Wollstonecraft comes into contact for the first time with a radical intellectual: Rev. Dr Price, the widely known, pro-American Welshman, writer, political theorist, mathematician, former government financial adviser, and Unitarian preacher. He corresponds with other prominent intellectuals, philosophers, scientists, and revolutionaries in England, France, and North America, such as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Marquis de Condorcet, and Joseph Priestley. Price’s international stature notwithstanding, he presides over a small local Dissenters’ chapel and proves to be a kind neighbor, especially to children and to the afflicted and vulnerable, and to animals in distress – a quality that impresses Wollstonecraft, who can see his home and chapel through her window. Due to his own experiences of discrimination as a Rational Dissenter, he can sympathize with women’s struggles and unconventional aims. Devoted also to his chronically ill wife and mourning the recent death of his close friend, the educator-author Rev. Dr James Burgh, Price becomes an unthreatening fatherly mentor to her as she embarks upon her first work as an educator with assistance from his friend’s widow, Mrs Hannah Burgh. Educating her much as Mr Arden and Rev. Clare have done previously, Price is a strong critic of dogmatism, who favors teaching how to think rather than teaching what to think. Believing strongly in education as a universal human right, he teaches young people to question and analyze, to experiment scientifically with microscopes and electricity, to reason. Moreover, while condemning American slavery, he also advises founders of the United States that nothing’s importance

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exceeds that of education for their formerly colonial society, now a politically independent nation. Remaining Anglican despite her disapproval of the Church of England’s ‘Romish customs’,41 Wollstonecraft attends Price’s chapel as often as she does her own church. She listens to his political sermons, probably much like the revolutionary sermon that precipitates Burke’s scathing promonarchist attack upon him in Reflections on the Revolution in France, against which her Rights of Men defends him. Although she refuses to convert (which Price does not seem to mind), she sees rational merit in his insistence upon an individual’s inner relationship with God, which conflicts with the Church of England’s insistence upon the guiding roles of priest and doctrine. Learning from her new mentor to reflect critically and independently on her religious faith, she moves toward a liberal faith similar to that upon which she grounds her later, explicitly religious argument for educational sex equality in Rights of Woman. Her more liberal faith becomes organized around ‘an encouraging rational God who demanded that his creations be free to become moral’,42 albeit still with the objective of eternal life for which worldly life is mere moral preparation. That pious objective becomes a central motive for women’s moral education later in her Rights of Woman. In Newington Green, Wollstonecraft also meets other prominent intellectuals outside Price’s circle, including Dr Samuel Johnson, ailing in his seventies but kind to her the year before he dies. Despite her eventual rejection of his political conservatism, she feels some religious affinity with his posthumously published Prayers and Meditations, and repeatedly turns to his writing in times of trouble. Wollstonecraft meets Dr Johnson through John Hewlett, an Anglican clergyman and schoolteacher, well connected with London’s literary circles, who is aiming for a career in educational and religious writing, when she befriends him in Newington Green. Hewlett encourages Wollstonecraft to take a similar aim by introducing her also to his publisher Joseph Johnson, a convert to Unitarian Rational Dissent. Expanding the market for textbooks and educational works, commercial development of English schooling now offers many teachers – including some women, like Hannah More and Wollstonecraft herself – new opportunities to promote their schools or to achieve their

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independence as writers by publishing their own educational methods and advice. But in 1785, in ‘a daring action for a young woman’,43 Mary Wollstonecraft travels to Lisbon in order to nurse her newlywed friend Fanny through childbirth and death – ending this rich early phase of Wollstonecraft’s higher self-education. Life in Newington Green does not exhilarate Eliza and Everina as it does their elder sister, and they fail to tend their school adequately in her absence. Upon Wollstonecraft’s return in 1786, in the mournful period immediately following Fanny’s death, the school’s mounting problems cease to interest her as well. The school fails to survive both her sisters’ and her own neglect; they find teaching positions, and Wollstonecraft seeks employment as a governess while also acting on Hewlett’s advice: she begins writing Education of Daughters. Most eighteenth-century writers on education for girls of the middle and upper classes assume that, in comparison to men, as Bridget Hill explains, women have ‘different and inferior intellectual abilities’44 and ‘consequently they need totally different educations to prepare them for totally different occupations and employments’.45 In families of adequate means, girls are educated for the home, where women’s role is often that of ‘upper servants’.46 Jump observes that although Wollstonecraft ‘is clearly questioning the status quo, and worrying at it’ in Education of Daughters, ‘she nonetheless accepts the establishment view with little or no modification – at best one can notice the occasional restlessness in her thinking’.47 A hybrid of two popular eighteenth-century genres – the conduct book and the treatise on female education – Education of Daughters is constructed from her correspondence with Fanny’s brother George Blood and her own sisters. Her first book offers a miscellaneous collection of her opinions about girls’ education, abstracting from her observations and experiences without formulating them into a logically structured argument, though Jump makes the apt observation that ‘all the material is in place for a radical social critique’.48 Deriving its title from James Burgh’s influential Thoughts on Education (1747), Thoughts on the Education of Daughters also quotes Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), scorns female education for dependence promoted by many men’s conduct books for women, and reflects knowledge of others’ extant

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educational theories as well as some particular concern for uneducated, unmarried women’s economic hardships – albeit without making any particularly original, historically significant, or politically controversial contribution to educational thought. In 1786, she travels to Dublin in order to take employment as governess to the ‘wild’ children of Irish aristocrats Robert and Caroline King, the Lord and Lady Kingsborough. Teaching the King sisters in Dublin gives her an opportunity to put her theory of education into practice and deepens her understanding of ladies’ miseducation. While traveling to that post, she observes boys’ public-school culture at Eton College, whose tyrannical ridicule, frivolous vanity and pretentious banter horrify her – observations that also figure later in Rights of Woman’s critique of monarchist miseducation. In Ireland, however, her continuing self-education is solitary and bookish, not much enhanced by opportunities for travel around the country. Having recently written Education of Daughters, she reads Theodore and Adelaide by the popular educational writer Stephanie deGenlis, and other books, usually with specific intentions to improve her French or learn Italian. She also takes up some serious philosophical reading, including Hugh Blair’s Letters on Rhetoric and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s educational novel Emile. Her employers plan to take her with them to France, but dismiss her before acting on that plan. Despite her pedagogical successes as governess, she feels alienated and angered by the King family’s aristocratic society, much as she has felt as Mrs Dawson’s companion in Bath. She therefore intensifies more than she corrects young Margaret King’s negative judgment of her frivolous mother – insubordinate pedagogy that understandably displeases her ladyship, Caroline King, and cuts short Wollstonecraft’s employment as governess. With Johnson’s publication of her Education of Daughters in 1787, she embarks at age 27 upon her public writing career as an experienced educator, and it sells well, so her briefly desperate situation as an unemployed educator in 1788 becomes her windfall opportunity to make her life writing for Johnson. Gordon notes that ‘the portrait of a professional woman’ that emerges from Education of Daughters is not a self-portrait, but a portrait of possibility – Wollstonecraft’s ‘first attempt at the alternative life plot that could bring into being an

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exemplar of her sex’.49 She is about to make that portrait correspond to reality, despite the scarcity of employments available to women. However muted her iconoclasm seems in print at first, her restlessness cited by Jump already appears far more intense and unconventional in the unusual effort she devotes to shaping her life, making her life’s work, and educating herself for that work. Working in Johnson’s circle, where she continues to see Price, Hewlett and Priestley occasionally, she subsequently develops her educational thought with noteworthy ‘speed, courage and skill . . . from resignation and acceptance to rejection and revolt’ against the taken-for-granted conventions of her own upbringing.50 Her courageous appetite to see, to know, to grow and learn, to experience as much as she can, immeasurably contributes to her sophisticated intellectual development with scarcely any formal education. Besides reading voraciously and writing letters prolifically, she befriends, she works, she teaches, she travels, she loves, and later she mothers also. She refuses to stay mired in any oppressive situation and chooses to brave the world; she thinks about, learns and writes from her unusually wide-ranging experience. In some peculiarly gender-critical sense, she could be said to embody with uncommon brilliance Locke’s ideal of the self-made person, the re-educated adult.

D. Revolutionary World and Home Landscapes (1792–7): Learning to Love Again Wollstonecraft’s most recent scholarly biographies devote the largest share of their attentions to her life after Rights of Woman’s publication: her European travels and her revolutionary experiment with William Godwin making marriage an egalitarian domestic partnership between mutual friends. She goes to Paris on assignment as a correspondent for Johnson as 1792 ends. While there, she distances herself from the Revolution’s militant feminist movement, but does take keen interest in its educational planning until the Reign of Terror begins. At age 33 with Gilbert Imlay as her first male lover, she becomes pregnant, giving birth to Fanny Imlay in Le Havre in May 1794. At the end of that year, Johnson publishes her French Revolution,

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but she does not return to London until April 1795, when she discovers Imlay’s infidelity and attempts suicide. Imlay sends her with Fanny and their maid, Marguerite Fourn´ee, to Scandinavia as an emissary concerning one of his business difficulties. Her correspondence with him while traveling in summer 1795 becomes rough draft material for her Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, which she prepares for publication while recovering from a second suicide attempt. In 1796 she renews her friendship with Mary Hays, as well as her acquaintance with Godwin, who subsequently becomes her lover and husband. She begins writing Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman, and during her second pregnancy begins writing Lessons as well. Eleven days after she gives birth to their daughter, Wollstonecraft dies as a consequence of an attending physician’s inadequate hygiene. ‘The last part in education is travel,’ Locke theorizes, ‘which is commonly thought to finish the work and complete the gentleman’,51 so Wollstonecraft longs also to travel. Immediately after Rights of Woman’s second publication in late 1792, she travels to France – just in time to witness the violent end of its monarchy – and subsequently also to Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, a part of Europe then less popular with British travelers than France, Spain, Italy, and Holland. This extended trip to Europe marks a major turning-point in Wollstonecraft’s self-education: though financed by Johnson, her selfeducation abroad lacks friendly, caring, close guidance from a primary mentor. At a significant historical moment when France and England are mutual enemies, she is entirely on her own in culturally unfamiliar, sometimes dangerously seductive, sometimes dangerously hostile and violent territory. She develops new ‘wisdom and prudence’ during her self-governed travels precisely as she has theorized in Rights of Woman that young people’s knowledge of self and others should develop, so that they may become wise and virtuous: that is, through ‘labour and sorrow’ (W5, 182). Initially she goes to France only to research and write French Revolution, which requires her investigation and close study of ‘journals, records, and documents then available in Paris and London’.52 Horrified by violence that consumes Paris, where she finds herself stepping through actual puddles of blood during the Reign of Terror, Wollstonecraft must also re-examine her own thinking

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about the Revolution. But still she attempts to counter Britain’s ‘counter-revolutionary repression and hysteria’ with accurate history and, according to Tom Furniss, ‘offers one of the most profound discussions of revolutionary politics to emerge out of the Revolution Controversy’.53 Furniss remarks that ‘Strikingly, Wollstonecraft hardly even hints that the Revolution may have gone astray because of its failure to set up a proper system of education for women to take up full civil rights’,54 though the bloodthirsty Jacobins embrace Rousseau’s ideal of natural womanhood, which Rights of Woman has directly criticized. Todd is correct, however, to point out that French Revolution does ‘call for mental as well as physical change’ in France,55 and Furniss is not entirely on the mark with his claim that ‘The argument of Rights of Woman makes no appearance here.’56 For, like Rights of Woman, French Revolution does put forward, albeit only briefly, a moral critique of education that aims at people’s learning to strive primarily to please others; it conceives education as a broadly cultural phenomenon integral to radical alteration of the property-centered political economy. The French Revolution has disrupted the old regime’s educational system, and although French Enlightenment philosophers share Wollstonecraft’s belief in education’s power to improve humanity, most Revolutionary thinkers do not evidence any desire to grant human rights to women. Indeed, no single French Revolutionary treatise formulates a feminist statement of coeducational thought as comprehensive as her Rights of Woman.57 Having already met Talleyrand in London, between the first and second publications of Rights of Woman, she becomes involved in French republicans’ work on a ‘plan of education’ (CL, 221),58 perhaps in contact with Marquis de Condorcet, through her friend Thomas Paine. Paine has become involved with committees concerning education and land reform through his affiliation with the Girondins. Among English and American expatriates in France, Wollstonecraft finds other intellectually stimulating company such as she has met around Johnson’s dinner table. She falls in love with Gilbert Imlay, an American entrepreneur and gentle-seeming frontiersman in whom Gordon thinks Wollstonecraft mistakenly sees an exemplar of Rousseau’s ‘natural man’.59 He presents himself to her through

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a mutual friend as an author who admires her own writing and the poetry of Phyllis Wheatley, opposes slavery, and advocates women’s rights, including the right to freedom from marital rape and the right to divorce. Tantalized by the possibility of moving with him and her sisters to an idyllic farm in frontier Kentucky,60 Wollstonecraft does not learn until later the cruel truth that Imlay is not so much a revolutionary man of moral character as he is a man of commerce from a prosperous, slave-owning family in New Jersey, a sly and smooth-talking opportunist pursuing profit from the French Revolution. Indeed, she does not yet know he is ‘no different from other men on the make in an age of smuggling, piracy and colonisation’,61 a womanizer, perhaps a spy and a con-man. Liberated from Georgian England’s pieties by the world-changing fervor of the French Revolution and as naively unaware of Imlay’s shady character as Samuel Richardson’s fictional hero Clarissa is concerning Lovelace’s seductive deceptions, Wollstonecraft embarks upon her first known heterosexual relationship, with naively trusting and passionate devotion to him. When the Girondins fall, some of Wollstonecraft’s friends, including Paine, are arrested and imprisoned; many leave Paris. Wollstonecraft relocates to a nearby village. Amid joyful interruptions for amorous rendezvous with Imlay, who saves her life by arranging a fake marriage at the US embassy so that she can pass as an American under his surname, Wollstonecraft works at emulating historical writing that she admires by Catherine Macaulay, reformulating her perspective on the Revolution, to write French Revolution. Eventually relocated to Le Havre, she bears a child by Imlay, for whom he cares little: Fanny Imlay, whose given name memorializes Wollstonecraft’s earlier passionate love for Fanny Blood. Wollstonecraft’s experiences while abroad in this Revolutionary, expatriate context become for her an experimental ‘school of adversity’ (W4, 36) that puts her already famous coeducational theorizing about marriage and motherhood in Rights of Woman to some hard tests that threaten even her strong will to live. Wollstonecraft retains hopes for the French Revolution and wants Fanny to grow up in France, where she will not suffer the stigma of illegitimacy, but finally in response to Imlay’s affectionate pleas does wean Fanny, in futile hopes of endearing the child to him, and returns to London.

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Shocked to find Imlay has taken an actress as his mistress, however, and unwilling to become a kept woman herself, Wollstonecraft takes an overdose of laudanum, but with second thoughts for her daughter, she vomits to prevent her own suicide. Thus she faces now the immense twin challenge of educating herself and Fanny for survival with dignity and meaning within a culture that regards them both as legal outcasts – for the Hardwicke Marriage Act of 1753 has constructed ‘unmarried mother’ and ‘fatherless child’ as new categories of outlaws, and renders legally insignificant all private promises of fidelity or even of engagement to marry. Imlay subsequently sends Wollstonecraft on a trip to Scandinavia as his emissary to settle a legally complicated business matter. Such travel on the part of an unchaperoned single woman is in itself revolutionary. She may, as Gordon hypothesizes, discover toward the trip’s end Imlay’s complicity in an elaborate fraud. Before any such horrifying discovery, however, their correspondence with each other throughout her trip is substantial on both sides, evidencing her extreme psychological difficulty in accepting the frightening truth that their affair is surely finished, leaving her a fallen woman and the single mother of an illegitimate child. Upon return to London in considerable distress, she survives a second suicide attempt (this time by drowning in the Thames). Subsequently, she rejects a proposal of marriage from a rich friend of Joseph Johnson, and embarks upon reworking her recent correspondence with Imlay into her brilliant fictional autobiographical travelogue, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark – according to Todd ‘one of the few firsthand accounts of Scandinavia written in English in the eighteenth century’.62 Translated into Dutch, German, Swedish, and later Portuguese, this book is for Wollstonecraft a huge success and at the same time a deliberate piece of self-educative work, as she writes with apparent reflection upon Locke’s theorizing about educational travel. Sweden, Norway, and Denmark brings a poetically autobiographical narrative voice to document a single mother’s selfeducation through travel in foreign lands alone with her child and au pair.63 Her travel is both physical and spiritual as she develops a new rationality mingled with sensibility, intensely curious about this foreign world as she examines her own mind and heart. Her artistic rewriting of her letters to Imlay becomes a self-educative exercise

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for spiritual recovery from his betrayal and from the violent terror she has witnessed in France. Critiquing commerce, politics, gender relations, and ‘the tyranny of wealth’ as she confronts the lonely terror of her own abject situation, she learns that ‘reason could coexist with passion, and intelligence with extreme sensitivity’.64 This epistolary testimonial of her self-education via simultaneously outward and inward travel in Scandinavia serves her philosophically also: ‘to take such a dispassionate view of men as will lead me to form a just idea of the nature of man’ (W6, 326). In 1796 Wollstonecraft renews acquaintance with Godwin, which quickly becomes by his own report ‘friendship melting into love’ (M, 258). Having scorned the quality of her writing in Rights of Woman, he much admires it in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. An unmarried man at age 40, he enjoys friendships with many intelligent women, and his experience resembles Wollstonecraft’s own in many respects. Besides their common affiliations with the community of Rational Dissent, they share resentment about having been sent out to wet-nurses rather than being breastfed by their own mothers; they share strongly self-respecting resilience as survivors of violent childhood homes; they share comparable developmental experiences as respected authors who began their careers as ‘hack writers’; and they share a strong philosophical opposition to the institution of marriage.65 Whereas Wollstonecraft remains Anglican, albeit a dissenting and now inactive one, Godwin has renounced the Presbyterian clergy for which he has been educated at a Dissenting Academy in Hoxton, and indeed renounces faith in God altogether for a vigorous Enlightenment rationalism. But his experience as a clergyman proves useful in the compassionate clarity and frankness he so gracefully brings to Wollstonecraft’s ongoing recovery from wounds inflicted by Imlay, and although more coolly rational than she, he does share with her an appreciation for the moral significance of emotion.66 Temperamentally, they differ insofar as she is ‘active and eager’ and he is ‘sedentary and cautious’.67 Yet his respect reflects her strength, as he nonetheless challenges the morality of suicide and of increasing militarism in her still-beloved France. Meanwhile, she greets his sometimes cold, hard rationality with playfulness that softens him into a gentler reasonableness. Living around

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the corner from each other, they meet eye to eye as writers with mutual respect for each other’s profound intellects, strong characters, iconoclastic world-views, and sometimes psychologically complex feelings. From this encounter Wollstonecraft learns daily practices of open selfexpression and response that develop mutual understanding she has scarcely known with any man other than Johnson. Their friendship develops quickly while she is writing Wrongs of Woman, an especially difficult project simply because she lacks confidence as a writer of novels. She teaches him sensitivity to her vulnerability and need for encouragement, so that eventually his criticism can become more helpfully severe, and he can teach her grammar. Thus with him she finally makes a more erotically joyful, albeit no less rational or egalitarian, marital friendship than she has previously theorized in Rights of Woman. Although she does not finish Wrongs of Woman, she deploys narrative to critique the political, economic, and legal problems of women, including denial of property rights and child custody rights to women. She explores the possible help that women might give one another across class lines, and the complications of sexuality combined with rationality. The incomplete narrative focuses on the parallel and intersecting fictional lives of Maria, an intelligent and genteel woman who separates from her husband, loses custody of her child, and suffers confinement to a madhouse, and of her jailor, Jemima, a woman of the laboring class whose own mother, a servant girl seduced by another servant, had died shortly after her birth, leaving her to grow up without love or moral direction. Stylistically troubled by ‘relentless didacticism’,68 Wrongs of Woman has elicited little attention from theorists of women’s education, who nonetheless find in it a sequelsubtext to her earlier Rights of Woman, specifically concerning the education of working women, elaborating in what ways ‘education and environment have a profound effect on the development of the moral character’.69 Through this fiction-writing, Wollstonecraft continues to puzzle over her own social predicament as a scorned single mother. She also jots down ‘hints’ of ideas for a forthcoming sequel to Rights of Woman, which largely center on the education of emotion and imagination. At the same time, while she thus works, Godwin and Wollstonecraft deepen their friendship with hearty respect for

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each other’s writing lives, educating each other about what such lives require temperamentally, through ‘repartee without aggression’.70 Maintaining separate living quarters, they work out writing times and meeting times, communicate not just face to face but also by letter, allow each other social freedom for their other intellectual friendships, openly express their discomforts, respond with sensitive effort to them, and enjoy their strongly erotic mutual attraction. He teaches her Latin, and she teaches him how to win little Fanny’s affection. Small wonder that Virginia Woolf has judged Wollstonecraft’s experimental relationship with Godwin her major cultural contribution to women’s lives (Woolf, 1932). Indeed, except for their obvious erotic joy in each other, Wollstonecraft’s friendship with Godwin fulfills, at least in a general way, the moral requirements that she theorized for marriage in her earlier Rights of Woman; through this remarkable friendship Wollstonecraft has moved from self-education to mutual education. Although marriage resisters, Wollstonecraft and Godwin do marry privately in Old St Pancras when she becomes pregnant again. While awaiting the birth of their child, whom they playfully name ‘William’, they continue the living pattern of their friendship, enduring separation during his travel, unabashedly reproaching each other and apologizing as occasion arises, albeit without losing their mutual respect. During her pregnancy, Wollstonecraft embarks upon composition of another posthumously published manuscript that remains unfinished, thirteen Lessons designed for Fanny and William. Noting that Wollstonecraft’s writing style is ‘now strong, simple, direct, and confident’, Jump reads in Lessons evidence that Wollstonecraft has dismissed the teacher posture of distrust toward children: ‘As a mother Wollstonecraft has learnt what as a teacher, governess and theorist she never learnt: that the great secret of morals . . . is love. She does not feel the need to preach or rationalise, only to love and protect her child.’71 Although a fragment, this brief document of maternal teaching with active paternal assistance may be useful to coeducational theorists curious about Wollstonecraft’s vision of how children may learn from mutually loving parents to care for one another, to observe and love animals, to avoid household dangers, to read, to dress themselves, and to be considerate of others. In ‘Letters on the

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Management of Infants’, she calls upon mothers ‘to treat childcare as a profession to be learnt’72 – a message also unmistakably delivered by her fragmentary Lessons. She has experienced Fanny’s delivery three years earlier in Le Havre as quick and easy, but not so with the delivery of ‘William’, who actually turns out to be a daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. Over a week later, Todd reports, as Wollstonecraft lies in childbed suffering puerperal fever as a consequence of inadequate medical hygiene, ‘Godwin tried to speak to her about the future of little Fanny and baby Mary’, but his wife is already near death, too weak to reply more than ‘I know what you are thinking of’.73 Surrounded by Godwin, Hays, and other friends, and having communicated to one that ‘He is the kindest, best man in the world’,74 she dies at age 38, now neither alone nor unloved. If she could live, the recent works she leaves unfinished suggest that she might theorize maternal teaching, women’s mutual education across class lines, and the role of poetry in the education of human emotions – thus modifying her own coeducational thought and giving a public voice to her most courageous and difficult self-education after the publication of Rights of Woman. At the same time, her tragically foreshortened but amply documented life, no less than Rights of Woman and her other educational writings, remains a rich curriculum in living for future women’s self-education, not least for her own daughters.

E. The Landscape of Educational Thought: Opposing Sex Segregation Wollstonecraft’s intellectual biography cannot be complete without recognizing her place within the larger historical landscape of thought on women’s education, including coeducation. She has often become an icon of feminism for both her detractors and her advocates – sometimes even inaccurately labeled ‘the first feminist’.75 Although Judy Chicago’s monumental feminist-historical work of collaborative sculptural-decorative artistry, The Dinner Party, has beautifully honored her as an educator,76 Wollstonecraft’s appropriation by feminism (not even a word in her vocabulary) may have eclipsed her

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educational thought’s significance in the late twentieth century. This is ironic, in view of education’s topical centrality to women’s thought in Enlightenment England, including women intellectuals of a sort quite different from the intelligentsia gathered at Johnson’s. Like some twenty-first-century feminists, such women advocate women’s education as sex-segregated education instead of attempting, as Wollstonecraft does, to conceptualize coeducation. The radical historical significance of Wollstonecraft’s Rights of Woman can scarcely be exaggerated. At least a century before Wollstonecraft’s time, however, the women writers of Grub Street have resisted their sex’s cultural suppression, intellectual degradation, and educational deprivation.77 Dale Spender is surely right in her latetwentieth-century observation that ‘To label A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft as the first major feminist treatise is to do Mary Astell a serious injustice, for almost one hundred years before, in 1694, she put forward a very similar thesis.’78 Wollstonecraft seems to Todd ‘unusual in her ignoring or ignorance’ of Astell when compiling her Female Reader ,79 and Spender considers it ‘unlikely’, albeit debatable, that Astell’s work – so similar to Wollstonecraft’s own – escapes her reading. Astell has even proposed a school for women with the explicit purpose of improving teacher preparation,80 and Wollstonecraft’s friend Hays evidences some knowledge of Astell’s unprecedented educational project, explaining that as ‘a lady of fortune’ she proposed to contribute £10,000 towards erecting a seminary or college, for the education of young women, and also to serve as an asylum for those whom misfortune, studious habits, or other circumstances, should render desirous of retiring from the world. The execution of this laudable and rational project was prevented by Bishop Burnet, from a puerile apprehension, that its resemblance to conventual institutions would reflect scandal on the Reformation.81

But unlike Wollstonecraft’s argument for coeducation, Mary Astell’s argument for women’s higher education does not address men’s education as part of its ‘feminist’ agenda, nor does it make her revolutionary political argument for sexual equality. Whether aware or

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unaware of such explicitly unacknowledged ‘feminist’ predecessors in seventeenth-century England, Wollstonecraft becomes more than an advocate for women’s education. An educator herself, she also becomes an innovative critic of this era’s chaotic provisions for children’s upbringing and schooling, concerned about the miseducation of both sexes, both rich and poor; and her educational thought critiques monarchism. Constructed ‘upon the foundations of Grub Street’,82 the Enlightenment intelligentisia in which Wollstonecraft takes her place opposes the English social hierarchy and its injustices, which define the era in which Wollstonecraft comes of age, but it offers only a few uncommonly courageous women possible new means to resist the monarchist political economy’s constraints upon them. Within Johnson’s circle, Wollstonecraft becomes one of these few women, with the most enduring fame and cultural influence. The members of this emerging new intellectual class earn their living through learning, much as university professors, public intellectuals and journalists do now: by writing, teaching, lecturing, editing, publishing, reviewing, and translating. Moreover, this new intelligentsia constitutes a Romantic avant-garde in Georgian England, with unorthodox religious beliefs, radical philosophical inclinations, and imaginative approaches to living, but politically more revolutionary in their thought than in their actions.83 Although this particular new Enlightenment intelligentsia includes a few women, as an emerging social class it differs profoundly from the ‘Bluestockings’, those ‘fashionably learned women’84 who host genteel soirees – more akin to the Paris salons than to Johnson’s weekly dinners. Eschewing cards and liquor for tea and conversation, the Bluestockings exhibit their intellectual accomplishments and wit, and assert their conversational equality with the gentlemen of London’s metropolitan elite. In view of Dr Gregory’s and other popular conduct-book writers’ condemnation of wit in women, the Bluestockings’ artistic, literary, and intellectual activity does represent a noteworthy, controversial departure from some but not all eighteenth-century assumptions about sexual character, making Bluestockings in some sense avant-garde figures among middle- and upper-class Georgian women. Popularly regarded as unmarriageable

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and therefore also unworthy of young women’s emulation, they have sufficient cultural visibility to make ‘Bluestocking’ become a popular, albeit sometimes pejorative label loosely applied to any woman intellectual, including sometimes Wollstonecraft herself. Educational theorists Hannah More (who refuses to read Rights of Woman) and Hester Chapone (whose thought Wollstonecraft commends) have better claims to the Bluestocking label than she does. The error in labeling Wollstonecraft a Bluestocking becomes obvious upon observation that the Bluestockings rarely break ranks with the conservatism of their privileged class or its patriarchs to endorse the more challenging philosophical, religious, political, and other living concerns that preoccupy the new Romantic avant-garde intelligentsia with whom Wollstonecraft affiliates both economically and intellectually at Johnson’s. Yet Bannet may be right to theorize that the controversy between ‘Egalitarians’ of this intelligentsia like Wollstonecraft and Hays on one hand, and ‘Matriarchs’ like the Bluestockings (especially More) and the internationally renowned Irish educational writer Maria Edgeworth on the other hand, together fuel a ‘domestic revolution’ that alters the politics of family life with women and children in mind.85 Todd’s multi-volume collection, Female Education of the Enlightenment, represents a rich resource for future inquiry on the controversies within which women and other educators of Wollstonecraft’s era position themselves as theorists of women’s education. In painfully sharp contrast to the genteel Bluestockings, Mary Wollstonecraft lives and dies ever in debt – as a neglected eldest daughter of a prosperous-born social climber who becomes a downwardly mobile, poor drunk. Yet she makes her own way as ‘the first of a new genus . . . not born to tread in the beaten track’ (CL, 139–40), to become one of England’s most prolific and progressive participants in the new Enlightenment intelligentsia, many of whose free-thinking members are indebted just as she is to Johnson’s liberal patronage. This experience of struggle and success within and against the Georgian political economy gives Wollstonecraft ample reason in Rights of Woman to promote the necessity and possibility not only of women’s education to reason, an aim several famous Bluestockings endorse, but also of women’s education for sustained independence and full citizenship, an aim too revolutionary for Bluestocking

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agendas. Their arguments for women’s sex-segregated education originate in Christian doctrine, whereas Wollstonecraft’s revolutionary argument for coeducation has roots in rational religious Dissent; it also has ancient secular philosophical antecedents (of which she is most likely unaware). In the world’s wealthiest nations, coeducation – quite simply, the practice of admitting students of both sexes to the same educational setting – is in the first post-millennial decade commonly accessible to all children through government-supported day schools, and to many younger and older adults through variously supported and structured institutions of higher learning and continuing education. Coeducation remains a highly varied, problematic, thinly conceptualized, sometimes debated practice, often elsewhere around the world still not accepted, albeit as ancient as the academies of Plato and Pythagoras. The term ‘coeducation’ does not come into English usage until the mid-nineteenth century, and even post-millennial philosophers of education have scarcely analyzed the concept, despite problems and debates still surrounding it.86 Notwithstanding lack of a term for this practice until the nineteenth century, any reader of Plato’s Republic knows that Wollstonecraft does not make the first carefully reasoned argument for coeducation.87 Yet she has never witnessed, much less experienced, coeducational schooling when she argues for it, and the notion of coeducation as a thoughtfully conceived multi-institutional practice fostering sex equality is revolutionary in eighteenth-century England. In Plato’s Republic V , Socrates shocks Glaucon, Adiemantus, and Thrasymachos, his companions in the Athenian marketplace, by advocating both civic and educational sex equality in the imaginary city’s guardian class and pointing out the irrationality of their conventional arguments against it. Socrates may out-reason his more conventionalminded companions, but in most world cultures their gender prejudices seem to have survived his philosophical thought experiment. For example, no significant documentation of early Roman interest in girls’ education has been found, but St Jerome’s letters in the early Christian era do give evidence of serious thought on girls’ education, in which he declares that ‘Females should only mix with their own sex; they should not know how to play with boys, nay, they should be

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afraid to do so’.88 Although some coeducational schooling may have occurred irregularly in Christian Western Europe, St Jerome’s doctrine of sex segregation holds sway over ‘best’ educational practice until the late nineteenth century, contradicting Socrates’ still often forgotten claim in Plato’s Republic that sex is like baldness, a difference that should make no educational difference. Wollstonecraft’s critique of monarchist sexual politics in Rights of Woman suggests a similar view. But never privileged (as her own brothers are) to enjoy any classical education, Wollstonecraft is unlikely to be familiar with that remarkable dialogue in the Republic, unless through some chance conversation with a philosophically literate man.89 Nor is she likely to be familiar with St Jerome’s letters. Wollstonecraft’s revolutionary coeducational thought experiment vigorously and critically engages Rousseau’s thought on women’s education, which reflects undeniable familiarity with Plato’s Republic even as it makes an argument against sex equality, worthy of St Jerome’s approval.90 Yet Wollstonecraft’s Rights of Woman reflects no apparent familiarity with modern egalitarian arguments made for women’s education in early Revolutionary France, advanced by the Marquis de Condorcet and Olympe de Gouges. Her epistolary dedication of Rights of Woman to Talleyrand, architect of the new French Constitution, addresses directly to him her own even more radical plea for women’s education for full independence and citizenship, but she does not meet him or become acquainted with the French Revolution’s feminist advocates of coeducation until after Rights of Woman’s publication. Her revolutionary theory of coeducation in that work, however, does acknowledge her having read with admiration Macaulay’s Letters on Education, which reflects some knowledge of Plato and also explicitly advocates coeducation. Yet her coeducational vision – more substantially developed, more energetically radical than Macaulay’s, and significantly different from Socrates’ – is nonetheless critically grounded in her own unusually extensive experiences and observations as a self-educating educator within a Christian culture still dominated by St Jerome’s educational doctrine of sex-segregation. The pious Bluestockings advance women’s education by endorsing that doctrine, whereas Wollstonecraft rejects it by grounding

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her argument for coeducation in a revolutionary educational critique of a religious-political-economic principle that they honor: the Divine Right of Kings. Insofar as revolutionary philosophical men reject that principle also, albeit while continuing to endorse the monarchist practice of trivializing women’s education, Wollstonecraft’s argument for coeducation is revolutionary even among revolutionaries.

Notes 1. Janet Todd (2000), Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 4. This is Wollstonecraft’s most thorough, candid, scholarly biography to date. 2. Todd, A Revolutionary Life, 6. 3. Barbara Taylor, ‘For the love of God’, in Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination, Chapter 3, 95–142. 4. Moira Ferguson (1993), Colonialism and Gender Relations from Mary Wollstonecraft to Jamaica Kincaid: East Carribean Connections. New York: Columbia University Press, 15. 5. Eve Tavor Bannet (2000), The Domestic Revolution: Enlightenment Feminisms and the Novel. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 6. Claudia Johnson (ed.) (2002), ‘Introduction’ in The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft. Cambridge, UK/New York: Cambridge University Press. 7. Todd (ed.) (2003), ‘Introduction’ in The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft. New York: Columbia University Press, ix. 8. Todd (2000), A Revolutionary Life, 28. 9. Miriam Brody (2000b), Mary Wollstonecraft: Mother of Women’s Rights. New York: Oxford University Press, 69. This biography is a work of fine scholarship accessible to high school as well as some upper elementary school students. 10. Lyndall Gordon (2005), Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft. New York: HarperCollins, 2. This is the most recent scholarly biography as this volume goes to press, also of the highest literary quality as a reading experience, suitable for undergraduates.

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11. Todd, A Revolutionary Life, 153. 12. Todd, A Revolutionary Life, 154. 13. Clearly, Wollstonecraft would have been irresponsible to take Ann to Paris at such a volatile, violent moment for that city; it is also possible that Wollstonecraft realizes that her naive benevolence has led her to take on a more challenging responsibility than she can creditably handle. Shortly before her departure, Wollstonecraft’s sister Everina and another friend, Ruth Barlow, evidently take on responsibility for Ann, who seems by turns affectionate, high-spirited, dishonest, and inclined to petty household thievery. Having attempted to raise Ann with affection and without undue restraint, Wollstonecraft expresses concern about Ann in correspondence after the child comes under her sister’s and friend’s care. But extant letters do not complete the narrative, only suggesting that Everina may have a way with the difficult child that Wollstonecraft struggles and fails to find herself. There is little other evidence to fill out this story, which invites conjecture at present impossible to validate. There is no conclusive evidence of either ‘adoption’ or abandonment, as one popular biographer has questionably indicated. Todd, A Revolutionary Life, 151; Gordon, Vindication, 161, 163. Cora Kaplan notes how this narrative fragment becomes useful to ideologically motivated biographical distortions, in ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’s reception and legacies’, in Claudia L. Johnson (ed.) (2002), The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 255. 14. Todd, A Revolutionary Life, 153. 15. Todd, A Revolutionary Life, 153, 156. 16. Gordon, Vindication, 179. 17. Claire Tomalin (1992), The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft. London: Penguin, 99. 18. Todd, A Revolutionary Life, 152. 19. Barbara Taylor (2003), Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 29. 20. Gordon, Vindication, 130. 21. Harriet Devine Jump (2003), Mary Wollstonecraft: Writer . London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 13.

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22. Jump, Writer , 11. 23. As an adult, Margaret King mentors Wollstonecraft’s own motherless daughter Mary Shelley, who knows her by the name of the governess character in Original Stories, Mrs Mason. 24. Jump, Writer , 21. 25. Moira Ferguson and Janet Todd (1984), Mary Wollstonecraft. Boston: Twayne Press, 59–72, cited in Mary Wollstonecraft (1988/1975), A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Carol H. Poston. New York: W.W. Norton, 319–20. 26. Alan Richardson (2002), ‘Mary Wollstonecraft on education’, in The Cambridge Companion, 39. 27. O’Day, (1982) Education and Society 1500–1800: the Social Foundations of Education in Early Modern Britain. London/New York: Longman, 190, 188. 28. Todd (ed.), see ‘Introduction’ to Collected Letters. 29. Janet Todd (1986), Sensibility: An Introduction. London: Ashgate, 7; G.J. Barker-Benfield (1992), The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain. London: Penguin, xvii. 30. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility, xvii. 31. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility, xxxiii. 32. Taylor, The Cambridge Companion, 110. 33. Jump, Writer , 11. 34. Poovey (1984), The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 52. 35. Taylor, Feminist Imagination, 140. 36. Amanda Vickery (2003), The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England. New Haven: Yale University Press, 9. 37. Miriam Brody (2000b), Mary Wollstonecraft: Mother of Women’s Rights. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 27. 38. Bridget Hill (1984), Eighteenth-Century Women. London: Allen & Unwin, 156–76. 39. Todd, A Revolutionary Life, 56. 40. Gordon, Vindication, 41. 41. Todd, A Revolutionary Life, 59. 42. Todd, A Revolutionary Life, 60. Todd notes that such a faith would not conflict with Anglicanism, except insofar as it lacks guidance

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43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

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from priest and doctrine, which Dissenters abandon in favor of the individual’s inner relationship with God. Poovey, The Proper Lady, 50. Hill, Eighteenth-Century Women, 44. Hill, Eighteenth-Century Women, 10. Hill, Eighteenth-Century Women, 10. Jump, Writer , 8. Jump, Writer , 9. Gordon, Vindication, 74. Jump, Writer , 1. John Locke (1996), Some Thoughts Concerning Education and of the Conduct of the Understanding , ed. Ruth W. Grant and Nathan Tarcov. Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 158. Tom Furniss (2002), ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’s French Revolution’, in The Cambridge Companion, 68. Furniss, The Cambridge Companion, 68–9. Furniss, The Cambridge Companion, 70. Todd, ed. (1990), A Wollstonecraft Anthology. New York: Columbia University Press, 126. Furniss, The Cambridge Companion, 70. Moira Ferguson and Janet Todd (1988), ‘Feminist backgrounds and argument of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’, in Mary Wollstonecraft (1988), A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Carol Poston. New York/London: W.W. Norton, 320–22. Todd, A Revolutionary Life, 210. Gordon, Vindication, 197. Gordon, Vindication, 197. Gordon, Vindication, 217. Janet Todd (1990), A Wollstonecraft Anthology. New York: Columbia University Press, 142. Gordon, Vindication, 197. Todd, A Revolutionary Life, 364. Todd, A Revolutionary Life, 379. Gordon, Vindication, 302. Gordon, Vindication, 312. Jump, Writer , 143.

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69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76.

77.

78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87.

88. 89.

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Jump, Writer , 139. Gordon, Vindication, 334. Jump, Writer , 25. Gordon, Vindication, 353. Todd, A Revolutionary Life, 456. Todd, A Revolutionary Life, 456. Fiona MacCarthy, ‘The first feminist’, New York Review of Books 52, no. 19 (1 December, 2005). Judy Chicago with Susan Hill (1980), Embroidering Our Heritage: The Dinner Party Needlework. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 212– 19. Dale Spender (1982b), Women of Ideas (And What Men Have Done To Them): From Aphra Behn to Adrienne Rich. London/Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 50–51. Spender, Women of Ideas, 52. Todd, A Revolutionary Life, 136. O’Day, Education and Society, 187. Mary Hays, quoted by Dale Spender, Women of Ideas, 60. Roy Porter (1982), English Society in the Eighteenth Century. London: Allen Lane, 83. Porter, English Society, 83–4. Gordon, Vindication, 51. Bannet, see ‘Introduction’ in Domestic Revolution. Susan Laird, ‘Rethinking coeducation’, Studies in Philosophy and Education, 13, 361–78. Jane Roland Martin, however, had to remind philosophers of education about this fact; see Chapter 2 of her book (1985), Reclaiming a Conversation: the Ideal of the Educated Woman. New Haven: Yale University Press. Shirley Nelson Kersey (ed.) (1981), Classics in the Education of Girls and Women. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 17. Janet Todd has found no evidence of Wollstonecraft’s familiarity with this dialogue, according to her recent correspondence with the author, although her A Revolutionary Life does mention (p. 27) her brief friendly contact with Thomas Taylor, a married bank clerk with whom her family rents lodgings in Walworth, who engages her in rapturous conversations about his study of

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Plato – and years later trashes her work by writing A Vindication of the Life of Brutes. 90. Jane Roland Martin, Chapters 3–4 of Changing the Educational Landscape: Philosophy, Women, and Curriculum (1994). New York: Routledge.

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Chapter 2

Coeducational Thought First Of A New Genre

‘I am going to be the first of a new genus’ (CL, 139), Mary Wollstonecraft boasts in a letter to her sister Everina as she risks dedicating her life to the professional pursuit of composing her educational thought, rather than continuing to live by teaching other people’s children. In 1787, Wollstonecraft is not the first woman either to claim the philosophical life or to practice public education by writing; nor, as Chapter 1 has explained, is she even the first person to write a defense of women’s education or coeducation. In this large sense, Janet Todd correctly judges her often-quoted boast an ‘exaggerated’ claim.1 Some have termed the twenty-first century already a ‘postfeminist’ era, but the scarcity of other women’s educational thought deemed worthy of inclusion in this multi-volume Continuum Library of Educational Thought bears eloquent testimony to the difficulty of her admission to that amazingly rare ‘genus’ who is both female and an historically significant philosopher or theorist of education. Wollstonecraft may owe the (belated) recent recognition of her work’s significance as ‘educational thought’ worthy of canonical status to Jane Roland Martin’s Reclaiming a Conversation, which situates her in a coeducational ‘conversation’ across time and space with Plato, Rousseau, Catharine Beecher, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Martin herself. As Martin opens that philosophical conversation, she does so with the explicit intention that her thought be ‘coeducational’ in a ‘thick’ sense: ‘Men and women need to claim the best possible education for themselves and their sons and daughters’, she explains, taking care to signify both sexes across either side of the parent/child divide: ‘All must listen to and participate in conversation about the ideals governing the education of both sexes’ (Martin, 1985, 7). She then addresses the ideal of the educated

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woman, with explicit reference to its logical relevance for the commonplace practice of coeducation, taken-for-granted as conceptually ‘thin’ and unworthy of philosophical debate or study.2 For this conversation, she also deliberately selects participants of both sexes, and she deliberately addresses an academic audience then largely structured by de facto sex (and race) segregation, ‘contemporary philosophers of education’, and ‘feminist theorists’,3 the former mostly white men and the latter mostly white women, not yet in conversation with one another (or with philosophers and theorists of color to any significant extent).4 Therefore framing her study of the history of thought on women’s education as a conversation, Martin invites readers to think of themselves as critical participants in that conversation. Thus presenting her study with a topic of direct logical relevance to the conceptual analysis of coeducation, with philosophical sources by and about both sexes, and for an audience of both sexes, Martin has written a work of coeducational thought in the thickest possible sense of that term – a genre of writing then strangely new to many philosophers of education as well as to feminist theorists. ‘Genre’ is an imprecise but useful term by which literati denote any distinctive kind of writing whose disposition toward particular textual conventions either establishes or disturbs readers’ expectations. When gender plays any part in shaping those dispositions and expectations, what literati call ‘gender-and-genre’ issues commonly arise. They certainly do for Martin when she discovers the diversity of genres in which women have written their educational thought as outsiders to the academy, genres that her own scholarly training in philosophical analysis has scarcely prepared her to study. Still academically anomalous in 1985, the genre of coeducational thought is unprecedented when Wollstonecraft writes in 1792, and the gap between male education and female education, between men readers’ dispositions and expectations and those of women readers, could hardly be wider. Critically examining and imaginatively responding to her deeply gendered life and landscape, Wollstonecraft’s educational thought in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is so original and so radical that no theoretical vocabulary exists in English until later centuries

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to name some of her most important educational ideas. The nowcommonplace conceptual terms ‘miseducation’ and ‘coeducation’ do not appear in the Early Modern English lexicon, for example, so she does not deploy them. These terms do, however, denote the central educational concepts that she formulates in Rights of Woman. In that work, she argues (1) that the Divine Right of Kings and its corollary conception of women’s ‘sexual character’ – as (a) weakness of mind and body, (b) dependence both economic and political upon men, and (c) modesty and chastity unreciprocated by libertine men – render private and public education of both sexes ‘false’ and immoral and, furthermore, (2) that her experimental concept of coeducation might enhance the morality and survival of revolutionary republics by actively deconstructing those miseducative principles. Wollstonecraft’s most famous work, Rights of Woman, is a founding document of ‘coeducational thought’ – the first of a new genre in the philosophy of education. Rights of Woman not only analyzes the miseducation of both sexes, critiques educational thought written by and about both sexes, and argues for a national system of coeducation; it also addresses that analysis, critique, and argument to a coeducational audience hitherto sexually classified, divided, unequally educated, and mutually suspicious. Apparently aiming to draw that unlikely readership into honest rational conversations despite likely emotional and communicative difficulties with one another, Rights of Woman constitutes a brave new kind of philosophical writing about education. Its iconoclastic complexities, responsive to that difficult pedagogical situation, can challenge the philosophical understanding of differently situated readers, particularly those who reconstruct the text’s meaning anachronistically, without regard to the interplay of gender and genre in its composition and reception. Part Three will address the actual reception and influence of Wollstonecraft’s coeducational thought historically, but this chapter will introduce Part Two’s exposition of her work with a survey of some recent philosophers’ and theorists’ insights into gender-and-genre issues that may affect the meaning that late moderns construct as they read and respond to Rights of Woman as a work of coeducational thought.

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A. Coeducational Thought, Gender and Genre Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile represents an obvious contrary case of coeducational thought insofar as it argues for sex-segregated education and takes a dismissive stance toward women’s thinking. A contemporary study of Plato’s Republic that claims – as is often the case – to be thorough and yet denies attention to Book V, in which he extends his thought experiment to the idea of coeducation, would also represent a contrary case of coeducational thought even if it still may be worthy of critical attention from readers of both sexes. Yet Plato’s Republic V is coeducational thought in only a thin sense, since its discussion of coeducation occurs among men only. But Catherine Macaulay’s Letters on Education is a work of coeducational thought, which Wollstonecraft cites with praise in Rights of Woman. It argues for coeducation and reviews the educational thought of both sexes, but it utilizes the epistolary genre, traditional for women, and also names her fictional correspondent ‘Hortensia’, to attract an audience of women, and so has not drawn the coeducational audience that Rights of Woman has drawn over the past two centuries. Wollstonecraft’s thought is coeducational in a thicker sense than Macaulay’s, insofar as it adopts the contentious genre of the ‘vindication’, to trope on her own A Vindication of the Rights of Men, initially presumed by her public to have been male-authored, with a cover letter addressed to the most powerful man in Revolutionary France. Her genre artistry in coeducational thought has succeeded; it has attracted a coeducational readership to the idea of coeducation. The thought that Wollstonecraft writes is coeducational in a thick sense, not only insofar as it theorizes about coeducation, engages educational writings by both women and men, and addresses questions prompted by available evidence concerning the educational experiences of both sexes; it is also coeducational insofar as she writes it to both sexes. That is a challenging pedagogical situation, especially in 1792. However, she brings to this challenge an astute even-handedness in her moral criticisms of men’s and women’s miseducated characters, along with an appeal to revolutionary scorn for monarchism which many literate men and women then share in common, in England, France, and the United States.

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But reading Rights of Woman philosophically can be difficult for late moderns, insofar as its embodied ethos and pathos (appeals to authorial credibility and to emotion) pose some peculiar interpretive challenges, especially for philosophical readers trained and habituated only to read for disembodied logos (appeal to reason). Its structure of argument is not conversational, like Martin’s in Reclaiming a Conversation; instead, its style of argument is conversational: full of witty aphorisms, indignant disputations, emphatic repetitions, critical asides, narrative digressions, autobiographical observations, candid comments on other writers, exemplary portraits, provocative figures of speech, and expository spontaneity. Wollstonecraft gets personal and passionate, insults kings as well as ladies who have employed her, talks a lot about God, presents herself as an example – and, besides, she is uneducated! Her other published works are translations, reviews, stories, novels, histories, letters, manuals, mostly genres coded ‘feminine’ – not even ‘arguments’! Why should a philosopher of education bother to read them? Her reasoning in Rights of Woman is heavily laced with emotion. Moreover, doesn’t she contradict herself or at least undermine her own clarity when she claims that education should, above all, teach people to reason, to think, and then elsewhere claims that education’s purpose is ‘to strengthen the body and form the heart’ (W5, 90)? William Godwin and others have criticized the ‘arrangement’ and ‘grammar’ of Wollstonecraft’s quickly written argument in Rights of Woman; English philosopher of mind and education Mary Warnock has called the work ‘rambling’ and confessed ‘some misgivings’ about including an excerpt from it in her anthology Women Philosophers.5 She cannot be alone, either, in her skepticism about the ‘feminism’ that so often defines this text and its audience, although to be fair, that term is another one excluded from the Early Modern lexicon. Maybe such a text has pedagogical value as coeducational thought, as something that can appeal to women specifically – just so they don’t feel left out, you know! But how can it merit classification as philosophy or theory of education? How can one go about reading such a strange text for philosophical or theoretical meaning? These likely sorts of reader-response problems are genderand-genre issues, insofar as they reflect reciprocally constitutive

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relationships between gender and genre that regulate and disrupt production of meaning through reading and writing. The Early Modern era when Wollstonecraft writes is intensely preoccupied with questions about writing style, even among Enlightenment philosophers, who value highly the artful care devoted to their argumentative discourse, because, as Miriam Brody has explained, ‘Societal and linguistic improvement were inter-related meliorative processes in the eighteenth-century mind.’6 Working within Joseph Johnson’s circle, Wollstonecraft finds herself among philosophical colleagues intensely and famously preoccupied with that culturally formative inter-relation, of whom one most noteworthy is William Wordsworth; his brilliant preface to Lyrical Ballads theorizes a revolution against academic classicism in poetic language, grounding it anew in the conversational language of common middle- and lower-class people, just six years after Wollstonecraft publishes Rights of Woman. Uneducated herself, but actively self-educating, Wollstonecraft works at achieving the grand aspiration she has professed to Everina, experimenting with diverse genres’ distinctive capacities for expressing, developing, and communicating various phases and aims of her educational thought: epistolary, didactic, narrative, expository, sentimental, polemical, analytical genres, some coded ‘feminine’ and others coded ‘masculine’ (you can probably guess which is which). In Rights of Woman she deploys all those genres, composing a multi-genre pastiche to produce a profoundly conversational text – that is, a text not only conversational in tone and style, projecting awareness of its imagined coeducational audience, but also conversational in aim, intentionally engaging readers of both sexes in continuing the conversation it begins: ‘I only drop these observations at present as hints’, she interjects as an aside, ‘rather as an outline of a plan I mean, than a digested one’ (W5, 242). Such devices of textual pedagogy, of which Rights of Woman offers many more examples, deliberately resist interpretive closure to demonstrate how she invites her readers’ imagination and reason into the ongoing conversation that her text initiates. But as a member of the uneducated sex whom Wollstonecraft characterizes as being often ‘in a state of perpetual childhood’ (W5, 75), she confronts some distinctive challenges in writing about miseducation and coeducation for a coeducational audience. Her pedagogical situation as an uneducated but self-educating author of coeducational

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thought poses a problem of credibility at her project’s very outset, which she confronts directly with logical ingenuity, as if following the editorial advice that she writes so candidly and sensibly to Mary Hays: Disadvantages of education &c ought, in my opinion, never to be pleaded (with the public) in excuse for defects of any importance, because if the writer has not sufficient strength of mind to overcome the common difficulties which lie in his way, nature seems to command him, with a very audible voice, to leave the task of instructing others to those who can. (CL, 210)

She makes no excuses for, but also no attempts to conceal, the limitations of her own institutional education, which is, after all, the problem that is Rights of Woman’s raison d’ˆetre. Instead, she premises the ‘disinterested spirit’ of her argument for women’s rights and education explicitly upon her bold claim to embody an anomaly: I plead for my sex – not for myself. Independence I have long considered as the grand blessing of life, the basis / of every virtue – and independence I will ever secure by contracting my wants, though I were to live on a barren heath. (W5, 65)

Even as this textual self-embodiment (a simultaneous invocation of ethos and pathos) removes the philosophical problem of self-interest from Wollstonecraft’s reasoning before an Enlightenment audience (thereby addressing logos), it also acknowledges her own social location within the uneducated sex, establishing her authority as its spokesperson and critic. She thus underscores her felt commitment to observe and refuse the moral and rational defects that render most other members of the uneducated sex unworthy of such a serious audience. Carol H. Poston proposes that Wollstonecraft’s passionate speech is recognizably that of an adult survivor of childhood abuse, emotional and physical abuse, not necessarily, though possibly, also sexual – parental and cultural abuse, about which Rights of Woman’s analysis of monarchist miseducation reflects emphatic concern. Yet readers may

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find Rights of Woman’s subtext of childhood abuse confusing, Poston further warns, if they have not themselves experienced such abuse – as of course some members of any coeducational audience are likely to have done. ‘The voice of the formerly abused child becomes in adulthood the political voice’ of resistance against male abuses of power of all sorts and of fury at ‘female passivity’ in response to such abuses, explains Poston as she theorizes that Wollstonecraft’s prose reflects her struggle to find a political voice from a powerless position of disembodiment.7 That disembodied position of powerlessness is a consequence not only of childhood abuse, but also of the ‘masculinized’ rhetorical situation that Brody characterizes as commanding ‘either her sexual obliteration or textual failure’.8 Casting herself as an ‘exceptional woman’ and heaping scorn upon ‘the weak woman of fashion’, Wollstonecraft rewrites ‘the idea of a woman’s body’ to repudiate canonical rhetoric and to refuse both the sexual effacement and the textual failure,9 according to Brody – and thereby to theorize monarchist miseducation of and about women’s bodies. Thus, artfully, Wollstonecraft transforms her gender-and-genre problems by strategically deploying her coeducational pathos and ethos in order to command attention to logos. Such biographical motives and rhetorical constraints framing her pedagogical situation have shaped her philosophical ideas and strategies, inflecting the moral voice of her coeducational thought in unconventional ways. Late modern readers are thus confronted with an unusually challenging philosophical reading experience, by turns clarifying, puzzling, and intriguing. ‘To read her works’, advises twentieth-century American political theorist Wendy GuntherCanada, ‘is to meet a nuanced idea in a sentence hurriedly noted, the brilliant rhetorical flourish marked by an exclamation, and to find dots and dashes in the place of words where emotion blots the page.’10 Indeed, refusing to ‘cull [her] phrases or polish [her] style’ (W5, 75), Wollstonecraft makes no attempt to sever her reasoning from her moral emotions, such as compassion, concern, righteous indignation, abhorrence of violence, religious devotion, and yearning for goodness and justice. Scorning ‘the turgid bombast of artificial feelings’ (W5, 76), however, she is no advocate for women with irrational

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partiality or uncritical tolerance of their moral faults: ‘I shall be employed about things, not words!’ Wollstonecraft declares with conversational disdain for that sentimental ‘sickly delicacy that turns away from simple unadorned truth’ (W5, 76). Thus her writing reflects not only reason and emotion, but also thought about how their relationship works within her philosophical writing practice. What philosophical sense of that relationship should ground readers’ inquiry concerning her coeducational thought?

B. Recent Philosophical Readings of Wollstonecraft’s Reason–Emotion Problem Rights of Woman’s textual form no more resembles that of ancient Socratic dialogues, nineteenth-century philosophical dialectics, or twentieth-century philosophical analysis than does the textual form of either John Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education (whose genre is prescriptive) or Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile (whose genre is both fictional-narrative and prescriptive). Nonetheless, Rights of Woman’s Socratic spirit is evident in Wollstonecraft’s voiced intention ‘rather to persuade by the force of my arguments, than dazzle by the elegance of my language’ (W5, 75). Moreover, in that work, Wollstonecraft does satisfy criteria that Warnock has formulated in Women Philosophers for ‘who counts as a philosopher’, taking as her paradigm case Wollstonecraft’s Scottish contemporary, David Hume, who never holds a university position but whose place in the Western philosophical canon few, if any, would question.11 In Rights of Woman, from which Warnock publishes an excerpt in that anthology, Wollstonecraft pursues general truths in more than a superficial factual sense, reasons dialectically, questions and analyzes the conceptual meanings of taken-for-granted terms, asks logical questions of general interest, argues about education, marshals evidence, dialogues implicitly with Locke on education, and dialogues explicitly with the works of other educational writers of both sexes in what contemporary researchers might call a systematic and thorough critical review of the literature: Rousseau and his followers, Dr James Fordyce, Dr John Gregory, Mrs Hester Piozzi, Baroness Anne-Louise-Germaine

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de Sta¨el, Madame Stephanie Genlis, Mrs Hester Chapone, Mrs Catherine Macaulay, Lord Philip Chesterfield, and the Dean Jonathan Swift. Albeit in lively conversational prose – not in passionless, disembodied, highly formalized, linear, academic discourse – Rights of Woman does construct a theory of monarchist miseducation, founded upon a complex concept of ‘sexual character’ that she critiques as fallacious and damaging to the revolutionary republic. That text also responds philosophically to that problem by conceiving a normative theory of republican coeducation as a moral revolutionary strategy. Many other volumes before this one have offered critical expositions of Wollstonecraft’s most influential contributions to the development of feminist theory and philosophy and of women’s writing and history. Although that recently prolific scholarship from several humanities disciplines offers indispensable understanding of her life and work, this volume’s explication of Rights of Woman as a work of ‘educational’ thought has scarce precedents. After Martin ‘reclaims’ Rights of Woman as a major contribution to educational thought, Warnock endorses the philosophical orthodoxy of that same ‘gender-indifferent’ stance that Martin’s critical study of Wollstonecraft questions.12 Acknowledging without analyzing Rights of Woman as a ‘work of political philosophy’, indeed labeling it ‘a work of genuine socialism’, Warnock calls attention to its concern with ‘justice and equality for everyone, not only for women’, to explain that ‘in this spirit she was concerned with the fundamental political importance of education’.13 Martin argues that this treatise makes philosophically significant contributions to the Early Modern conversation about education led by Locke and Rousseau, in their Enlightenment idiom: ‘The originality and profundity of her ideas are not to be found in her eighteenthcentury rationalism per se but in the way she extends the fundamental tenets of that philosophy to women.’14 Conceding Wollstonecraft’s explicit advocacy for education of the heart, a prominent – not subordinate – theme in all her other ‘non-philosophical’ works, Martin also observes Wollstonecraft’s many approving comments on feelings and passions. Yet remarking her evident ambivalence about feeling and emotion, and judging Wollstonecraft’s conceptual framework generally ‘derivative’ from the Enlightenment thought of Locke and

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Rousseau, she interprets in Rights of Woman a ‘sovereignty model of personality’ that requires an impossible choice between ‘the absolute subjection of feeling and emotion to reason’ and ‘the absolute subjection of reason to feeling and emotion’.15 On Martin’s account, developed with reference to Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, Wollstonecraft rejects the latter option and claims the former, which yields an unsatisfactory, simplistic solution that undermines her aim to educate the heart: a vexed relationship between reason and emotion that can scarcely improve upon monarchist miseducation. Citing ‘contradictions and irresolvable tensions’ in Rights of Woman, Moira Gatens attributes those complications to no particular local cause, but to her ‘enlightened’ insistence that not only men, but women too, have some share in human nature: a key premise for Wollstonecraft’s proposal of coeducation; for Gatens, as for Martin and most Wollstonecraft readers, ‘the overriding tension is that between reason and sentiment’.16 Pertinent to the pedagogical situation of Wollstonecraft’s coeducational thought, Gatens argues that in Georgian England this work appeals less to ‘women’s reason’ than to ‘men’s reason’ because ‘a culture which encourages the exaggerated development of women’s sentiment’17 – the culture of sensibility that Part One has introduced – obscures the former. From Gatens’ analysis of such gendered asymmetry of audience appeal, readers might infer that it signifies miseducation such as Wollstonecraft theorizes in Rights of Woman and dramatizes the gender-and-genre challenge that the pedagogical situation of coeducational thought poses to its author. This vexed relationship between reason and emotion, reason and sensibility, reason and sentiment, or reason and imagination – or logos and pathos – is foundational, of course, for philosophical approaches to writing and reading, so Wollstonecraft’s contemporary philosophical readers have puzzled over this relationship extensively. Contemporary philosophers since Martin have, however, diverged from one another somewhat in their interpretations of Wollstonecraft’s reasonemotion puzzle. Their responses to the problem of emotion and reason in Wollstonecraft’s thought have explicitly varied with regard to which of her texts (if any) they have studied besides Rights of Woman and with regard to their engagement of theoretical questions about

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gender and genre, or lack thereof. Moreover, only Wollstonecraft’s most recent philosophical reader in this review reflects knowledge of Janet Todd’s biography Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life (2000), the most candid and thorough study to date of Wollstonecraft’s lifelong psychological struggles – an undeniable context for her thinking about the relationship between reason and emotion. Closely reading Wollstonecraft’s oeuvre, American feminist ethicist Catherine Villanueva Gardner advances a ‘nuanced view of the relationship between reason and emotion in her philosophy’, particularly evident in Wollstonecraft’s critically complex and original notion of sensibility, developed through both the content and the form of her thought, as ‘intertwined with the creative imagination, moral and social progress, and the equality of women’.18 Part One has already noted the cultural importance of sensibility in Georgian England, also remarked by Martin. Gardner observes correctly that Wollstonecraft rejects sensibility as ‘false’ when it exaggerates writers’ sentiments or becomes an educational ideal for women ‘in order to make them more pleasurable companions for men’, and she celebrates sensibility as ‘true’ within the context of her claim for women’s ‘right to love whom they choose, and to love mankind and God in a reasoned and educated manner’.19 According to Catriona Mackenzie, Wollstonecraft struggles thus to avoid pitting women’s reason against either their bodies or their affectivity in her attempt to construct a subtle theory of their autonomous moral agency.20 Yet Gunther-Canada’s judgment may be sound, that Wollstonecraft is, like most philosophers since Plato’s Symposium, ‘ultimately unsuccessful in resolving the conflict’ between reason and passion.21 Ironically, however, according to Gardner, the unusual embodied and emotional character of Wollstonecraft’s philosophical prose may at the same time underscore the significance of her philosophical contribution and raise questions about Rights of Woman’s tooeasy classification as an Enlightenment treatise. At the millennium, Gardner closely reads Wollstonecraft’s complete oeuvre, in various genres. She argues that the way Wollstonecraft smudges conventional Enlightenment boundaries between literature and philosophy illuminates other possibilities for philosophical argument beyond those of the ‘dominant model of moral philosophy’.22 (This volume explores such possibilities for coeducational thought more fully in Parts

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Three and Four as reflections of Wollstonecraft’s legacy.) ‘In other words’, remarks Jane Duran, ‘Gardner is arguing that the apparent rambling . . . is not accidental – it represents that uniting of passion and reason that Wollstonecraft herself wants to press upon as some kind of goal’.23 Gardner’s recent study of genre and interpretation in moral philosophy also cites Martin’s earlier study of Rights of Woman in Reclaiming a Conversation, which smudges those same boundaries between literature and philosophy to explain her theory of Wollstonecraft’s rationalism via comparisons between her argument and Austen’s Sense and Sensibility and Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth. Martin implies, too, that women’s inclusion in the history of educational thought requires careful but radical rethinking akin to Gardner’s in moral philosophy, concerning what may count as this discipline’s proper topics, sources, data, methods, techniques of study, and authorship. The already remarked scarcity of women’s names titling the many volumes of this Continuum Library of Educational Thought may reflect that particular academic difficulty, awareness of which logically premises Martin’s argument that ‘a simple additive solution to the problem of inclusion of women will not work’.24 At the same time, Wollstonecraft’s inclusion in this volume does implicitly invite students of educational thought to take up Gardner’s philosophical challenge to resist ‘the comfortable narrowness and rigidity of the boundaries of the dominant model’.25 Her inclusion signifies also at least a nod toward Martin’s advice that, ‘in our two-sex society, educational theory and philosophy must place males and females in one world – a world in which the sexes live together interdependently’.26 Wollstonecraft’s Rights of Woman also invites philosophical readers’ rational acceptance of the moral emotions that motivate her concerns about monarchist miseducation founded upon a fallacious sexual metaphysics, as well as their rational questioning of emotions and prescriptions that have immoral consequences.

C. Primary Sources for Exposition of Wollstonecraft’s Coeducational Thought Part Two’s exposition of Wollstonecraft’s theories of monarchist miseducation and republican coeducation presents a logical map of those

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theories and their relationship to one another. Each section narrating her critical theory of monarchist miseducation finds its response in a corresponding section narrating her normative theory of republican coeducation. This volume’s expository narrative of those theories is a close textual reading of relevant primary sources of her work, with primary-source citations selected to help readers locate specific arguments and to make perceptible the emotional content of the thought, otherwise severely subordinated to the central purpose of outlining her reasoning as clearly as possible. Despite its central focus on Wollstonecraft’s classic work of coeducational thought, Rights of Woman, this volume’s Part Two exceeds the scope of previous educational studies of Wollstonecraft’s thought insofar as it reflects some historical study of the particular educational landscape her thought addresses as well as close reading of her entire educational oeuvre, which includes works of diverse genres, and some attention to her other works as relevant, and also genre-diverse. Her early curriculum published under a pseudonym, The Female Reader , may have utility for historians’ biographical examination of her earliest reading, teaching, and pieties, as well as her commitment to abolition of slavery, but it offers little to improve philosophical understanding of her later, more significant conceptions of monarchist miseducation and republican coeducation. In various genres, Wollstonecraft’s other earlier educational works, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters and Original Stories from Real Life, as well as her educational narrative in Mary, A Fiction, neither critique monarchy nor advocate coeducation. But these less-renowned works do begin interpretive accounts of girls’ miseducation, of economic oppression under the property system, and of girls’ possible self-education and moral and arts education by women – all original efforts that inform Wollstonecraft’s subsequent, more radical educational thought. In Rights of Men she begins her critical interpretation of monarchist miseducation, upon which she more fully elaborates in its sequel, Rights of Woman. Her later educational writings, also in diverse genres, Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark and posthumously published fragments of educational narrative in Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman and of Lessons for her own young children, suggest her later likely modification and refinement of some

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often criticized interpretive claims made in Rights of Woman, but do not radically alter either the theory of monarchist miseducation or the theory of republican coeducation that she formulates in that work. Therefore, this exposition of Wollstonecraft’s educational thought will outline those two theories that compose Rights of Woman’s critical and normative educational arguments respectively, remarking where relevant those interpretive contributions that her other earlier and later work might make to twenty-first-century readers’ understanding of her thought concerning monarchist miseducation and republican coeducation. Wollstonecraft’s oeuvre is primarily that of an educational practitioner who subsequently becomes an Early Modern pioneer in philosophical criticism and theory, of an historically informed and socially conscientious type now professionalized as ‘Educational Studies’. Her Rights of Woman may be without English-speaking precedent in two particular respects besides the one most commonly claimed for it – its status as a founding (even if not the first) document of modern feminist thought. What earlier work of political or educational thought by any English-speaking author undertakes careful educational analysis of a government system as this treatise does? What earlier work of political or educational thought by any English-speaking author develops a coherent rationale and vision for universal governmentfunded schooling of rich and poor, male and female together? This classic revolutionary treatise sets precedents and agendas for later work not only in feminist thought, but also in philosophies of democracy and education and in genre-diverse critical theories of coeducation, which Part Three will gloss, and for whose written pragmatics gender-and-genre issues remain challenging. Completing Part Two of this volume, then, Chapter 3 will explicate the critique of monarchist miseducation that Wollstonecraft addresses to revolutionaries and dissenters as a caveat; whereas Chapter 4 will explicate her thought experiment proposing a concept of republican coeducation in response to that critical caveat. Chapter 3 will examine how her theorizing of monarchist miseducation argues against ignoring the artificially constructed nature of sexual character: how Wollstonecraft calls critical attention repeatedly to the cultural difference of sex, exposing its fallacious social construction as a moral and

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political liability that damages not only women, but also children of both sexes – a liability of monarchism that she fears uncritical acceptance of Rousseau’s educational thought will reproduce in the revolutionary French and American republics. Chapter 4 will examine her thought experiment in republican coeducation, which she conceives as aimed at social deconstruction of that artificial difference of sex without fatuously denying biological differences between the sexes that are of practical import for education. The problems of sexual politics that Wollstonecraft theorizes in those two chapters also impose constraints on her writing of such educational thought, constituting a new genre of coeducational thought, whose further development Part Three will gloss and Part Four will propose.

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Chapter 3

Monarchist Miseducation A Critical Caveat

Mary Wollstonecraft artfully prefaces A Vindication of the Rights of Woman with a letter dedicating it to the chief architect of the French Revolution’s educational system, the late Bishop of Autun, M. Talleyrand-Perigord. That prefatory letter of dedication presents her treatise as a critical caveat to revolutionary men, lest their new republic make the mistake of founding its new educational system upon an unquestioned sexual metaphysics fundamental to monarchism – sexual assumptions concerning ontology, political economy, social ethics, and institutional culture that must undermine both the republic’s durability and its morality. Appealing directly to their reason as well as their loves of God, country, and children as she pleads her ‘affection for the whole human race’ (W5, 65), she presents her logical case for replacing monarchist sexual-metaphysical assumptions with revolutionary analysis of monarchist sexual politics that she judges morally unworthy of republican educators’ endorsement. At the same time, published in a post-revolutionary monarchist nation then belligerently engaged in imperial expansion, Rights of Woman gives a theoretically coherent critical account of many immoral effects of Britain’s haphazard, laisser-faire, ‘false system of education’ (W5, 73). Insofar as late moderns term any education of such deleterious consequence ‘miseducation’,27 Wollstonecraft’s object of analysis, for which Early Moderns have no single conceptual term, is monarchist miseducation. She premises her caveat upon her critique of the Divine Right of Kings, against which revolutionary men are then struggling in France and have already struggled in the United States, and explains how monarchist miseducation reflects that founding principle implicitly. Basically, the Divine Right of Kings means that a monarch owes his

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sovereignty to the will of God rather than to the will of his people, a religious-political principle formalized in cathedral coronation ceremonies today unique to the United Kingdom and succinctly expressed in the British royal family’s motto: ‘Dieu Et Mon Droit’. This Divine Right of Kings is, for Wollstonecraft in 1792, an implicitly fallacious and immoral principle, not only religious, economic, and political, as many Enlightenment thinkers have often noted before her, but also sexual as she argues with significant originality and cogency. She details at length how the monarchic principle perverts both men’s and women’s moral learning – in common with one another and also distinctively. Today educators might call Wollstonecraft’s theoretical account of such monarchist miseducation, evident also in some of her earlier works, a ‘hidden curriculum’ analysis. That analysis implicates the Divine Right of Kings in fallacious construction of sexual essentialism that she considers disrespectful of God (instead of expressing God’s will) and as blameworthy for both an oppressive sexual economy and an immoral sexual culture, harmful to children of both sexes. For, she argues, monarchy sustains much of its power via patriarchal education, which distorts men’s learning, minimizes women’s learning, and undermines childrearing, inasmuch as it takes sexual ontology, sexual economy, and a double standard of sexual ethics for granted – and thus fosters both sexes’ immoral learning within a wide variety of contexts. Wollstonecraft warns revolutionaries: any republic that structures its educational system sexually as monarchies do cannot survive morally.

A. The Divine Right of Kings as an Educational Principle ‘Most women, and men too, have no character at all’ (W4, 36). Such is Wollstonecraft’s summary judgment of humankind in her earliest work, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, a criticism variously reiterated throughout her life’s work. Invoking a familiar Shakespearean line in one of her latest and strongest works, Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, for example, she makes a similar educational observation that ‘All the world is a stage, . . . and

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few are there in it who do not play the part they have learnt by rote’ (W6, 337). The Divine Right of Kings is a religious and political principle of sexual and economic hierarchy that, Wollstonecraft argues in Rights of Woman, logically requires questionable character education, with particularly unjust and harmful consequences for women and children. For, quoting Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France in A Vindication of the Rights of Men, she takes note of the monarchist view that women are not even human: ‘On this scheme of things a king is but a man; a queen is but a woman; a woman is but an animal, and an animal not of the highest order’ (W5, 25). Moreover, she complains in Rights of Woman, ‘Humanity to animals . . . is not at present one of our national virtues’ (W5, 243). But in Education of Daughters and in her most popular early work, Original Stories from Real Life, she does not develop her harsh critique of human character into an explicitly revolutionary critique of monarchy as she does in her later works. Instead, still a practicing Anglican herself, she singles out women for stern pietistic criticism in Education of Daughters, recommending their resignation to learning knowledge and virtue ‘in the school of adversity’ (W4, 36) and urging them to ‘examine the tenets of the religion they profess’ and ‘find comfort in the promises of the Gospel’ (W4, 41). She singles out girls for pietistic moral education in her popular Real Life also, urging the women ‘of tenderness and discernment’ who educate them ‘to make religion an active, invigorating director of the affections, and not a mere attention to forms’ (W4, 360). Such early advocacy of women’s education for religious inquiry and introspection without empty ceremonies does begin to imply her skepticism about the Divine Right of Kings. That principle of government, allegedly founded on God’s will, constitutes a mandate for training of monarchic subjects’ superstitious, worshipful, credulous attitude, possibly through supernatural healing and spirit-communications such as those she condemns in ‘Instances of Folly Which the Ignorance of Women Generates’ (W5, 251–255), and most especially through cathedral ceremonies whose performance she considers ‘slavery to forms’, which ‘makes religion worse than a farce’ (W5, 231). She is surely thinking of such religious education for monarchist subjection when she writes of

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Danes’ ceremonial Lutheran worship in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark: ‘What . . . has piety, under the heathen or christian system, been, but a blind faith in things contrary to the principle of reason?’ (W6, 326) As for other Enlightenment thinkers, the Divine Right of Kings represents, for her, an outrage against reason and therefore also against a rational God, in whose ‘perfection’ she still professes fervent faith in 1792 (W5, 84): ‘Rational religion . . . is a submission to the will of a being so perfectly wise, that all he wills must be directed by the proper motive – must be reasonable’ (W5, 255). Jane Roland Martin cites Wollstonecraft’s particular ‘originality . . . in her perception that it is both formal institutions such as the church and the informal education that society transmits that prevent reason from developing’.28 Indeed, Wollstonecraft theorizes that, no less than religion, monarchy itself is such an instrument of miseducation: ‘It is the pestiferous purple which renders the progress of civilization a curse, and warps the understanding, till men of sensibility doubt whether the expansion of the intellect produces a greater portion of happiness or misery’ (W5, 87). She criticizes monarchy for the first time in Rights of Men, and men’s education too, charging that within the monarchist regime a few rich men ‘have ceased to be men’ and ‘have sacrificed the many’ to become ‘artificial monster[s]’, pampering their appetites and exercising neither their minds nor their bodies, ‘so warped by education, that it may require some ages to bring them back to nature’ (W5, 10). Rights of Woman’s subsequent argument is, therefore, not advocacy for women’s education alone: the moral character of no rank and of neither sex escapes her severe criticism and educational analysis in that later, now classic treatise. Unlike her earlier works, despite its title, Rights of Woman is not merely a treatise on female education; it formulates a complex structural critique of education’s foundation upon a monarchist sexual metaphysics that falsifies the human nature of monarchs themselves as well as that of their subjects of both sexes in every sector of society. ‘A king is always a king – and a woman is always a woman: his authority and her sex’, Wollstonecraft theorizes, ‘ever stand between them and rational converse’ (W5, 125). Thus offending nature and distorting human character, education founded upon that metaphysical principle conjoining rank and sex, the Divine Right of Kings, as she

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examines it, is clearly miseducative. Arrested growth and unrealized human potential, docility and obedience, irrationality and immorality, war, poverty, commercial greed and fraud, prostitution and slavery, religious hypocrisy, capital punishment, spousal abuse, child neglect and child-abuse all particularly concern Wollstonecraft as miseducative personal and cultural effects of the Divine Right of Kings – as evidence of monarchist miseducation. Her unfinished novel Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman largely consists of fictional first-person narratives of women’s suffering from such effects within vastly different class contexts. In Rights of Woman Wollstonecraft traces such miseducative effects to two causes: (1) the miseducated characters of kings themselves, and (2) their power relations. Kings’ fallaciously divinized position constitutes both these causes, according to Wollstonecraft’s theoretical account. Thus sacrilegiously ‘attacking the sacred majesty of Kings’ (W5, 86), she theorizes that the ‘uncontrouled power’ of the monarch makes adequate education for intelligent leadership ‘impossible for any man’ even in ‘the most favourable circumstances’ (W5, 85). The clear case around which she constructs her theory of monarchist miseducation in Rights of Woman is Louis XIV, often called the ‘Sun King’, who was regarded, not only in France, but over all Europe, as the most perfect model of a great prince. But what were the talents and virtues by which he acquired this great reputation? Was it by the scrupulous and inflexible justice of all his undertakings, by the immense dangers and difficulties with which they were attended, or by the unwearied and unrelenting application with which he pursued them? Was it by his extensive knowledge, by his exquisite judgment, or by his heroic valour? It was by none of these qualities. But he was, first of all, the most powerful prince in Europe, and consequently held the highest rank among kings. (W5, 128)

Citing Voltaire, Wollstonecraft explains that Louis XIV’s ‘talents and virtues’ seem ‘not to have been much above mediocrity’ (W5, 128). What drew admiration for that king were his ‘frivolous

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accomplishments’ (W5, 128), his appearance and ‘factitious manners’ (W5, 125), ‘which would have been ridiculous in any other person’ and elicited embarrassment in those to whom he spoke (W5, 128), according to Voltaire: ‘Knowledge, industry, valour, and beneficence, trembled, were abashed, and lost all dignity before them’ (W5, 128). Wollstonecraft notes further that this French monarch also achieved distinction by flattering women with ‘a puerile attention to the whole sex’ that was ‘fatal to reason and virtue’ (W5, 125). In this way, she claims, Louis XIV established ‘an artful chain of despotism’ that entangled the whole French nation ‘in his toils’ (W5, 125). In Rights of Men, her passionately reasoned rebuttal of Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, she similarly considers some of England’s own past monarchs, and in her later Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, she portrays the Danish king as ‘the most absolute monarch in Europe’ (W6, 301), a ‘puppet of a monarch’ and ‘merely a machine of state’ who ‘had always been directed by some favourite’ and was ‘a notorious debauchee and an idiot into the bargain’ (W6, 322), ‘an effigy of majesty’ (W6, 322). Reflecting more generally upon other kings’ characters in Rights of Woman, she observes: ‘kings, viewed collectively, have ever been inferior, in abilities and virtue, to the same number of men taken from the common mass of mankind’ (W5, 106). She wonders at superior men’s irrational reverence for them as she counters theological claims for kingship by remarking upon ‘the various crimes that have elevated men to the supreme dignity. – Vile intrigues, unnatural crimes, and every vice that degrades our nature, have been the steps to this distinguished eminence’ (W5, 85). But, in her view, even such a king’s moral inferiority is not merely an accident of his native bad personality as an individual; it reflects a fundamental contradiction between education and monarchy per se. Arguing that ‘his very elevation’ constitutes ‘an insuperable bar to the attainment of either wisdom or virtue’ (W5, 85), Wollstonecraft applies an educational logic to her analysis of kings’ vices, as she infers that flattery and luxury as major features of their childhood education must stifle their inborn good nature and their development of rational capacities for reflection. Thus she concludes, ‘all power [inebriates] weak man’ (W5, 85): inevitably, monarchism must miseducate the monarch himself and all who revere, obey, and emulate him:

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What but a pestilential vapour can hover over society when its chief director is only instructed in the invention of crimes, or the stupid routine of childish ceremonies? Will men never be wise? — Will they never cease to expect corn from tares, and figs from thistles? (W5, 85)

Upon this educational critique of monarchs’ characters, then, Mary Wollstonecraft premises her examination of common men and women’s education within monarchist society. She argues that kings’ characters and power relations have miseducative consequences for their subjects, insofar as kings function as idols for their subjects’ reverence and, therefore, too, as models for unquestioning emulation, even as they may become objects of envy and resentment. Thus ‘educated in slavish dependence’ upon the monarch (W5, 114), other men as well as women develop similarly questionable characters. Such ‘slavery to monarchs and ministers, which the world will be long in freeing itself from’ (W5, 114), in Wollstonecraft’s view, constructs men’s similar power relations with regard to men of lower ranks (including slaves), women, children, and animals, and women’s similar power relations with regard to children, servants, and animals. Throughout Rights of Woman Wollstonecraft heaps scorn upon the irrational means and immoral ends of such docile, idolatrous, reverentially mimetic learning that follows logically from the Divine Right of Kings. With profoundly original irony, she cites Adam Smith’s characterization of ‘people of rank and fortune’ in The Theory of Moral Sentiments as particularly applicable to ‘the female sex’ (W5, 127). Like kings and the men of rank and wealth who emulate them most closely, she explains, Women, commonly called Ladies, are not to be contradicted in company, are not allowed to exert any manual strength; and from them the negative virtues only are expected, when any virtues are expected, patience, docility, good-humour, and flexibility; virtues incompatible with any vigorous exertion of intellect. (W5, 127)

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Wollstonecraft also compares women specifically to her critical portrait of Louis XIV, citing their ‘frivolous accomplishments’ and their disposition to ‘seek for pleasure as the main purpose of existence’ (W5, 128–129, Wollstonecraft’s emphasis). However, she explains, women ‘must marry advantageously’ in order to pursue their pleasures (W5, 129), and this requirement makes them not sovereigns, even of their own lives, but instead subjects them to ‘the divine right of husbands’ (W5, 110), another major effect of the Divine Right of Kings. This effect Jean-Jacques Rousseau endorses in his Emile, thereby prompting Wollstonecraft’s extensive criticism of his educational thought. Under the divine right of husbands derived from the Divine Right of Kings, the whole litany of character faults she finds in women inevitably derives from the character faults men learn as subjects of their monarch, she argues: Men have submitted to superior strength to enjoy with impunity the pleasure of the moment – women have only done the same, and therefore till it is proved that the courtier, who servilely resigns the birthright of man, is not a moral agent, it cannot be demonstrated that woman is essentially inferior to man because she has always been subjugated. (W5, 106)

Janet Todd’s The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft and especially also Wollstonecraft’s Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, which Joseph Johnson publishes in 1796, suggest the remarkable, almost ethnographic quality of close cultural observation and reflection that informs her thinking about miseducation in Rights of Woman. There she takes inventory of abundant evidence at hand to discern the cultural patterns of monarchy and cites that evidence to trace how the Divine Right of Kings operates as an educational principle – upon kings themselves and their power relations at the national level, and also upon character education and power relations within private households. After completing Rights of Woman, she sustains this concern about monarchist miseducation in her Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, where she observes of the Danes: ‘the men are domestic tyrants, considering them as fathers, brothers, or husbands’ (W6, 326).

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Both John Locke and Rousseau have idealized the patriarchal household as the best site of childhood education, of whose actual practices (contrary to Locke and Rousseau’s prescriptions) she has known bitter experience herself. Thus she extends her critique of monarchy to that institution as well, observing that when parents ‘become tyrants’, they exercise ‘not rational freedom, but a lawless kind of power resembling the authority exercised by the favourites of absolute monarchs, which they obtain by debasing means’ (W5, 226). Thus Alan Richardson explains that ‘the “Divine Right” of parents to their children’s obedience’ is for Wollstonecraft ‘just as spurious as the divine right of kings to rule a people’.29 In this regard, Wollstonecraft particularly worries that ‘Females . . . in all countries, are too much under the dominion of their parents’, which ‘may in some degree account for the weakness of women’ (W5, 226), who, ‘taught slavishly to submit to their parents, . . . are prepared for the slavery of marriage’ (W5, 226), governed by the divine right of husbands. Indeed, Wollstonecraft’s educational analysis identifies the Divine Right of Kings as a motive source of tyrannical relations within all sorts of a monarchic nation’s institutional cultures, including marriage, motherhood and the professions, religious, military, and educational. Rights of Woman theorizes that both educational and other professional relations of various miseducative sorts take their forms indirectly from the Divine Right of Kings and its corollary notion of sexual character.

B. Monarchist Hidden Curriculum and ‘Sexual Character’ Wollstonecraft can have no familiarity whatsoever with the commonplace late modern educators’ term ‘hidden curriculum’. Martin has philosophically analyzed that concept to mean perceived significant effects in learners that merit strategically critical educational responses; e.g., attitudes, values, beliefs, habits, dispositions, facts, concepts, or skills that, whether intentionally or unintentionally transmitted, whether good or bad, have not yet been openly acknowledged

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to their learners as explicit educational aims.30 Sometimes, they are hidden from teachers as well. But Wollstonecraft substantiates her theory of monarchist miseducation by detailing in the characters of both sexes what today educators would recognize readily as a critical theory of hidden curriculum. Her theory of hidden curriculum integrates her concern about neglect of girls’ and women’s education with her concern about other inhumane consequences of the Divine Right of Kings, which reflect problematic conceptions of men’s education too: the assumption of sexual ontology, the perpetuation of sexual economy, and the demoralization of sexual culture. The hidden curriculum that she thus theorizes in Rights of Woman is for her a life-long concern, not new in that work. In Education of Daughters and in Real Life, she reflects little upon men’s miseducation or upon the political, patriarchal structures that constitute women’s miseducation. But she is already theorizing this immoral hidden curriculum for women in both works, as well as pedagogical approaches toward its correction that may deepen understanding of her more revolutionary coeducational theorizing in Rights of Woman. Wollstonecraft’s title for Rights of Woman’s sixth chapter reflects a more cumbersome language for this hidden curricular phenomenon: ‘The Effect Which an Early Association of Ideas has Upon the Character’ (W5, 185). More than a century before the hidden curriculum becomes a commonplace concept in educational theory, she explains the Lockean phenomenon of the ‘early association of ideas’ as ‘habitual slavery to first impressions’: Education thus only supplies the man of genius with knowledge to give variety and / contrast to his associations; but there is an habitual association of ideas, that grows ‘with our growth’, which has a great effect on the moral character of mankind; and by which a turn is given to the mind that commonly remains throughout life. So ductile is the understanding, and yet so stubborn, that the associations which depend on adventitious circumstances, during the period that the body takes to arrive at maturity, can seldom be disentangled by reason. One idea calls up another, its old associate,

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and memory, faithful to the first impressions, particularly when the intellectual powers are not employed to cool our sensations, retraces them with mechanical exactness. (W5, 186)

As with late twentieth-century critical theorists of the hidden curriculum, Wollstonecraft voices concern that both sexes learn ‘pernicious’ habits and dispositions through such an ‘early association of ideas’. Moreover, she cites primary sources of such ideas in then popular educational thought that she considers misguided, which she analyzes through her extensive ‘Animadversions on Some of the Writers Who Have Rendered Women Objects of Pity, Bordering on Contempt’ in Rights of Woman, writers such as Rousseau and his many French and English followers. In general, she faults such educational writers’ tendency ‘to degrade one half of the human species, and render women pleasing at the expence of every solid virtue’ (W5, 91). In particular, Wollstonecraft questions Rousseau’s formulation of sexual character as a philosophical foundation for private education – the idea that Sophie ‘should be as perfect a woman as Emilius is a man, and to render her so, it is necessary to examine the character which nature has given to the sex’ (W5, 147). ‘Sexual character’ is Wollstonecraft’s theoretical term for a pernicious idea that constitutes a culturally pervasive hidden curriculum: the logic of dehumanizing sexual difference that Rousseau embraces as ‘nature’ in Emile, which also rationalizes monarchist neglect and trivialization of women’s education. This term’s usage, peculiar to Wollstonecraft, denotes a critical distinction between socially constructed ‘character’ and innate, immutable, essentialist ‘nature’ that is also explicit in the late modern feminist theoretical term ‘gender’ as distinct from ‘sex’.31 At the same time, Wollstonecraft’s term connotes moral significance that lies at the core of her argument for educating women, premised upon her analysis of monarchist sexual character in three logically related senses: ontological-aesthetic, political-economic, and social-ethical. She develops her critique of sexual character as an artificial, oppressive, and immoral construction of monarchist miseducation by presenting her rigorously parallel,

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close examination of observed characters in both women and men. In this way she shows how monarchism constitutes a hidden curriculum that distorts the characters of both sexes while fallaciously rationalizing women’s educational deprivation and the divine right of husbands. B1. Humanity, Artifice, Weakness: Debunking Sexual Ontology ‘Wollstonecraft’s strategy is brilliant’, Martin writes in Reclaiming a Conversation, for ‘she puts her opponents in the awkward position of being committed to the thesis that women are not human beings’, and ‘shifts the burden of proof onto those who would deny the rationality of women.’32 Wollstonecraft critiques the taken-for-granted sexual ontology that is foundational for monarchist miseducation by showing how its categorical attribution of humanity to men may be as suspect as its categorical denial of humanity to women. Look at them, she implores: many people of both sexes fail to exercise their reason as well as their bodies; many people of both sexes are mentally and physically weak! On what grounds, she asks, should men’s weakness be judged accidental and women’s weakness be judged essential? She proposes the possibility, to be tested empirically, that ‘education gives this appearance of weakness to females’ (W5, 92), that in fact both sexes become weak as a consequence of monarchist miseducation’s artifices of sexual character. Therefore, Wollstonecraft does not deny that many, perhaps even most, women do appear to lack rationality: ‘understanding, strictly speaking, has been denied to woman; and instinct, sublimated into wit / and cunning, for the purposes of life, has been substituted in its stead’ (W5, 122–123). But she argues that such want of reason is not an essential aspect of women’s nature that can justify labeling the rare rational woman (like Wollstonecraft herself, for example) ‘masculine’, a term denoting sexual character whose equation with rational human character she scoffs at: ‘Indeed the word masculine is only a bugbear’ (W5, 76). For she demonstrates that men of undisputed and celebrated masculinity, such as military men, may demonstrate characteristics quite similar to those of women that might similarly

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disqualify them from humanity if only they were women. ‘To account for and excuse the tyranny of man’, she theorizes, Many ingenious arguments have been brought forward to prove, that the two sexes, in the acquirement of virtue, ought to aim at attaining a very different character: or, to speak explicitly, women are not allowed to have sufficient strength of mind to acquire what really deserves the name of virtue. (W5, 88)

Girls’ education perpetuates ‘false notions of beauty and delicacy’ that ‘stop the growth of their limbs’ (W5, 186), and renders women weak in every respect: indolent, cunning, and sentimental. ‘Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman’s scepter,’ she argues, invoking a monarchic metaphor, ‘the mind shapes itself to the body, and, roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison’ (W5, 113). Wollstonecraft depicts women’s ‘many follies’ (W5, 251) so repeatedly and harshly in Rights of Woman that some twentieth-century feminists have accused her of misogyny. But she demonstrates how such faults are likely consequences of their miseducation, not of their nature: ‘the limbs and faculties are cramped . . . , and the sedentary life which they are condemned to live, whilst boys frolic in the open air, weakens the muscles and relaxes the nerves’ (W5, 110–111). With ‘their thoughts’ thus ‘constantly directed to the most insignificant part of themselves’ (W5, 113), they learn to ‘cherish or affect weakness under the name of delicacy’ (W5, 116), and their thoughts become shallow to the point that they even become irrationally ‘proud of a defect’ (W5, 109) – where is the mystery in that? Wollstonecraft asks, ‘How can they attain the vigour necessary to enable them to throw off their factitious character? – where find strength to recur to reason and rise superiour to a system of oppression, that blasts the fair promises of spring?’ (W5, 186–187) But as ‘overgrown children’ (W5, 257) who ‘are always on the watch to please’ because they are ‘only taught to please’ (W5, 126), women are only like men, Wollstonecraft explains in Rights of Woman. Like rich men, women learn to value their own pleasure and comfort

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rather than moral concerns and duties; like soldiers, they trade away their own ‘health, liberty, and virtue’, to be supplied as royalty are with ‘food and raiment, for which they neither toil nor spin’ (W5, 125). Even ‘the attention to dress’ and other bodily adornments, including tattooing and painting, ‘what has been thought a sexual propensity’ in women (W5, 259), Wollstonecraft recognizes as a human inclination that arises in either sex whenever ‘the mind is not sufficiently opened to take pleasure in reflection’ (W5, 259). Hence, she points out that ‘A female beauty, and a male wit, appear to be equally anxious to draw the attention of the company to themselves’ (W5, 259); whereas men of genius damage their constitutions through ‘careless inattention to their health’ (W5, 107), just as women are prone to ‘sickly soreness’ (W5, 186), having destroyed their constitutions with ‘mistaken notions of beauty and female excellence’ (W5, 109). With such critically even-handed ironic brilliance theorizing the monarchist hidden curriculum’s narcissistic and otherwise morally questionable effects upon both sexes’ strength of mind and body, she constructs her devastating portrait of monarchist miseducation. Implicitly questioning the humanity of the most widely glorified sexual character, that of military men, she points out that war is integral to men’s miseducation, ‘being rather the school of finesse and effeminacy, than of fortitude’, as she compares ‘the character of a modern soldier with that of a civilized woman’ (W5, 216). ‘Particularly attentive to their persons, fond of dancing, crowded rooms, adventures, and ridicule’, she explains, soldiers learn ‘a punctilious politeness’ from conversation and social activity, much as women do, without distinguishing such superficial worldly knowledge from ‘knowledge of the human heart’ (W5, 92–93). Therefore, although standing armies may through training become ‘disciplined machines’, she argues, they are nonetheless ‘like the fair sex’, excessively preoccupied with ‘gallantry’ (W5, 92–93). Thus Wollstonecraft characterizes the monarchist hidden curriculum in sexual character as an irrational one evident in both sexes, which falsifies women’s human nature and rationalizes the divine right of fathers, husbands, and brothers, as well as imperial belligerence. In Rights of Men, Wollstonecraft develops a revolutionary premise for this critique of various men’s education in Rights of Woman,

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theorizing that ‘when a man makes his spirit bend to any power but reason, his character is soon degraded, and his mind shackled by the very prejudi[c]es to which he submits with reluctance’ (W5, 38– 39). How can reason be the measure of manhood when men are subject to so many irrational prejudices, Wollstonecraft asks, such as unquestioning respect for royalty, property, and commerce as well as ‘the slave trade’ and ‘the state of warfare so strenuously supported by voluptuous men’ (W5, 14; W5, 195)? Guilty of irrational and idolatrous reverence for kings and other inferior men of superior rank, rich men, military men, and professional men share the common educational fault of having learned manners at the expense of morals, of having learned to live with a view toward pleasing others rather than toward honoring reason. Consequently, she argues, Men, in general, seem to employ their reason to justify prejudices, which they have imbibed, they can scarcely trace how, rather / than to root them out. The mind must be strong that resolutely forms its own principles; for a kind of intellectual cowardice prevails which makes many men shrink from the task, or only do it by halves. Yet the imperfect conclusions thus drawn, are frequently very plausible, because they are built on partial experience, on just, though narrow, views. (W5, 81–82)

What, she asks, besides prejudice, can explain the popular belief that soldiers and sailors are superior to women? The only difference she ‘can discern, arises from the superior advantage of liberty’ denied to women, which enables military men ‘to see more of life’ than women (W5, 92). Thus Wollstonecraft’s argument for educating women becomes simultaneously an argument for rethinking men’s education too. B2. Slavery, Marriage, Professions: Protesting Sexual Economy The fundamental economic relation within eighteenth-century British culture organized around the principle of the Divine Right of Kings is the property relation, whose extreme immoral exemplar is slavery. This monarchist property system is Aristotelian in its

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classification of women and children together with slaves, animals, and land as men’s property. Unlikely to be familiar with Aristotle, however, Wollstonecraft begins her revolutionary critique of the monarchist property system in her earliest political treatise, Rights of Men, often compared with her friend Thomas Paine’s later Rights of Man (upon which it exerts some influence). Its sequel Rights of Woman reflects her understanding that the monarchist property system is a principal determinant of sexual character that depends upon (even as it rationalizes) sexual essentialism, insofar as marriage – a property relation – represents ‘the only way women can rise in the world’, thereby ‘making mere animals of them’ (W5, 76). In Wrongs of Woman Wollstonecraft narrates this system’s oppressive effects upon women of both the employing and serving classes, as Maria and Jemima come to learn from each other in what class-distinctive ways they have both experienced tyranny through husband, father, employer, and even the occasional special man who seems to offer honest friendship. Rights of Woman suggests that such men are not by sexual nature tyrants, but through miseducation become so, as she observes how schoolboys learn to make sport of cruelty to animals, and theorizes that such early ‘barbarity to brutes’ matures into ‘tyranny and abject slavery . . . established amongst the boys’ (W5, 231) and later their ‘domestic tyranny over wives, children, and servants’ (W5, 244). But her critique of sexual character formation focuses intensely on the political economy of property that structures and produces such miseducation: ‘From the respect paid to property flow, as from a poisoned fountain, most of the evils and vices which render this world such a dreary scene to the contemplative mind’ (W5, 211). Mrs Mason’s provocative moral curriculum for two daughters of the propertied class in Wollstonecraft’s Real Life is precisely that ‘dreary scene’ of ‘evils and vices’, thus pedagogically framed to elicit their compassion – local evidence of both sexes’ oppression at the hands of greed, irrationality, sloth, dishonesty, petulance, vanity, and carelessness with regard to others’ suffering, including that of animals. Oppressive to white children of both sexes, as it is to white women and to African slaves of both sexes and all ages, according to Wollstonecraft, this property system’s haphazard educational offerings (explained in section C, below) leave both men

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and women unprepared for honest independence and citizenship, and often complicit in tyrannies large and small. Thus she invokes the slavery metaphor explicitly to theorize that women are made slaves to their persons, and must render them alluring that man may / lend them his reason to guide their tottering steps aright. Or should they be ambitious, they must govern their tyrants by sinister tricks, for without rights there cannot be any incumbent duties. (W5, 215)

Moira Ferguson points out in Colonialism and Gender Relations from Mary Wollstonecraft to Jamaica Kincaid that Wollstonecraft’s language in Rights of Woman makes more than eighty references to slavery and articulates ‘a metonymic chain of the tyrannized’ that includes white women and children, African slaves, and oxen.33 Ferguson credits Wollstonecraft as ‘the first writer to raise issues of colonial and gender relations so tellingly in tandem’ – as dehumanized property relations wrought by the Divine Right of Kings.34 Critical of the American Revolution’s failure to rectify both racial and sexual dehumanization and having condemned the institution of slavery in Rights of Men, Wollstonecraft asks revolutionary and dissenting men and women in Rights of Woman, ‘Is one half of the human species, like the poor African slaves, to be subject to prejudices that brutalize them, when principles would be a surer guard, only to sweeten the cup of man?’ (W5, 215) Recognizing Wollstonecraft as ‘a political pioneer’ critically engaged with the issue of colonial slavery in her reading and writing for the Analytical Review, Ferguson suggests that such theoretical language ‘fuses the oppression of white women and black female slaves as well as slaves in general’, thereby ‘fundamentally altering the definition of rights’ while ‘paving the way for a much wider cultural dialogue’ about both human rights and education.35 Wollstonecraft’s theorizing ‘invokes the language of colonial slavery to impugn female subjugation and call for the restoration of inherent rights’.36 Critically observing in Rights of Woman that ‘the few employments open to women, so far from being liberal, are menial’ (W5, 218–219), she acknowledges – with particular narrative vividness in Wrongs of

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Woman – that a woman’s sexual character depends upon her relationship to men within that economic system, upon whom her economic status depends, impairing her discernment ‘in what true merit and happiness consist’ (W5, 212). Whereas ‘Many poor women maintain their children by the sweat of their brow, and keep together families that the vices of the fathers have scattered abroad’ (W5, 145), she complains that the career of ladies is ‘simply to have nothing to do, but listlessly to go they scarcely care where, for they cannot tell what’ (W5, 218). This sexual economy defines and miseducates women’s moral characters, Wollstonecraft argues, for Whilst they are absolutely dependent on their husbands they / will be cunning, mean, and selfish, and the men who can be gratified by the fawning fondness of spaniel-like affection, have not much delicacy, for love is not to be bought, in any sense of the words, its silken wings are instantly shrivelled up when any thing beside a return in kind is sought. (W5, 212)

Remarkably, even as Wollstonecraft theorizes sexual character from the slavery metaphor, demonstrating the monarchist sexual economy’s logical dependence upon sexual (and racial) essentialism, she analyzes clearly also where that metaphor breaks down when applied to middle-class white women, whose moral characters she castigates repeatedly: When, therefore, I call women slaves, I mean in a political and civil sense; for, indirectly they obtain too much power, and are debased by their exertions to obtain illicit sway. (W5, 239)

Dependent upon men’s labors for their livelihood, women learn to surrender their moral integrity in obedience to morally weak men, often also projecting expected outward signs of docility while seeking power indirectly: through competitive fashionableness, wily manipulation, flattery and flirtation, hauteur and condescension, favoritism and indulgence, and various petty tyrannies within their

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domestic relationships and narrowly circumscribed social milieux. Wollstonecraft does not sentimentalize the moral character of white middle-class women even as she advocates for their rights: ‘if women are not permitted to enjoy legitimate rights, they will render both men and themselves vicious, to obtain illicit privileges’ (W5, 68). This demoralizing sexual economy, in which ‘one class presses on another; for all are aiming to procure respect on account of their property’ (W5, 211), undermines children’s education too. Wollstonecraft’s early concern about girls’ ‘too familiar or haughty’ behavior toward servants signals her incipient reflection in Education of Daughters upon preoccupations with rank and class that form much of the property system’s hidden curriculum for both women and men. That early thought develops later into Rights of Woman’s revolutionary educational concern about ‘The manner in which [women] treat servants in the presence of children, permitting them to suppose that they ought to wait on them, and bear their humours’ (W5, 262). Thus the property-centered hidden curriculum that Wollstonecraft analyzes in Rights of Woman includes indolent aspirations to rank and privilege – as well as blind obedience, cunning, and prejudice; immodesty, coquetry, libertinism, and tyranny. Such evils emanate, she suggests, from the hidden curriculum she observes in the propertied class: The education of the rich tends to render them vain and helpless, and the unfolding mind is not strengthened by the practice of those duties which dignify the human / character. – They only live to amuse themselves, and by the same law which in nature invariably produces certain effects, they soon only afford barren amusement. (W5, 75)

In some sense, the monarchist property system enslaves white gentlemen too, Wollstonecraft insists, especially those in the professions, which she conceives as integral to monarchist miseducation inasmuch as ‘the character of every man is, in some degree, formed by his profession’ (W5, 87), and ‘every profession, in which great subordination of rank constitutes its power, is highly injurious to

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morality’ (W5, 86). Section B1, above, presents a relevant account of her educational appraisal of military professions, but Wollstonecraft does not spare the clergy from such critical appraisal either, despite their ‘superiour opportunities of improvement’, as she observes that ‘subordination . . . cramps their faculties’ too (W5, 86). Sadly, she observes, ‘men of the same profession are seldom / friends’ (W5, 259). For professional education, like women’s, is founded upon the despotic chain of corollaries that follows from the Divine Right of Kings. However, Wollstonecraft expresses no sanguinity about the likely effects of a revolutionary conversion from a monarchic property system that trades an ‘aristocracy of birth’ for a new ‘aristocracy of wealth’ (W6, 444). In Sweden, Norway, and Denmark she comments critically, perhaps prophetically, upon the morally questionable characters of ‘men devoted entirely to commerce’ who make ‘ostentatious display of wealth without elegance, and a greedy enjoyment of pleasure without sentiment’, who regard ‘anxiety about the welfare of others [as] a search after misery, in which we have no concern’ (W6, 340). Seeking for women (or men) no educational right whatsoever to prepare for such a selfish life of profiteering, she worries about the rise of a new political economy that teaches men the vices of the old one in new guise: Men are strange machines; and their whole system of morality is in general held together by one grand principle, which loses its force the moment they allow themselves to break with impunity over the bounds which secured their self-respect. A man ceases to love humanity, and then individuals, as he advances in the chase after wealth; as one clashes with his interest, the other with his pleasures: to business, as it is termed, everything must give way; nay, is sacrificed; / and all the endearing charities of citizen, husband, father, brother, become empty names . . . These men, like the owners of negro ships, never smell on their money the blood by which it has been gained, but sleep quietly in their beds, terming such occupations lawful callings; yet the lightning marks not their roofs, to thunder conviction on them, ‘and to justify the ways of God to man’. (W6, 342, 344)

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B3. Modesty, Chastity, Libertinism: Analyzing Sexual Immorality Monarchist sexual ontology and economy set distinctly different moral standards for men’s and women’s sexual characters – particularly with regard to cultural values applied to their sexual conduct – and make these different standards appear to be consequences of biological nature rather than of miseducation. Structurally analyzing how monarchist culture sexualizes men’s and women’s characters, such that women ‘are all rivals’ (W5, 259), Wollstonecraft cites immoral cultural consequences that follow from popular assumptions often cited to justify a sexual double standard: (a) that women are naturally coy coquettes who strive piously for modest and chaste reputations while yearning endlessly for romance; and (b) that men are naturally prone to libertinism, gallantry, and immodesty. She is particularly concerned about this sexual-ontological ethic’s consequences for childrearing. Wollstonecraft critiques monarchist ideals that constitute sexual character via her conceptual analysis of chastity and modesty, embodied virtues often fallaciously conflated with each other. Her analysis of these two educational aims, chastity and modesty, which she evenhandedly applies to both sexes, turns upon a conceptual distinction she draws between two senses of modesty: (1) referring to ‘that purity of mind, which is the effect of chastity’ (W5, 191), and (2) referring to ‘that soberness of mind which teaches a man not to think more highly of himself than he ought to think’ (W5, 191). Modesty is also misunderstood, according to Wollstonecraft, when confused with mere regulation or decorum of behavior.37 Citing the vain (immodest) behavior of many married women who practice sexual fidelity to their husbands, she doubts whether modesty can be achieved through chastity. Moreover, men, not known for either their chastity or their modesty, are nonetheless more likely than women to be modest in the second sense, she argues, because they are more likely to have been educated to exercise their reason and understanding, vital to the development of just opinions of themselves. She further concedes that men’s judgment and fortitude may be superior to women’s in many instances because men ‘give a freer scope to the grand passions, and by more frequently going astray

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enlarge their minds’ (W5, 179). Corollary to such revolutionary reflections upon sexual education, she also cleverly questions why the burden of checking bodily passions should categorically fall to women, who have not even been educated to exercise their rational judgment, and scorns the social practice of women’s maintaining chastity only for the sake of their reputations, or of basing a woman’s reputation on her chastity to the exclusion of all other virtues.38 Wollstonecraft blasts monarchist miseducation’s double standard of moral sexual character, judging ‘the little respect [paid to chastity in the male world]’ as the grand source of many of the physical and moral evils that torment mankind, as well as of the vices and follies that degrade and destroy women . . . The little attention paid to the cultivation of modesty, amongst men, produces great depravity in all the relationships of society; for, not only love – love that ought to purify the heart, and first call forth all the youthful powers, to prepare the man to discharge the benevolent duties of life, is sacrificed to premature lust; but, all the social affections are deadened by the selfish gratifications, which very early pollute the mind, and dry up the generous juices of the heart. (W5, 236)

This double standard – the taken-for-granted expectation of women’s chastity and men’s libertinism – undermines all domestic relations, especially childrearing. ‘The affection of husbands and wives’, Wollstonecraft argues, ‘cannot be pure when they have so few sentiments in common, and . . . when their pursuits are so different’ (W5, 265). She objects to the notion that this double standard is founded upon natural features of sexual character, arguing that its origin is simply miseducation: To adulterous lust the most sacred duties are sacrificed, because before marriage, men, by a promiscuous intimacy with women, learned to consider love as a selfish gratification – learned to separate it not only from esteem, but from the affection merely built on habit, which mixes a little humanity with it. (W5, 265)

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C. Laisser-Faire Education under the Divine Right of Parents ‘I may be accused of arrogance,’ Wollstonecraft warns as she explains that she holds writers of educational thought in some measure responsible for the deplorable miseducation whose ideology of sexual character she has critiqued: [A]ll the writers who have written on the subject of female education and manners from Rousseau to Dr Gregory, have contributed to render women more artificial, weak characters, than they would otherwise have been; and, consequently, more useless members of society . . . my objection extends to the whole purport of those books, which tend, in my opinion, to degrade one half of the human species, and render women pleasing at the expence of every solid virtue. (W5, 91)

But she obviously does not confine her critique to others’ educational thought; she also examines educational institutions and practices. Conceptually, she maps the ‘disorderly education’ of the entire monarchic culture in which she lives, both the tutoring, governessing, and mothering that constitute its private education, and the various ways of schooling boys and girls that constitute its public education. All these educational media – from published books to homes to schools – offer miseducation premised upon the divine right of parents corollary to the Divine Right of Kings, miseducation that reproduces the sexual character that she has found fallacious, oppressive, and immoral. None of these media offers a moral alternative for educating children or women. Therefore, the entire ‘mistaken’ and ‘false’ unsystematic system requires rethinking and remaking, she argues. Chapter 4 interprets her effort, in Rights of Woman, at such radical rethinking, in light of the conceptual map of monarchist miseducation that she has drawn in that work. C1. Private Miseducation: Governessing, Tutoring, Mothering Having served as a governess in a great house herself and having corresponded with her sisters and friends still thus employed,

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Wollstonecraft does not lose sight of her theory that professions are active agents of education, and she recognizes that the profession of education is no exception. Reflecting upon private education as a profession whose practitioners include governesses, tutors, and parents, she analyzes monarchism’s miseducative institutional effects upon both children and their educators in Rights of Woman – ever alert to how the divine right of parents infects pedagogical relations with the myriad moral faults of sexual character that section B has mapped. In Education of Daughters, primarily written as a guide for parents engaged in their children’s private education, her appraisal of the governess’s profession is devastating: A governess to young ladies is equally disagreeable. It is ten to one if they meet with a reasonable mother; and if she is not so, she will be continually finding fault to prove she is not ignorant, and be displeased if her pupils do not improve, but angry if the proper methods are taken to make them do so. The children treat them with disrespect, and often with insolence. In the mean time life glides away, and the spirits with it; ‘and when youth and genial years are flown’, they have nothing to subsist on; or, perhaps, on some extraordinary occasion, some small allowance may be made for them, which is thought a great charity. (W4, 25)

Although tutors are often clergymen, they also enjoy ‘little respect . . . in great houses’, and they undermine boys’ education by indulging their ‘most capricious follies’ (W5, 38), Wollstonecraft charges in Rights of Men. Thus tutored, rich men have ‘ceased to be men’ as their pampered appetites have led them to abandon ‘true pleasure’ and ‘supinely exist without exercising mind or body’ (W5, 10). Tutors who educate the sons of propertied men also bring disrespect upon the clergy with their obsequious and ‘servile dependence’ upon the propertied fathers who employ them, with their ‘servility to superiors, and tyranny to inferiors’ (W5, 38–39). Logically, then, Wollstonecraft questions Burke’s defense of the pre-revolutionary status quo under churchmen’s direction:

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Is it among the list of possibilities that a man / of rank and fortune can have received a good education? How can he discover that he is a man, when all his wants are instantly supplied, and invention is never sharpened by necessity? Will he labour, for every thing valuable must be the fruit of laborious exertions, to attain knowledge and virtue, in order to merit the affection of his equals, when the flattering attention of sycophants is a more luscious cordial? (W5, 42)

Parents, of course, employ both governesses and tutors, and also select schools for their children. In view of their governance of private education and strong influence also on public education, then, Wollstonecraft focuses much of her analysis of monarchist miseducation on parenthood, an analysis that becomes her key premise in Rights of Woman for the necessity of educating women. ‘The weakness of the mother will be visited upon the children!’ she warns (W5, 249), for as a professional educator she has experienced the difficulty of teaching children whose parents display more moral faults than virtues. Complaining that ‘the absurd duty, too often inculcated, of obeying a parent only on account of his being a parent, shackles the mind, and prepares it for a slavish submission to any power but reason’ (W5, 225), she argues that children’s moral education becomes impossible when allowances are made for their parents’ faults before their ‘first affection’ has matured into ‘esteem / and love . . . blended together’ (W5, 228). Too often, she theorizes, such faults reflect not just parents’ personal idiosyncrasies, but monarchist miseducation: ‘till society is very differently constituted, parents, I fear, will still insist on being obeyed . . . and constantly endeavour to settle that power on a Divine right which’, like the Divine Right of Kings, ‘will not bear the investigation of reason’ (W5, 228). The ‘respect for parents’ in the monarchic system, she charges, ‘is only a selfish respect for property’, not natural human love (W5, 225). Thus Wollstonecraft applies political metaphors to her educational analysis of family life: Every family might also be called a state. States, it is true, have mostly been governed by arts that disgrace the character of man; and

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want of a just constitution, and equal laws, have so perplexed the notions of the worldly wise, that they more than question the reasonableness of contending for the rights of humanity. Thus morality, polluted in the national reservoir, sends off streams of vice to corrupt the constituent parts of the body politic . . . (W5, 249)

Even ‘parental affection’ does not escape the political lens through which she regards the ‘false system of education’ under monarchy (W5, 73), insofar as she regards it as ‘the blindest modification of perverse self-love’, as ‘a pretext to tyrannize, where it can be done with impunity’ (W5, 221–222). Although she acknowledges that ‘the father who is blindly obeyed, is obeyed from sheer weakness, or from motives that degrade the human character’ (W5, 225), she is not only talking about patriarchs when she discourses on parental tyranny; indeed, she judges ‘the affection of some women for their children . . . frequently very brutish’ (W5, 222). Perhaps the most damning aspect of her portrait of monarchist miseducation is her analysis of motherhood’s taken-for-granted foundation upon the notion of sexual character, whose logic and ethics she critiques at length in Rights of Woman: artificial sexual ontology, oppressive sexual economy, and immoral sexual culture. Under ‘the divine right of husbands’ (W5, 110, Wollstonecraft’s emphasis), upheld by uneducated women as well as prominent educational writers of both sexes (including Rousseau) who reject the Divine Right of Kings, this problematic concept of sexual character becomes a prescription for miseducative motherhood. When Wollstonecraft debunks the monarchist sexual ontology, she objects to a sex distinction that monarchist culture has made to disqualify women from human nature; she objects specifically to that sex distinction which identifies masculinity with mental and physical strength, and femininity with beauty whose chief feature is mental and physical weakness. Wollstonecraft protests that this sex distinction, which dehumanizes women, is not only fallacious and unnatural, an artifice: but it also has grievous consequences for motherhood, insofar as it makes mothers’ ‘natural and artificial duties clash’ (W5, 212). Living at a time when infants’ survival depends on breastfeeding

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and when contraceptive technologies are primitive and unreliable, Wollstonecraft can find little sound reason to object – as twentyfirst-century feminists in an era of bottle feeding and breast-milk pumps, pharmaceutical contraception, legal abortion, and sophisticated reproductive technologies often do – to the designation of motherhood ‘as the peculiar destination of woman’ (W5, 261). Indeed, protesting against women who ‘either destroy the embryo in the womb, or cast it off when born’ (W5, 209), she argues that ‘the care of children in their infancy is one of the grand duties annexed to the female character by nature’ (W5, 222). Observing that ‘mankind seem to agree that children should be left under the management of women during their childhood’ (W5, 137), however, she does challenge their assumption that women educated to be beautiful, to be weak in both mind and body, and to please men, are fit to be mothers. Thus miseducated, women ‘have not sufficient strength to discharge the first duty of a mother’ (W5, 209). She points out that many mothers ‘dedicate their lives to their children only to weaken their bodies and spoil their tempers, frustrating also any plan of education that a more / rational father may adopt’ (W5, 263). Men have erred, she charges, when they have considered females ‘rather as women than human creatures’ and when they ‘have been more anxious to make them alluring mistresses than [affectionate wives and rational mothers]’ (W5, 73). Such men insult nature when ‘they refuse to let their wives suckle their children’ (W5, 142), and ‘the obedience required of women in the marriage state’ (W5, 141), despite a husband’s being ‘devoid of sense and parental affection’ (W5, 142), undermines the moral practice of motherhood: ‘the mind, naturally weakened by depending on authority, never exerts its own powers, and the obedient wife is thus rendered a weak indolent mother’ (W5, 141). The political economy of sexual character also demoralizes motherhood oppressively, Wollstonecraft reasons, as she protests against the notion that a middle-class mother should be ‘merely an upper servant’ (W5, 142, 109). She deplores ‘the manner in which [mothers] treat servants in the presence of children, permitting them to suppose that they ought to wait on them, and bear their humours’ (W5, 262), and worries about difficulties that inevitably motherhood poses

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for widows ‘encumbered with children’. Such widowed mothers have never learned to think or act for themselves ‘to educate them . . . to form their principles and secure their property’ (W5, 117). Wollstonecraft’s unfinished novel Wrongs of Woman also extends such concerns about monarchist sexual economy to single motherhood within the serving class, telling the story of Jemima, the daughter of two servants. Jemima’s father began to hate her mother and herself before her birth, having seduced her mother with false promises to marry her; when Jemima’s mother died shortly after giving birth, her father put her under the care of ‘the cheapest nurse [he] could find; who suckled her own child at the same time, and lodged as many more as she could, in two cellar-like apartments’ (W1, 107). Consequently forced to steal bread in order to survive, later subjected to rape and impregnation by her master, and dismissed by his wife to a subsequent life as a street beggar and thief, Jemima tells Maria: Now I / look back, I cannot help attributing the greater part of my misery, to the misfortune of having been thrown into the world without the grand support of life – a mother’s affection. I had no one to love me; or to make me respected, to enable me to acquire respect. I was an egg dropped on the sand; a pauper by nature, hunted from family to family, who belonged to nobody – and nobody cared for me. I was despised from my birth, and denied the chance of obtaining a footing for myself in society. Yes; I had not even the chance of being considered as a fellow-creature – yet all the people with whom I lived, brutalized as they were . . . never yearned for me. I was, in fact, born a slave, and chained / by infamy to slavery during the whole of existence, without having any companions to alleviate it by sympathy, or teach me how to rise above it by their example. (W1, 110)

From these first two monarchist assumptions, sexual ontology and sexual economy, which construct sexual character as a fallacious foundational principle for education, a morally problematic sexual culture develops that makes motherhood miseducative. Wollstonecraft warns revolutionaries that a new republic’s preservation of these principles

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of sexual character, as advocated by Rousseau and his followers, will infect that republic with monarchist evils that concern them deeply. ‘The mother will be lost in the coquette’ (W5, 118), and be ‘swallowed up by the factitious character which an improper education and the vanity of beauty had produced’ (W5, 245), she warns, if her education has emphasized her disposition to please men: When a woman is admired for her beauty, and suffers herself to be so far intoxicated by the admiration she receives, as to neglect to discharge the indispensable duty of a mother, she sins against herself by neglecting to cultivate an affection that would equally tend to make her useful and happy. (W5, 212)

Wollstonecraft’s analysis of the monarchist sexual culture’s miseducative effects upon motherhood suggests that such coquettish mothers are more apt to manipulate their children with their charms, in order to win their favor, than to educate them: ‘she either neglects her children, or spoils them by improper indulgence’ (W5, 222). Mothers who are ‘quite feminine, according to the masculine acceptation of the word’ may even exert more compassion and express more affection for pet animals than for their own children while lisping out ‘a pretty mixture of French and English nonsense, to please the men who flocked round her’ (W5, 244). Thus miseducated, such self-absorbed mothers miseducate their daughters: Women are told from their infancy, and taught by the example of their mothers, that a little knowledge of human weakness, justly termed cunning, softness or temper, outward obedience, and a scrupulous attention to a puerile kind of propriety, will obtain for them the protection of man; and should they be beautiful, every thing else is needless, for, at least, twenty years of their lives. (W5, 88, Wollstonecraft’s emphasis)

Such private miseducation by and for mothers might suggest a powerful argument for public education, except that public education functions under the divine right of parents, too.

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C2. Public Miseducation: Schooling Boys, Schooling Girls A veteran of school-teaching herself, Wollstonecraft complains in Education of Daughters that ‘A teacher at a school is only a kind of upper servant, who has more work than the menial ones’ (W4, 25). But still in Rights of Woman, she declares her categorical disdain for schoolmasters: ‘There is not, perhaps in the kingdom, a more dogmatical, or luxurious set of men, than the pedantic tyrants who reside in colleges and preside at public schools’ (W5, 233). She makes extensive commentary on boys’ schooling of various sorts and some commentary on girls’ schooling, too, to illustrate how schools, sex-segregated to reflect the monarchist ideology of sexual character, contribute to both sexes’ moral miseducation. Few women would envy men’s opportunity to attend boys’ schools such as she surveys: academies, seminaries, boarding-schools, great public schools. Her commentary describes in some detail how schooling distorts the characters of both sexes and how predictably students respond, regardless of their sex, to loveless confinement and unreasonable restriction by amusing themselves imprudently and often also with selfish disregard, even meanness, toward others. ‘At boarding schools of every description, the relaxation of the junior boys is mischief; and of the senior, vice’ (W5, 231). Boarding schools deny girls the freedom of physical movement vital to their health, requiring them to pace back and forth in a strict posture, their heads held high, their toes turned out, their shoulders pulled back; such physical restriction miseducates them mentally by spoiling their tempers, reducing their ‘faculties’, and perverting their ‘understanding’ so that even its most precocious sharpness becomes ‘pitiful cunning’ (W5, 236). Also confined, school boys may have the privilege of access to studies in Latin and Greek, but only a few clever ones actually learn. ‘The health and morals’, understanding and constitutions of most others weaken as they ‘rush into libertinism’, mischief, vice, gluttony, and slovenliness, preoccupied with anticipation of ‘riotous holidays’ to be ‘spent in total dissipation and beastly indulgence’ rather than in enjoyment of ‘domestic affections’ (W5, 230, 233–234). In such schools, gardens may be ‘superb’, but the children

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cannot enjoy them because appearances must be ‘kept in order’ to impress visiting parents (W5, 235). Without government support, schools court contacts with nobility and cater to parents, who either want the cheapest school they can find or are eager for their sons to outshine their neighbors’ sons. This political economy of schooling devastates pedagogy with its compulsion to make more pretentious than honest exhibitions of students’ learning designed to impress parents. Thus it rewards slick salesmanship in schoolmasters while putting conscientious teachers at risk of commercial failure. Both boys’ and girls’ school peer cultures suffer morally as a consequence of that economy as well. ‘Shut up together’, schoolgirls develop ‘bad habits’ no less than schoolboys do, engaging in ‘nasty tricks’ and jokes, just as boys indulge in mischievous pranks and ridicule of in loco parentis adults whose favor they seek nonetheless (W5, 197, 237). Thus Wollstonecraft’s critical account of monarchist schooling shows how it preserves the illusion of sexual character: how it dehumanizes young people of both sexes as well as schoolmasters and other teachers, imparts a sense of free entitlement to boys and a sense of limitation to girls, and is structurally situated within the monarchist economy to offer little hope for either sex’s moral-educational improvement. In Rights of Woman Wollstonecraft devotes several pages to the miseducative effects of moral instruction attempted via the requirement of religious observances in great schools, For what good can be expected from the youth who receives the sacrament of the Lord’s supper, to avoid forfeiting half a guinea, which he probably afterwards spends in some sensual manner? Half the employment of the youths is to elude the necessity of attending public worship . . . (W5, 231)

Small wonder that Locke and Rousseau both defend gentlemen’s private education and oppose schooling, or that Wollstonecraft herself forms that preference briefly too, when she writes Education of Daughters and Real Life. But in composing Rights of Woman she comes

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to recognize that homes, no less than schools, are sites of monarchist miseducation, which render sexual character a highly questionable premise for denying women the education needed to become strong mothers, citizens and human beings. If the Divine Right of Kings and its corollary the divine right of parents make both private and public education morally and sexually miseducative, what then? As Chapter 4 explains, Wollstonecraft’s answer is republican coeducation.

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Chapter 4

Republican Coeducation A Thought Experiment

Mary Wollstonecraft’s revolutionary response to monarchist miseducation is not merely critical, but inventive too. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is a work of passionately rational educational imagination. Wollstonecraft may be the first English-speaking author of educational thought ever to make a sustained philosophical argument for government-financed free universal schooling, not only of boys and girls together, but also of rich and poor together, and at the same time to recognize that schooling could not reasonably be expected to do all the necessary work of educating children for mature citizenship. This undeniably important contribution has suffered undue neglect by historians of educational thought – perhaps as a consequence of excessively narrow, anachronistic conceptions of her treatise’s ‘feminist’ significance that overlook her openly expressed motivation by ‘an affection for the whole human race’ (W5, 65). As Amartya Sen has commented to an international gathering of feminist economists at Oxford in 2004, ‘One particular insight that Mary Wollstonecraft had is the basic commonality of different kinds of social deprivation and societal inequality, which have a uniting feature.’ Her imaginative response to monarchist miseducation reflects this insight, demonstrating how, as he explains further, ‘The relevance of feminist thinking is not confined to gender inequality only, nor only to the pursuit of perspectives that a woman’s position or a feminist commitment can bring out. It also links with other types of deep inequality.’39 Wollstonecraft does not make the naive mistake of casting a professional practice of coeducational schooling in the impossible role of society’s radical cure-all, for she acknowledges, ‘till society be differently constituted, much cannot be expected from education’

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(W5, 90). Revolutionary politics may be necessary, then, for republican coeducation’s success, Wollstonecraft argues, but revolutions against monarchic oppression – like those in France and the United States – will be in vain without it. In its taken-for-granted, contemporary practical but apolitical sense, however, coeducation has scarcely any conceptual meaning, and Wollstonecraft never uses this now commonplace term – not because it is so conceptually thin, but because it simply does not come into use until after her death. In writing Rights of Woman in 1792, she becomes the first English-speaking author to embark upon conceptualizing a normative idea of an educational system to which the contemporary term ‘coeducation’ might apply both accurately and meaningfully.40 Because she recognizes that ‘Men and women must be educated, in great degree, by the opinions and manners of the / society they live in’ (W5, 90), her creative conception of coeducation is not merely a system of public schooling, but a multiinstitutional cultural configuration whose ‘most perfect’ educational ideal ‘is such an exercise of the understanding as is best calculated to strengthen the body and form the heart’ (W5, 90). The conceptual thinness of coeducation as a commonplace schooling practice in the world’s richest, most powerful nations at the millennium obscures how revolutionary Wollstonecraft’s theorizing about it is; at the same time, educators’ philosophical neglect and ignorance of that theorizing may begin to explain coeducation’s conceptual thinness in late modern practice. Her thick concept of coeducation constitutes her most distinctive contribution to the moral formation of a sustainable republic. The normative concept of coeducation she suggests in her thought experiment is philosophically substantial – not coeducation in any apolitical, anachronistic, or geographically dislocated sense, but specifically republican coeducation – a set of moral-educational principles deliberately designed for a revolutionary society.41 Concerned about women’s dehumanization via artificial feminization integral to monarchist miseducation and also endorsed by popular Enlightenment thinkers, she challenges revolutionary nation-builders to undertake a practical experiment in coeducation, to try her claim for women’s possible human virtue. In Rights of Woman she proposes an

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experiment in coeducation for the revolutionary republic to address the many moral faults she finds in both sexes’ characters, but especially women’s characters, under the monarchist regime: Let an enlightened nation then try what effect reason would have to bring [women] back to nature, and their duty; and allowing them to share the advantages of education and government with man, see whether they will become better, as they grow wiser and become free. They cannot be injured by the experiment; for it is not in the power of man to render them more insignificant than they are at present. (W5, 239)

A. The Divine Source of Moral Education for All, Including Women Having rejected the Divine Right of Kings and its despotic chain of corollaries, including the divine right of husbands and the divine right of parents, which have led men to view ‘education in a false light’ (W5, 122), Wollstonecraft wants people of both sexes to learn virtuous living by emulating God rather than monarchs or their other superiors in rank and fortune. Such a revolutionary coeducational challenge to presumed ‘divine’ rights requires religious imagination and thought. Thus she grounds her argument for coeducation – for women’s right to education – in religious thought often neglected, as if it were irrelevant, by her late modern readers. But, for a coeducational system that aims to displace the Divine Right of Kings, how can it be irrelevant? In Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination Barbara Taylor has argued that her religious thought conceives the love of God as ‘an agent of human liberation’ and as ‘an agent of psycho-ethical reformation’.42 Although clearly biblical in some sense and accessible also through fine arts, Wollstonecraft’s notion of the divine image’s educative power has its source less in church doctrines than in the wild landscape of ‘Nature’ – where a girl or woman can wander, feel, and think freely, apart from those who claim divine rights to oppress

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her. Her notion of the love of God entails the sanctity of reason, which she regards as itself divine and therefore the highest good to which, besides God-like compassion and justice, humans should aspire. Believing that ‘God is Justice itself’ (W5, 170),43 Wollstonecraft invokes these religious premises, to which she weds humanist individualism, for her proposal to educate women (and obviously men too) via coeducation. Even if not theologically significant, the religious thought upon which thus she grounds her coeducational thought requires some scrutiny as a source of educational insight into the peculiar and variously understood relations between emotion and reason in Rights of Woman – especially with regard to the workings of her own imagination, her critique of feminine sensibility, and her ambivalent reflections on arts education for women. A1. Religious Emotion and Reason: Advocating Women’s Education For Wollstonecraft, moral life depends upon enactment of a symbiotic relationship between reason and the love of God. The relationship between these is so symbiotic within her thought that, to those who avoid examination of her God-talk or have not read her early educational work, it may just seem like sovereign reason sloppily mixed with some sort of indeterminate value for emotions. But her premises for coeducation in Rights of Woman retain the basic shape of Mrs Mason’s religious instruction to Mary and Caroline in Original Stories from Real Life, the work in which her critical educational concerns about monarchist wealth and poverty first appear. After teaching these daughters of the propertied class first to feel and exercise compassion toward injured animals they encounter outdoors, Mrs Mason insistently ensures the girls’ early and repeated encounters with men’s and women’s poverty, hunger and homelessness; with children of both sexes orphaned or destined for workhouses, diseases and early deaths; and with strong evidence that wealth without virtue causes such human suffering. Her pedagogy constructs these emotionally affecting encounters through both story and first-hand experience that ‘directly addresses the senses, the first [inlets] to the heart’ (W4, 359), as well as extensive reasoning conversations that teach virtue and ‘explain the nature of vice’ (W4, 359). Wollstonecraft frames

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Mrs Mason’s ‘gradually imparted’ pedagogy and curriculum for compassion and benevolence in explicitly religious terms (W4, 359): To attain any thing great, a model must be held up to [exercise] our understanding, and engage our affections. A view of the disinterested goodness of God is [therefore] calculated to touch us more than can be conceived by a depraved mind. When the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts, true courage will animate our conduct, [for] nothing can hurt those who trust in Him. If the desire of acting right is ever present with us, if admiration of goodness fills our souls, we may be said to pray constantly. And if we try to do justice to all [our fellow-creatures, and even to the brute creation, and assist them] as far as we can, we prove whose servants we are, and whose laws we transcribe in our lives. (W4, 423)

Real Life’s second edition with William Blake’s illustrations comes out the same year as the first edition of Rights of Woman, in which Wollstonecraft insists that, ‘It is not impious thus to scan the attributes of the Almighty: in fact, who can avoid it that exercises his faculties’ (W5, 115)? But there she further develops Real Life’s earlier concept of the love of God, to conceive it as a moral foundation for the humanist individualism upon which she also premises her coeducational thought experiment: The stamen of immortality, if I may be allowed the phrase, is the perfectibility of human reason . . . Reason is, consequentially, the simple power of improvement; or, more properly speaking, of discerning truth. Every individual is in this respect a world in itself. More or less may be conspicuous in one being than another; but the nature of reason must be the same in all, if it be an emanation of divinity, the tie that connects the creature with the Creator; for, can that soul be stamped with the heavenly image, that is not perfected by the exercise of its own reason? (W5, 122)

Critically engaging Milton, Pope, Rousseau, and others, she protests against men’s denial that women’s souls have such potential

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for human distinction and divine connection, of which their capacity to reason must be the primary evidence: ‘the inquiry is whether she have reason or not’ (W5, 122). For ‘if woman be allowed to have an immortal soul’, she argues, ‘she must have, as the employment of life, an understanding to improve’ (W5, 132). Indeed, when a woman ‘is incited by present gratification to forget her grand destination, / [nature] is counteracted, or she was born only to procreate and rot’ (W5, 132). In reasoning for herself, therefore, Wollstonecraft explains, a woman reconnects directly with her Creator and thus realizes her true nature; such a woman achieves moral virtue and immortality by taking her direction from perfect God rather than from imperfect men whose connections to God under the Divine Right of Kings are presumed closer or more direct than women’s. This is precisely the direct-to-God dynamic by means of which the autobiographical hero of Wollstonecraft’s first novel, Mary, A Fiction, liberates her own mind from the divine right of neglectful and abusive parents who ‘exclaimed against female acquirements’ to deny her education (W1, 10): Many nights she sat up, if I may be allowed the expression, conversing with the Author of Nature, making verses, and singing hymns of her own composing. She considered also, and tried to discern what end her various faculties were destined to pursue; and had a glimpse of a truth, which afterwards more fully unfolded itself. (W1, 16; Wollstonecraft’s emphasis)

In Rights of Woman, then, she counters the blindly worshipful obedience required by the Divine Right of Kings and its corollaries with fiercely honest reasoning as itself a kind of intelligent communion with God, the practice of which, in accord with Enlightenment thought generally, defines her conception of mature human nature and dignity: I love man as my fellow; but his scepter, real, or usurped, extends not to me, unless the reason of an individual demands my homage; and even then the submission is to reason, and not to man. In fact, the conduct of an accountable being must be regulated by the

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operations of its own reason; or on what foundation rests the throne of God? (W5, 105)

Thus offering herself as a clear case, Wollstonecraft cites God – whom she conceives in personal terms, as just, wise, good and omnipotent – as the source of ‘sufficient strength of mind to dare to exert [her] own reason’, and testifies that her dependence ‘only on him’ has led her to ‘view, with indignation, the mistaken notions that enslave my sex’ (W5, 105). Her profession of direct divine inspiration via her Godgiven power to reason is, however difficult for many late modern readers to comprehend, at least logically consistent with her claim that ‘the only solid foundation for morality appears to be the character of the supreme Being’ (W5, 114). Thus theistically she argues that ‘there can be but one rule of right, if morality has an eternal foundation’, and proposes an educational experiment by means of which men might discern if women do or do not have human capacity to learn ‘the power of generalizing ideas, of drawing comprehensive conclusions from individual observations’ (W5, 123). ‘Cultivate [women’s] minds’, she implores, ‘and let them attain conscious dignity by feeling themselves only dependent on God’ (W5, 105). Such dependence on God is not to be a superstitious notion of dependence, however; it is, instead, a God-loving conception of rational independence, saturated with modesty, albeit without timid or bashful subordination to men. For, distinguishing ‘modesty’ from ‘humility’ as ‘self-debasement’ that makes one ‘timid’, whose opposite, vanity, makes one ‘presumptuous’, she defines modesty as ‘that soberness of mind which teaches a man not to think more highly of himself than he ought to think’ (W5, 191). Reflecting upon her religious sources of moral self-education, she comments, ‘Jesus Christ was modest, Moses was humble, and Peter vain’ (W5, 192). Such morally reflective dependence upon God is a loving devotion to reason, rationality divorced neither from moral passion nor from religious imagination: ‘For to love God as the fountain of wisdom, goodness, and power, appears to be the only worship useful to a being who wishes to acquire either virtue or knowledge’ (W5, 115).

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Rights of Woman is riddled with abundant God-talk toward Wollstonecraft’s revolutionary, experimental coeducational aim, as she anticipates that ‘the cry of irreligion, or even atheism’ may ‘be raised’ against her for doubting ‘whether woman were created for man’ (W5, 148). She does concede ‘that were an angel from heaven to tell me / that Moses’s beautiful, poetical cosmogony, and the account of the fall of man’ in Genesis ‘were literally true, I could not believe what my reason told me was derogatory to the character of the Supreme Being’ (W5, 148). In her later fragmentary jotted ‘Hints’ for a second planned volume of Rights of Woman, she commends the Genesis creation story as ‘a sublime allegory’ and notes how its readers’ responses may vary: Tell a being, whose affections and passions have been more exercised than his reason, / that God said, Let there be light! and there was light; and he would prostrate himself before the Being who could thus call things out of nothing, as if they were: but a man in whom reason had taken place of passion, would not adore, till wisdom was conspicuous as well as power, for his admiration must be founded on principle. (W5, 275)

In a similar vein in Rights of Woman, she criticizes those who profess religious devotion yet forget the principle of Micah’s Biblical instruction ‘to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God’ (W5, 115). Thus the pattern of her Biblical citations and commentaries upon them suggests that she draws a strong theological distinction between her own revolutionary poetic and rational faith on one hand and others’ more conservative superstitious faiths on the other hand: ‘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’ (W5, 84, Wollstonecraft’s emphases). Identifying the love of God thus with reason as an instrument of human improvement via truth-seeking as well as with prophetic passion for possible future justice, mercy, and humility, she testifies in Rights of Woman that ‘Religion’ is a ‘pure source of comfort in this vale of tears’ even as she condemns ‘the dabblers, who have

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presumptuously endeavoured to confine in one narrow channel, the living waters that ever flow towards God / – the sublime ocean of existence’ (W5, 232)! Wollstonecraft’s Early Modern theology is thus not a rationalist one devoid of feeling, despite her theorizing about God as a perfect, rational Being who does not act ‘from the vague impulse of an undirected will’ (W5, 115) that justifies superstition, supernaturalism, and tyranny. Perhaps only comprehensible to many Late Modern readers in light of her girlhood biography, the Godtalk in which she grounds her coeducational thought is profoundly personal, passionate, and full of love, even at times poetic: What would life be without that peace which the love of God, when built on humanity, alone can impart? Every earthly affection turns back, at intervals, to prey upon the heart that feeds it; and the purest effusions of benevolence, often rudely damped by man, must mount as a free-will offering to Him who gave them birth, whose bright image they faintly reflect. (W5, 232)

She worries that such faith cannot survive schooling which requires students’ attendance at public worship whose Anglican ‘relicks of popery’ take the ‘irreverent’ form of ‘the cold parade that insults the understanding without reaching the heart’ – ‘a ritual performed by the lips when the mind and heart are far away’ – because such ‘Romish customs’ have been stripped of both ‘the solemnity that interested the imagination’ and ‘the theatrical pomp which gratifies our senses’ (W5, 231–232). She worries that such ‘irksome ceremonies and unreasonable restraints’ will inspire more ‘contempt’ and ‘idleness’ than the passionately loving and poetic faith whose independent, rational, aesthetically sensitive, and benevolent practice she commends. She apparently trusts that such faith will flower of its own accord as a rational necessity for living morally, perhaps just as it does for the religious imagination of her first novel’s self-educating autobiographical hero Mary, without dogmatic force or didacticism, as she declares in Rights of Men, That civilization, that the cultivation of the understanding, and refinement of the affections, naturally make a man religious, I am proud to acknowledge. – What else can fill the aching void

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in the heart, that human pleasures, human friendships can never fill? What else can render us resigned to live, though condemned to ignorance? – What but a profound reverence for the model of all perfection, and the mysterious tie which arises from a love of goodness? What can make us reverence ourselves, but a reverence for that Being, of whom we are a faint image? That / mighty Spirit moves on the waters – confusion hears his voice, and the troubled heart ceases to beat with anguish, for trust in Him bade it be still. (W5, 39)

Trusting such ‘natural’ religious development in otherwise welleducated children, Wollstonecraft envisions a coeducational plan that includes ‘conversations . . . in Socratic form’ about ‘The elements of religion’ (W5, 240), but no public formal religious observances; instead, she advocates simply that, ‘Public education, of every denomination, should be directed to form citizens’ (W5, 233–234). With that explicitly civic aim, prescribing religious inquiry but removing religious indoctrination from her vision of republican coeducation, she premises that revolutionary vision ironically upon (1) her devoutly religious faith that ‘every being may become virtuous by the exercise of its own reason’ (W5, 90), and (2) her belief that ‘the conduct of an accountable being must be regulated by the operations of his own reason; or on what foundation rests the throne of God’ (W5, 105)? Noting that Rousseau has applied that same principle to men, she declares simply: ‘I extend it to women’ (W5, 90). Wollstonecraft’s exclusion of religious observance and indoctrination from republican coeducation may seem to justify straightforwardly rationalist, secular readings of her coeducational thought that overlook its religious foundation as irrelevant. Recognition of the imaginative, insubordinate character of her coeducational thought’s religious foundation may be necessary, however, to understand how self-respect, love, and moral passion do figure integrally in it as motives, energies, and effects of reason’s divine educative power – to which thus she claims women’s right of direct access. A2. Nature, Arts, and Imagination: Refusing Feminine Sensibility In some ways reminiscent of her first novel’s narrative of its autobiographical hero Mary’s free and solitary self-educative outdoor

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wanderings in girlhood, Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark may help to explain Wollstonecraft’s counter-intuitive claim in Rights of Woman ‘that most of the women, in the circle of my / observation, who have acted like rational creatures, or shewn any vigour of intellect, have accidentally been allowed to run wild’ (W5, 112). For both her first novel and her later travel narrative demonstrate how her fictional Mary’s and her own speculative questions often emerge when their sensibility becomes rationally engaged, when they are freely at large in the world, on their own in the wild, through their sensory appreciation of and emotional response to ‘Nature’. Mary Poovey notes that in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark ‘Wollstonecraft is now much less orthodox in describing God’s order’,44 and ‘reason and the imagination play equally important roles in educating the individual’45 – specifically in educating herself as she experiments with narrative as a method of maturing her worldly knowledge and self-knowledge simultaneously. Thus, Poovey explains, she ceases to think of emotional control as reason’s office, and instead exercises her reason as ‘an inward-turning faculty that allows the individual to examine his or her own prejudices and to empathize with others’.46 Unmistakably reminiscent of William Wordsworth’s somewhat later definition of poetry in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads as ‘emotions recollected in tranquility’,47 that work’s most contemplative passages reflect an emotional-rational dynamic similar to that of her earlier religiosity cited above: What are these imperious sympathies? How frequently has melancholy and even misanthropy taken possession of me, when the world has disgusted me, and friends have proved unkind. I have then considered myself as a particle broken off from the grand mass of mankind;—I was alone, till some involuntary sympathetic emotion, like the attraction of adhesion, made me feel that I was still a part of a mighty whole, from which I could not sever myself – not, perhaps, for the reflection has been carried very far, by snapping the thread of an existence which loses its charms in proportion as the cruel experience of life stops or poisons the current of the heart. (W6, 248–249)

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Precisely such ‘power of looking into the heart, and responsively vibrating with each emotion’ does enter into her discourse on coeducation in Rights of Woman, where she notes that this power is particularly evident in ‘men of the first genius, and most cultivated minds’, who ‘have appeared to have the highest relish for the simplest beauties of nature’ and as poets and painters have thus been enabled to ‘personify each passion’ and ‘sketch with a pencil of fire’ (W5, 238). Such artistic self-expression figures strongly in the self-education of her first novel’s autobiographical hero, Mary, who sings tunes and hymns ‘of her own composing’ when wandering freely alone outdoors as a girl who is starting to learn to think for herself (W1, 10). Therefore, Wollstonecraft theorizes in Rights of Woman that ‘A taste for the fine arts requires great cultivation’ even if ‘not more than a taste for the virtuous affections’ (W5, 237) – and is not to be reduced to women’s ‘superficial accomplishments’ (W5, 103). Her earliest Thoughts on the Education of Daughters complains that, ‘Girls learn something of music, drawing, and geography; but they do not know enough to engage their attention, and render it an employment of the mind’ (W4, 12). Although that work disapproves of children’s access to the theater much as Late Moderns sound forth about TV’s miseducative effects upon children, it does devote an entire chapter to ‘The Fine Arts’ as sources of ‘the most rational and delicate pleasure’, explicitly commending the teaching of music, drawing, writing, and reading, with particular attention to ‘the beauties of nature’ and, again, to religious consolation and contemplation: The simple melody of some artless airs has often soothed my mind, when it has been harassed by care; and I have been raised from the very depths of sorrow, by the sublime harmony of some of Handel’s compositions. I have been lifted above this little scene of grief and care, and mused on Him, from whom all bounty flows. (W4, 18)

In contrast to that early reflection on girls’ arts education, Wollstonecraft’s coeducational thought in Rights of Woman concerning arts and nature education is fleeting and sketchy at best. But her early sense of the arts’ educational value either endures or returns, for

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in her later Sweden, Norway, and Denmark she comments upon a lack of ‘the graces of architecture’ as a noteworthy fault in Christiana’s cultural formation and upon her own (perhaps typically Anglican) inability to understand how the religious Dissenters she has met at Dr Richard Price’s meeting-house could regard ‘a noble pillar, or arch, unhallowed’. She further theorizes that, Whilst men have senses, whatever soothes them lends wings to devotion; else why do the beauties of nature, where all that charm / them are spread around with a lavish hand, force even the sorrowing heart to acknowledge that existence is a blessing; and this acknowledgment is the most sublime homage we can pay to the Deity. (W6, 307)

Thus framed by her earlier and later works, Rights of Woman’s ‘hints’ noted above do suggest that aesthetic experience of the natural world and artistic activity must in some sense be integral to her developing conception of educating both the moral emotions and the reflective rationality that permeate the religious thought upon which she grounds her coeducational thought experiment. Her proposal to include both aesthetic experience of the natural world and arts in coeducation, intent upon their possible power to open the heart and cultivate affections, is particularly revolutionary in its rejection of monarchist miseducation that focuses female learning upon the arts as ornamental ‘accomplishments’ aimed merely at pleasing men with that ‘sensibility’ which ‘women are supposed to possess’ (W5, 260). Accepting Dr Samuel Johnson’s definition of sensibility as ‘quickness of sensation; quickness of perception; delicacy’ and conceptually distinguishing it from affections definitively marked by a divinely inspired symbiosis of reason and emotion, Wollstonecraft faults sensibility as ‘a polished instinct’ that ‘is not reason’, lacks any ‘trace of the image of God’, and has the immoral effect of inclining one toward extremes of ‘tyranny and indulgence’ (W5, 132, 137). Thus, although she recognizes the educational value of the arts, particularly with regard to emotional learning that involves reasoning and makes oppressed lives endurable, at the same time she worries that, under the monarchist yoke of an artificial femininity, frivolous

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arts (like superstitious pieties) pervert the moral and civic aims of education by cultivating feminine sensibility rather than divinely directed human reason and affections: Novels, music, poetry, and gallantry, all tend to make women the creatures of sensation, / and their character is thus formed [in the mould of folly] during the time they are acquiring accomplishments, the only improvement they are excited, by their station in society, to acquire. (W5, 130)

But instead of excluding arts from her imagined coeducational curriculum altogether for fear of their miseducative consequences for women, as she does formal religion, she marginalizes ‘dancing, music, and drawing’ in that curriculum as ‘relaxations’. This Lockean move in her hurriedly written Rights of Woman contradicts inexplicably the disciplined engagement that learning such arts normally requires as well as the improving power she attributes to them elsewhere, to educate the God-loving heart (W5, 242). She does not thus marginalize writing and reading, which she does consider ‘fine arts’ also (W4, 18, 20), and her posthumously published ‘Hints’ about the second part of Rights of Woman suggests that she begins later to think more extensively about the culturally formative value of those particular arts: ‘I am more and more convinced, that poetry is the first effervescence of the imagination, and the forerunner of civilization’ (W5, 274). Yet the relationship between imagination and reason continues to vex her, and remains largely unresolved, as she cites Kant’s formulation that ‘the understanding is sublime, the imagination beautiful’ and observes, ‘it is evident, that poets, and men who undoubtedly possess the liveliest imagination, are most touched by the sublime, while men who have cold, enquiring minds, have not this exquisite feeling in any great degree, and indeed seem to lose it as they cultivate their reason’ (W5, 275). Elsewhere among those same ‘Hints’, she reflects upon the distinction between the mystic’s devotion to God and that of the philosopher, observing, ‘the happiest effusions of human genius have seemed like inspiration – the deductions of reason destroy sublimity’ (W5, 274). Such evidence of her ongoing

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philosophical ruminations on imagination and reason, particularly in light of her concerns about feminine sensibility at sharp odds with her admiration for artistic genius, suggest that her thought about the arts curriculum in coeducation might have undergone some change in Rights of Woman’s unwritten sequel. Wollstonecraft’s sustained philosophical preoccupation with this problematic dualism does have some roots in her deeply gendered experience, as she remarks in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark that one explicit consequence of women’s individual ‘struggles’ against their collectively ‘oppressed state’ is that ‘we reason deeply, when we forcibly feel’ (W6, 325). Taylor explains that ‘to the eighteenthcentury mind, reason and imagination, public professions and private emotions were inseparably (if often problematically) conjoined’,48 and in particular that, ‘To Wollstonecraft, the imagination was a sacred faculty, linking the fantasizing mind to its Maker. Psychic life was the realm not of an isolated “I” but of a yearning soul reaching toward its God.’49 Although Wollstonecraft does not live to theorize at further length the ends or means of cultivating imagination within the experimental coeducational scheme that she proposes, her own religious imagination and artistic imagination have both proven vital partners to her self-educative and philosophical reasoning in its construction. Therefore, the human individual’s power of improvement upon which Wollstonecraft premises her coeducational thought experiment in Rights of Woman includes both reason and imagination, although she theorizes at explicit length only concerning reason’s contribution to that power – and God’s. What philosophical significance for coeducation, if any, should readers interpret in the masculine pronoun and father metaphor by means of which she references ‘God’, or in the feminine pronoun by means of which she references Reason, ‘the mother of wisdom’ (W5, 274)? This question may especially arise insofar as Wollstonecraft remains in the throes of deep ambivalence about the possibilities of arts education – witnessing its educative power to cultivate ‘improving’ imagination, but fearing its miseducative power to reproduce feminine sensibility. She recognizes that the revolutionary republic must not only educate women as rational God-loving citizens, but also institute coeducation that aims definitively to deconstruct the very notions of femininity

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and masculinity upon which the culture of sensibility and the Divine Right of Kings both depend.

B. Republican Coeducation and ‘Sexual Character’ Most familiar to twenty-first century educators as a descriptive term, ‘coeducation’ may mean no more than the presence of both sexes in one place, without regard to their learning or teaching methods or relations, their curricular needs or access or representation, or even the setting’s educational aims or ethos. In its thinnest sense, ‘coeducation’ is a signifier that need not even denote sex-desegregation within an educational institution, although it might.50 Denoting a cameo of Wollstonecraft’s idea that ‘to improve both sexes they ought . . . to be educated together’ (W5, 237), the term comes into use in the nineteenth century when, perhaps inspired by her experimental thinking if not economically motivated by the prospect of educational market expansion, English-speaking people begin to establish deliberately coeducational institutions such as she begins to imagine in Rights of Woman. ‘In order to open their faculties’, Wollstonecraft argues, children ‘should be excited to think for themselves; and this can only be done by mixing a number of children together, and making them jointly pursue the same objects’ (W5, 229). Formulating a thick concept of coeducation around that aim in pacifist revolt against monarchism, she envisions a system of moral education with explicit aims to cultivate both sexes’ physical, mental, and moral strength for responsible independence, domesticity, and citizenship as God-loving adults in all classes of society, and also to eradicate sexual essentialism, inequality, slavery, and irresponsibility. This effort entails, on her view, a shift in educators’ attention from training in behavior that artificially defines sexual character as ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’, toward cultivating the moral character of a human nature common to both sexes: The behaviour of young people, to each other, as men and women, is the last thing that should be thought of in education. In fact,

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behaviour in most circumstances is now so much thought of, that simplicity of character is rarely to be seen: yet, if men were only anxious to cultivate each virtue, and let it take root firmly in the mind, the grace resulting from it, its natural exteriour mark, would soon strip affectation of its flaunting plumes; because, fallacious as unstable, is the conduct that is not founded upon truth! (W5, 200)

The thick, normative concept of coeducation that Wollstonecraft theorizes takes shape, therefore, around three broad coeducational remedies for monarchist miseducation, coeducational ends and means that all require a radical commitment to honesty in teaching and learning: (1) to confound the sex distinction by cultivating both sexes’ mental and physical strength, (2) to establish sex equality by cultivating both sexes’ political and economic independence, and (3) to foster mutuality undistorted by sex, by cultivating humanity toward animals as well as reciprocally educative male-female and same-sex friendships. These three purposes form the principal foundations for the republican system of coeducation that she proposes as a revolutionary experimental alternative to monarchist miseducation. B1. Mental and Physical Strength: Confounding the Sex Distinction ‘I do earnestly wish’, Wollstonecraft declares, ‘to see the distinction of sex confounded in society, unless where love animates the behaviour’ (W5, 126). Intent upon enabling women’s direct communion with rational divinity to liberate them from arbitrary male authority and upon preventing their development of that anti-rational feminine sensibility which inspires her apparent ambivalence about arts education, Wollstonecraft further clarifies what she means by confounding the sex distinction when she specifies that ‘the first object of laudable ambition is to obtain a character as a human being, regardless of the distinction of sex’ (W5, 75). Wollstonecraft’s primary coeducational aim and revolutionary strategy therefore becomes the confounding of that sex distinction which dehumanizes women by labeling mental and physical strength ‘masculine’ and mental and physical weakness ‘feminine’. ‘I wish’, she announces in her introduction to Rights of

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Woman, ‘to persuade women to endeavour to acquire strength, both of mind and body’ (W5, 75). Consequently she proposes an experiment in coeducation that aims for both mental and bodily strength in both sexes, to deconstruct the artifices that render the monarchist rationale for neglecting women’s education fallaciously plausible. ‘Let their faculties have room to unfold, and their virtues to gain strength’, she suggests as she explains how monarchist miseducation has denied such opportunities, and then, based on this experiment, ‘determine where the whole sex must stand in the intellectual scale’ (W5, 104). Moreover, she reasons, ‘if then women do not resign the arbitrary power of beauty – they will prove that they have less mind than man’ (W5, 91). And if this coeducational experiment also offers girls ‘the same exercise as boys, not only during infancy, but youth’ so that they may ‘arrive at perfection of body’ development, thus ‘we may know how far the natural superiority of man extends’ (W5, 155). And if the experiment thereby proves ‘that woman is naturally weaker than man, whence does it follow that it is natural for her to labour to become still weaker than nature intended her to be?’ (W5, 110) Wollstonecraft allows that some people may be mentally or physically stronger than others without losing their status as humans, emphasizing that she is not claiming that distinction for only an elite few. Similarly, she argues, some biological sex differences are undeniable, and the coeducational experiment she proposes may even result in finding that women’s strengths differ from men’s strengths in degree. But leaving that question open to inquiry in light of her experiment, she argues that such differences in degree cannot justify a sex distinction that denies humanity to women, because such differences in strength are not differences in kind. She does concede ad populum that such biological differences may require some (not all) moral duties to differ by sex, but again, she argues that such duties cannot justify a sex distinction that denies humanity to women, because those moral duties that do differ by sex ‘are human duties’ that require both mental and physical strength that does not differ in kind from men’s (W5, 120, Wollstonecraft’s emphasis). Section C1, below, examines this last point closely in relation to her thought on specific coeducational institutions and practices.

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Wollstonecraft formulates the sex-confounding project of republican coeducation as aiming not just to educate both mind and body, but also as premised upon educative interdependence between mind and body: ‘on diligent inquiry, I find that strength of mind has, in most cases, been accompanied by superior strength of body’ (W5, 107). She concedes, ‘bodily strength seems to give man a natural superiority over woman; and this is the only solid basis on which the superiority of the sex can be built’ (W5, 108). She reasons, however, that women no less than men might aspire to bodily strength defined as ‘natural soundness of constitution’, which (following Locke) she considers basic to mental soundness as well – bodily strength ‘sufficient to enable [women] to earn their own subsistence . . . and to bear those bodily inconveniencies and exertions that are requisite to strengthen the mind’ (W5, 155) – just as ‘most men are sometimes obliged to bear with bodily inconveniencies, and to endure, occasionally, the inclemency of the elements’ (W5, 112). There is no need, however, for either men or women to aspire to ‘that robust tone of nerves and vigour of muscles, which arise from bodily labour, when the mind is quiescent, or only directs the hands’ (W5, 107). In making this argument for healthy practical strength rather than brute virile strength, she challenges not only popular fear that bodily strength will detract from ‘feminine graces’ in women, but also popular fear that bodily strength will detract from men’s class aspirations to ‘the character of a gentleman’ (W5, 107). But she warns that a woman cannot ‘be expected . . . to strengthen her constitution . . . if artificial notions of beauty, and false descriptions of sensibility, have been early entangled with her motives of action’ (W5, 112). Therefore, she redefines beauty – again with her eye on both sexes: ‘At twenty the beauty of both sexes is equal’ (W5, 138). Wollstonecraft’s redefinition of beauty begins with her protest against the sex distinction that popularly defines male beauty in ‘connection with the mind’ while identifying female beauty with ‘mistaken notions’ of excellence as weakness, passivity, and fashionable dress as well as with ‘mere beauty of features and complexion’ (W5, 138). Alternatively, she observes, ‘The French . . . admit more of mind into their notions of beauty’ and therefore prefer women in their thirties to younger women, because they value signs of that age ‘when vivacity

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gives place to reason, and to that majestic seriousness of character, which marks maturity’ (W5, 138–139). Keenly interested in the science of physiognomy, she advances a notion of beauty in older faces that show ‘more character to the countenance . . . and tell us not only what powers are within, but how they are employed’ (W5, 139). Through such comparisons and analyses of sexual-aesthetic values, she articulates ideals of ‘intellectual beauty’ and ‘the beauty of moral loveliness’ as appropriate coeducational aims that include qualities of character such as judgment, affection and fancy, humanity, grace and modesty, regardless of sex (W5, 219). Thus, beauty becomes synonymous with strength of mind, which Wollstonecraft defines thus: [T]he perfection of our nature and capability of happiness, must be estimated by the degree of reason, virtue, and knowledge, that distinguish the individual, and direct the laws which bind society: and that from the exercise of reason, knowledge and virtue naturally flow, is equally undeniable, if mankind be viewed collectively. (W5, 81)

Wollstonecraft’s coeducational aim of confounding the sex distinction takes shape around her conceptual analyses of strength and beauty with regard to both mental and physical aims, then. ‘Why should we injure our health by close study?’ she asks (W5, 178), consistent with her implicit premise that republican coeducation should not pit mind against body, a premise also implicit in her theorizing that ‘the care necessary / for self-preservation is the first natural exercise of the understanding’ (W5, 110). Her claim that most women of vigorous intellect whom she has known ‘have accidentally been allowed to run wild’ not only speaks to the freedom of imagination discussed as educationally vital to rational development in section A of this chapter, but also to this vigorous interdependence of mind and body by means of which she aims to confound the sex distinction and strengthen human character in both sexes (W5, 112). Her own artistic narrative of self-education in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark represents precisely such educative interdependence of mind and body, as she reports that her ‘constitution has been renovated’ with

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mentally improving effects and she particularly recounts her experience of ‘learning to row. It was not difficult; and I do not know a pleasanter exercise. I soon became expert, and my train of thinking kept time, as it were, with the oars’ (W6, 281). A coeducational experiment constructed upon such a conceptual foundation, aimed at sexual character’s deconstruction, must obviously therefore exercise both sexes’ bodies and minds, she advises in Rights of Woman: Exercise and cleanliness appear to be not only the surest means of preserving health, but of promoting beauty, the physical causes only considered; yet, this is not sufficient, moral ones must concur, or beauty will be merely of that rustic kind which blooms on the innocent, wholesome, countenances of some country people, whose minds have not been exercised. To render the person perfect, physical and moral beauty ought to be attained / at the same time. (W5, 243)

The character-strengthening value that Wollstonecraft attributes to educative interdependence between mind and body also becomes evident in her thoughts about coeducation with regard to explicitly sexual minds and bodies: ‘Women as well as men ought to have the common appetites and passions of their nature, they are only brutal when unchecked by reason: but the obligation to check them is the duty of mankind, not a sexual duty’ (W5, 200). For example, she counsels rational simplicity with regard to dress for both sexes: ‘if men and women took half as much pains to dress habitually neat, as they do to ornament, or rather to disfigure, their persons, much would be done towards the attainment of purity of mind’ (W5, 199). She extends her scorn for sexual deceptions, as instances of mental and physical weakness, to insist upon the educative value also of adults’ honesty with children of both sexes about sexual bodily matters, lest falsely modest dishonesty ‘inflame their imaginations and set their little minds to work’ (W5, 196–197), thus cultivating moral weakness in their bodily relations: Children very early see cats with their kittens, birds with their young ones, etc. Why then are they not to be told that their mothers carry

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and nourish them in the same way? As there would then be no appearance of mystery they would never think of the subject more. Truth may be told to children, if it be told gravely. (W5, 196, footnote)

For Wollstonecraft, embodying the beauty of truthfulness in teaching and learning is the most necessary antidote for monarchist artifice and fallacy, the sine qua non of moral coeducation for mental and physical strength that aims to confound the sex distinction. B2. Political and Economic Independence: Establishing Sex Equality As both a coeducational end and a coeducational means, sex equality is Wollstonecraft’s revolutionary remedy for the monarchist political economy’s oppressive construction of sexual character. ‘“Educate women like men,” says Rousseau, “and the more they resemble our sex the less power will they have over us.” This is the very point I aim at’, explains Wollstonecraft: ‘I do not wish them to have power over men; but over themselves’ (W5, 131). And likewise for men: let them not have power over women, only over themselves. ‘There must be more equality established in society,’ Wollstonecraft pleads, ‘or morality will never gain ground’ (W5, 211). To foster such equality, ‘the most perfect education’ should ‘enable the individual to attain such habits of virtue as will render it independent’ (W5, 90). In her view, ‘The being who can govern itself has nothing to fear in life’ (W5, 171); she or he is, as it were, ‘equal’ to any challenge. ‘Yet let it be remembered’, she pleads, ‘that for a small number of distinguished women I do not ask a place’ (W5, 104). She considers coeducation of rich and poor children together vital not only to sex equality thus conceived but also vital to end the monarchist property system’s economic strife, in which ‘One class presses on another’, as she insists, There must be more equality established in society, or morality will never gain ground, and this virtuous equality will not rest firmly even when founded on a rock, if one half of mankind [be] chained

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to its bottom by fate, for they will be continually undermining it through ignorance or pride. (W5, 211)

Wollstonecraft theorizes that the very possibility of a morally constituted republic will require both men’s and women’s political independence as citizens. If women’s ‘private virtue’ is to yield ‘public benefit’, then, she argues, women ‘must have a civil existence in the state, married or single’ (W5, 219). Moreover, ‘women ought to have representatives, instead of being arbitrarily governed without having any direct share allowed them in the deliberation of government’ (W5, 217). Such sex equality should cut across all classes, Wollstonecraft argues – a point that becomes especially clear in Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman as Maria, a gentle-born married woman, and Jemima, an illegitimate daughter of the serving class, educate each other by exchanging their bitter stories of injustice and hardship. Acknowledging that some citizens will earn sufficient means to employ others, who will earn their means for living by serving them, she argues for a republic that is nonetheless classless in the sense that it does not deny either education or human dignity and rights as citizens to people whose social and cultural circumstances, mental and physical strengths may differ widely. To achieve sex equality, Wollstonecraft theorizes that both men and women must learn the virtue of resigning their ‘sexual privileges’ and of becoming content with ‘the privileges inherent in’ their mere humanity (W5, 125). On one hand, for example, middle-class men must learn to resist the exclusive economic, civic, and sexual prerogatives that the monarchist property system bestows (unequally) upon them as ‘divine right’ of fathers and husbands (W5, 110). On the other hand, middle-class women must learn to surrender their expectation that every wife can and should ‘be dependent on her husband’s bounty for her subsistence during his life, or support after his death – for how can a being be generous who has nothing of its own? or virtuous, who is not free?’ (W5, 216–217) Coeducation should make learning that is necessary for such revolutionary changes possible for all women: ‘a proper education; or, to speak with more precision, a well stored mind, would enable a woman to support a

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single life with dignity’ (W5, 101). Confounding the sex distinction is a necessary pre- or co-requisite for this second coeducational strategy, inasmuch as such equality requires from both men and women independence that is not only moral and spiritual (as noted above in section A of this chapter) but also political and economic, for ‘the true definition of independence’ entails, beyond just ‘the right use of reason’ (W5, 190), mental and physical strength ‘sufficient to enable them to earn their own subsistence’ (W5, 155). For Wollstonecraft recommends that women might avoid not only ‘common prostitution’ but also the sort of marriage that constitutes ‘legal prostitution’ by becoming educated for public service: Women might certainly study the art of healing, and be physicians as well as nurses. And midwifery . . . They might, also, study politics, and settle their benevolence on the broadest basis . . . Business of various kinds, they might likewise pursue, if they were educated in a more orderly manner, which might save many from common and legal prostitution. (W5, 218)

B3. Friendship and Justice: Fostering Mutuality, Undistorted by Sex As both a coeducational end and a coeducational means, mutuality between men and women in Rights of Woman – as well as between women of different classes in Wrongs of Woman – is Wollstonecraft’s revolutionary remedy for the monarchist sexual culture’s immoral construction of sexual character. ‘Chastity, modesty, public spirit, and all the noble train of virtues, on which social virtue and happiness [are] built, should be understood and cultivated by all mankind, or they will be cultivated to little effect’ (W5, 209). To displace the sexual double standard that constructs sexual character and demoralizes monarchist education and culture, she insists upon coeducation that develops mutuality undistorted by sex, with regard to mental and bodily, emotional and rational, public and private relations. Wollstonecraft theorizes that just as educating for sexual equality entails educating to confound the sex distinction, coeducation for such extensive mutuality will also depend upon educating for sexual equality: ‘such a degree

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of equality should be established between the sexes as would shut out gallantry and coquetry, yet allow friendship and love to temper the heart for the discharge of higher duties’ (W5, 241). To twenty-first-century readers, Wollstonecraft can seem unduly sanguine about the practical ease and moral consequence of such coeducation for mutual friendship and love among young people: ‘I should not fear any other consequence than that some early attachment might take place’ (W5, 240). She is eager to see ‘the affections common to both [sexes] . . . gain their due strength by the discharge of mutual duties’ (W5, 237). Claiming that ‘the main pillars of friendship, are respect and confidence’ while also recognizing that ‘In youth, the fondest friendships are formed’ (W5, 237, 234), she even recommends ‘early marriages’, in which young people ‘choose companions for life themselves’, as a way of preventing prolonged youthful libertinism and of fostering youthful maturity (W5, 240). Such optimistic reasoning may today seem naive at best, trivializing difficulties that educators and young people, especially young women, have struggled against at length in coeducational settings of a sort that Wollstonecraft has never experienced herself. She does nonetheless recognize that moral education adequate to formation of such strong friendships, loves, and marriages among young people requires understanding available only through extensive and complicated reflection, as she writes in Rights of Woman that ‘friendship is a serious affection; the most sublime of all affections, because it is founded on principle, and cemented by time. The very reverse may be said of love. In a great degree, love and friendship cannot subsist in the same bosom’ (W5, 142). Her own later experience of love and friendship with William Godwin contradicts this last point, although her thinking here does demonstrate her keen awareness of possible difficulties that her sanguinity seems otherwise to overlook. She knows that ‘a little sensibility, and great weakness, will produce a strong sexual attachment, and that reason must cement friendship’ (W5, 261), and advocates educating women to abstain from love that lacks the virtue of mutuality: When women are once sufficiently enlightened to discover their real interest, on a grand scale, they will, I am persuaded, be very

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ready to resign all the prerogatives of love, that are not mutual, speaking of them as lasting prerogatives, for the calm satisfaction of friendship, and the tender confidence of habitual esteem. (W5, 173)

Yet ‘it is far better’, she muses, ‘to be often deceived than never to trust; to be disappointed in love than never to love; to lose a husband’s fondness than forfeit his esteem’ (W5, 170). Moreover, she suggests that libertine ‘men ought to maintain the women whom they have seduced’ (W5, 209), and women should not pardon such men while spurning other women who become their victims – even in the twentyfirst century often the unquestioned social practice when schoolgirls become pregnant. If both sexes are to become physically and mentally strong, then their educators who aim to confound the sex distinction must recognize that the sexes ‘mutually corrupt and improve each other’ (W5, 209), and therefore that their ‘improvement must be mutual’. Educative mutuality undistorted by sex not only requires friendship as a coeducational end and means, but also a practical commitment to justice that comprehends this principle, Wollstonecraft suggests. If both sexes are to honor the rights and responsibilities of independence, political and economic, then their educators who aim to establish sex equality must teach them to practice peer mutuality in self-government, to be ‘independent’ of their teachers ‘respecting punishments. They should be tried by their peers, which would make an admirable method of fixing sound principles of justice in mind’ (W5, 242). As in Real Life, therefore, in Rights of Woman she theorizes that coeducation as the teaching and learning of mutuality for justice must have its foundation in learning compassion first as ‘humanity to animals’ (W5, 243), for ‘Justice, or even benevolence, will not be a powerful spring of action unless it [extend] to the whole creation; nay, I believe that it may be delivered as an axiom that those who can see pain, unmoved, will soon learn to inflict it’ (W5, 244).

C. A National Coeducational System To achieve revolutionary aims, coeducation – in Wollstonecraft’s thick, republican sense of the concept – responds to the cultural

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complexities of that disordered monarchist educational landscape whose immorality and ideological foundation upon sexual character concerns her: especially parenting, schooling, the Church, professions, print media, and government. Rather than abolish all these educational institutions, she proposes their innovative reconfiguration as coeducation, to remedy some of their constitutive injustices by refusing the monarchist ideology of sexual character. Thus, even though she critically analyzes the spousal and parentalfilial relations whose moral faults reiterate implicitly the Divine Right of Kings, she argues for the moral-educational significance and revolutionary public necessity of affectionate, egalitarian homes as coeducational sites. Even though she critiques various schooling and government practices, she calls for the government’s establishment of a national system of day schools for all, rich and poor, male and female. Even though she scorns obligatory public worship as an educational practice, she premises her coeducational thought experiment upon her passionate belief in the perfection of God and upon her desire for women ‘to feel the dignity of a rational will that only bows to God’ (W5, 104) rather than to the prescriptions and prejudices of imperfect, imperious monarchs and other men. Even though she condemns the professions and the imperialist government as morally and educationally corrupting for men, still she wants some humanely purposeful professions opened to women, and she wants legislative representatives for them. Moreover, even though Wollstonecraft criticizes the ‘modern publications’ of those men and women who have popularized Rousseau’s thought on women’s education, and confesses that ‘indignantly, have I heard women argue in the same track as men, and adopt the sentiments that brutalize them, with all the pertinacity of ignorance’ (W5, 171), still she takes care in the midst of her detailed fault-finding to acknowledge with respect and admiration the contributions that a few learned women’s writings have made to her own coeducational thought. Thus she signals the presence of an incipient intellectual tradition whose descendents, later to be termed ‘feminists’, will develop it further. A critic of war and of cruelty to animals as instances of men’s inhumanity, she offers no argument for militarizing women; instead, she imagines a republican system of coeducation as a means of non-violent revolution against misogyny,

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monarchism, and child abuse. But she does not explain how the marginalized fine arts curriculum that she proposes as ‘relaxations’ in Rights of Woman can adequately educate republican imaginations for the significant demands that such an incompletely formulated revolutionary experiment must make upon both their creativity and their receptivity to innovation. With undeniable originality, Wollstonecraft conceptualizes coeducation as simultaneously private and public, engaging a web of relations among diverse, distinctive social institutions – institutions such as universal schooling, domestic childrearing, representative government, professions, and other public media for both sexes’ broadest possible civic and cultural participation, albeit with some explicit class-stratification occurring as children mature. Thus, despite her unmistakable debts to both Locke’s and Rousseau’s thoughts on children’s private education for rational virtue by fathers and tutors, she departs radically from both philosophers with her innovative concept of coeducation as multi-institutional, ‘combining a public and a private education’ (W5, 230), in which women become educated and themselves claim coeducational agency, to exercise educative power in relation to themselves and others of both sexes. Her thought experiment leaves the pragmatics of this revolutionary proposal incompletely theorized, vulnerable to accusations of naive optimism, insofar as it fails to invoke its own republican premises and metaphors to conceptualize an institutional ethics of publicprivate relations for such coeducation to ensure its aimed-for provisions of liberty and justice for all. Rights of Woman recommends no conception of childrearing in paternal widowhood to match its concerns about childrearing in maternal widowhood, few hints about fathers’ childrearing duties in partnership with mothers, no constitutional rights for children, no checks and balances among the various coeducational agents proposed to protect children from private or public institutional tyrannies, no anticipation of sexual abuse or strife either among children or among their co-educators, much less between children and their co-educators. Yet to count such observations as grounds for dismissal in advance of the coeducational experimentation that Wollstonecraft is proposing may court the fallacy of anachronism. Her thought experiment as it stands is nonetheless

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brilliantly revolutionary, inasmuch as it imagines coeducation as a multi-faceted project for cultural renovation in republican terms that invite such unprecedented political inquiry – implicitly anti-slavery and anti-war – on behalf of children of both sexes. Whereas both Locke and Rousseau conceptualize private education over which fathers preside, Wollstonecraft conceptualizes the necessity of educated mothers – that is mothers without sexual character, mothers with moral human character. She envisions human mothers and human fathers as co-educators of both their children and each other at home, in partnership with day-schools. This proposed homeschool interdependence constitutes the institutional core of that republican cultural configuration which she envisions as a national system of coeducation, ‘hints’ of whose curriculum she sketches to suit her moral purpose of replacing artificial, oppressive, and duplicitous sexual character with strong, independent, loving, and just human character. C1. Educating Mothers: Claiming Republican Coeducational Agency ‘If children are to be educated to understand the true principle of patriotism’, Wollstonecraft warns revolutionaries, then ‘their mother must be a patriot’ (W5, 66). She therefore proposes to replace the patriarchal education of elite monarchist culture founded upon an artificial notion of sexual character, which neglects women’s learning and is therefore ‘subversive of morality’ (W5, 67), with republican coeducation of, by, and for both sexes in all classes of society. Arguing that ‘till men become attentive to the duty of a father, it is vain to expect women to spend that time in the nursery which they . . . choose to spend at their glass’ (W5, 68), she rethinks the meaning of motherhood as pedagogically integral to coeducation. Wollstonecraft’s proposed republican coeducational system for all socioeconomic classes of children requires mothers to teach fathers as well as their children and other women. She reasons that motherhood must become an office of civic importance and virtuous duty, a site of what might be called coeducational agency. Therefore, this office requires mothers’ education to confound the sex distinction with their human strength, both mental and physical, to claim sex equality through

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their own political-economic independence, and to foster mutuality through their honest companionship and friendship with men and through child-rearing that elicits filial affection and solicitude. The imputation of sexual character to motherhood is, for Wollstonecraft, a grievous category mistake. Mothers’ duties may differ from fathers’ duties, she concedes, but the prevailing sexual ontology of monarchism, endorsed by Rousseau, makes moral fulfillment of mothers’ duties unlikely, if not impossible, she argues. For their duties are ‘human duties’ that require both mental and physical strength, both rationality and health, learned virtues that are not distinctively sexual (W5, 120). Indeed, they are at odds with the sexual character of monarchist femininity. Therefore, she theorizes, women’s ‘first duty is to themselves as rational creatures, and the next, in point of importance, as citizens, is that, which includes so many, of a mother’ (W5, 216). Thus maternal duties are natural civic duties within Wollstonecraft’s scheme of republican coeducation. Mothers who delegate this civic duty to others sacrifice their natural humanity to artifice and become ‘mere dolls’ (W5, 216), unnatural creatures of sexual character. ‘By the exercise of their bodies and minds’, contrary to the dictates of monarchist sexual character, Wollstonecraft theorizes, ‘women would acquire that mental activity so necessary in the maternal character’ (W5, 250). Thus the natural human duties of motherhood provide her chief justification for educating women no less than men: ‘The conclusion I wish to draw is obvious,’ she declares; ‘make women rational creatures and free citizens, and they will quickly become good wives, and mothers; that is – if men do not neglect the duties of husbands and fathers’ (W5, 250). Wollstonecraft alludes several times in Rights of Woman to the ‘peculiar duties of a father’ without making exactly clear what those duties are beyond bestowing ‘caresses’ upon his child and the child’s mother (W5, 213). Presumably paternal duties do not necessarily include direct health care for his family. For she wants coeducational day schools to teach women ‘the elements of anatomy and medicine, not only to enable them to take proper care of their own health, but to make them rational / nurses of their infants, parents, and husbands’ (W5, 249). She seems to envision a father who has respect for and

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delight in such maternal skill and care, as an affectionate, understanding human witness and ‘help meet’ (W5, 220, Wollstonecraft’s emphasis). Fathers must learn this particular virtue from their children’s mothers. Wollstonecraft’s advocacy for maternal breastfeeding – rather than sending children out to hired wet-nurses – is ironically integral to her argument for coeducational deconstruction of monarchist sexual character, insofar as she commends its power to ‘stamp impressions’ on paternal hearts (W5, 212), improve maternal health, and practice some sort of planned parenthood. ‘For nature has so wisely ordered things, that did women suckle their children, they would preserve their own health, and there would be such an interval between the birth of each child, that we should seldom see a houseful of babes’ (W5, 263). This presumed contraceptive utility of maternal breastfeeding becomes important to her argument that maternal duty is inconsistent with the monarchist notion of sexual character. For she envisions mothers as women who earn their own bread and achieve moral autonomy of a sort that rules out patriarchal interpretation of ‘the respective duties’ of mothers and fathers in her scheme of republican coeducation (W5, 213): ‘To be a good mother – a woman must have sense, and that independence of mind which few possess who are taught to depend entirely on their husbands’ (W5, 223). Consequently, Wollstonecraft pleads strongly against dumbingdown maternal education, insisting that mothers’ ‘minds can take in much more, and ought to do so, or they will never become sensible mothers’ (W5, 261–262). Sensible, independent mothers within Wollstonecraft’s scheme of republican coeducation will not only use lactation to moderate family size, then; they will also set aside ‘the fashionable vagaries of dress’ that constitute so much of the artifice of feminine sexual character to ‘pursue a plan of conduct’ with some self-directed deliberation (W5, 263). (By ‘plan of conduct’ she seems to mean something vaguely like a mother’s version of the late modern bureaucrat’s strategic plan, or the monk’s rule of life.) For she insists with optimism that must now seem naive to many, especially if her ideal mothers are to rely upon no ‘hirelings’ to assist with infant-feeding and other childcare, that

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the management of their household and children need not shut them out from literature, [or] prevent their attaching themselves to a science, with that steady eye that strengthens the mind, or practicing one of the fine arts that cultivate the taste. (W5, 263)

In defense of her proposal thus to broaden mothers’ education, she theorizes ‘from the history of all nations’ that women ‘confined to merely domestic pursuits’ are apt, ‘unless their minds take a wider range’, to make a botch of child-rearing by occupying their minds mischievously and thus to ‘not fulfil [sic] family duties’ (W5, 245). Wollstonecraft charges that women cannot become good mothers unless they live fully as educated adults: nor will women ever fulfill the peculiar duties of their sex, till they become enlightened citizens, till they become free by being enabled to earn their own / subsistence, independent of men; in the same manner, I mean, to prevent misconstruction, as one man is independent of another. (W5, 237)

Therefore, one particular paternal duty becomes clear: ‘Would men but generously snap our chains,’ Wollstonecraft suggests, ‘they would find us more observant daughters, more affectionate sisters, more faithful wives, more reasonable mothers – in a word, better citizens’ (W5, 220). Mutuality, undistorted by sex, between mothers and fathers is integral to Wollstonecraft’s notion of coeducational agency as parental partnership: ‘children will never be properly educated till friendship subsists between parents’ (W5, 265). Wollstonecraft fears that ‘marriage will never be held sacred till women, by their being brought up with men, are prepared to be their companions rather than their mistresses’ (W5, 237). When erotic attraction between spouses cools, ‘when the lover becomes only a friend, and mutual confidence takes place of overstrained admiration’, then their shared love for their child should bring into their relationsip ‘a mutual care’ that ‘produces a new mutual sympathy’ (W5, 223). Wollstonecraft theorizes that such parental mutuality sets an educative example for children

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and naturally produces their ‘filial reverence’ (W5, 227), that mutuality between parents and children may also develop from parents’ deliberate efforts to educate their children’s affections: The parent who sedulously endeavours to form the heart and enlarge the understanding of his child, has given that dignity to the discharge of a duty, common to the whole animal world, that only reason can give. This is the parental affection of humanity, and leaves instinctive natural affection far behind. Such a parent acquires all the rights of the most sacred friendship, and his advice, even when his child is advanced in life, demands serious consideration. (W5, 225)

Wollstonecraft thus makes a conceptual distinction between ‘instinctive natural’ affection and educated affection that reflects ‘humanity’. This distinction is a necessary premise for her analysis of the affection that co-educative motherhood requires and teaches. For she concedes that ‘if nature destined woman, in particular, for the discharge of domestic duties, she made her susceptible of the attached affections in a great degree’ (W5, 238). Yet she argues in Rights of Woman that only by ‘allowing the sexes to associate together in every pursuit’ can women become ‘acquainted with the anatomy of the mind’ to an extent that makes the empathetic exercise of such domestic affections possible and reasonable (W5, 249). Judging a parent’s ‘natural affection’ for her or his child ‘a very faint tie’, while commending maternal breastfeeding of an infant as ‘calculated to inspire maternal and filial affection’, she advocates also ‘the habitual exercise of a mutual sympathy’ as a deliberate coeducative means of fostering affection among parents and children (W5, 223). In this case of maternal breastfeeding, the distinction between natural and educated maternal and filial affections may become unclear, particularly when a reader considers that the alternative to maternal breastfeeding is often to remove the suckling infant from access to the deliberately and habitually exercised mutual sympathies of home and family. Thus fathers, too, can only learn to love their infant children who remain at home for maternal breastfeeding.

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Such maternally directed coeducation as the exercise of mutual sympathy takes on more vivid detail in Wollstonecraft’s posthumously published, incomplete Lessons, written for Fanny Imlay and as-yetunborn ‘William’ Godwin, her only educational work based upon her own first-hand maternal experience – a domestic pedagogy for toddlers. Lessons’ teaching voice is maternal, but ‘Papa’ figures prominently in the story teaching the little girl not to make noise when her mother has a headache, for example. The mother’s care for Papa, Papa’s love for the mother, Papa’s knowing what is healthy to eat, Papa’s smiling and laughing and playing with the little girl, the little girl’s learning to be considerate of her mother and Papa, the little girl’s learning to comfort a startled puppy, the little girl’s learning about her baby brother’s needs and development, all figure in this little toddler curriculum. These are ‘lessons’ in mutuality and domestic affection that involve both mother and father in coeducative childrearing together, although the chief teaching voice that exercises empathy with the child’s point of view is maternal. The pedagogy of Lessons thus reflects Wollstonecraft’s notion in Rights of Woman that ‘It must be allowed that the affection which we inspire always resembles that we cultivate; so that natural affections, which have been supposed almost distinct from reason, may be found more nearly connected with judgment than is commonly allowed’ (W5, 227). She makes this symbiosis of reason and ‘natural affections’ clear when in Lessons the maternal voice teaches the little girl how ‘thinking’ may be evident in the child’s own loving act of caring for her papa’s comfort: You say that you do not know how to think. Yes; you do a little. The other day papa was tired; he had been walking about all the morning. After dinner he fell asleep on the sopha. I did not bid you be quiet; but you thought of what papa said to you, when my head ached. This made you think that you ought not to make a noise, when papa was resting himself. So you came to me, and said to me, very softly, Pray reach me my ball, and /I will go and play in the garden, till papa wakes. You were going out; but thinking again, you came back to me on your tiptoes. Whisper – whisper. Pray mama, call me, when papa

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wakes; for I shall be afraid to open the door to see, lest I should disturb him. Away you went. – Creep – Creep – and shut the door as softly as I could have done myself. That was thinking . . . (W4, 474)

Does such teaching exercise affection or reason? Is love or reason the object lesson for the child? Is reason ‘sovereign’ here, or is maternal-filial love? The maternal voice of the Lessons text nurtures the child’s self-esteem, praises the child’s empathetic consideration for her father, and at the same time engages her rationality in understanding the conceptual meaning of ‘thinking’. This pedagogical narrative illustrates the symbiosis of reason and love that is paradigmatic for Wollstonecraft’s concept of coeducation at home. Does Wollstonecraft intend that the publication of such lessons might teach fathers as well as mothers how to teach their children safe and loving, thoughtful ways of living at home? Rights of Woman does not treat childrearing with the same gender symmetry it treats other aspects of education for human life, although it mentions that both fathers and mothers have ‘duties’ to their children. Whereas it is clear why fathers should not be expected to breastfeed their infant-children, it is not clear why fathers should not be educated, just like mothers, to care for their own health and that of their children, spouses, and parents. Wollstonecraft has not fully examined the reasoning behind the customary assignment of domestic responsibilities to women; this is one subject she has in mind when she explains in her ‘Advertisement’ for Rights of Woman, ‘Many subjects . . . which I have cursorily alluded to, call for particular investigation, especially the laws relative to women and the consideration of their peculiar duties. These will furnish ample matter for a second volume’ (W5, 70). In maintaining such a notion of ‘peculiar duties’ for women, does she assume that a widowed father (such as Godwin becomes upon Wollstonecraft’s own death) will hire ‘a woman of tenderness and discernment’ like Real Life’s Mrs Mason to raise his children? Or would she condemn his dependence upon ‘hirelings’ as she condemns mothers’ dependence on hirelings to wet-nurse, raise, and

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care for their children? Would she say to income-producing father as she does to income-producing mother, ‘An active mind embraces the whole circle of its duties, and finds time enough for / all’ (W5, 241)? The absence of attention to fathering in Rights of Woman, coupled with its insistence on sex equality and mutuality, renders its argument for coeducational motherhood without sexual character ambiguous with regard to its rational consistency or self-contradiction; in sum, her coeducational thought experiment is incomplete and therefore its meaning is on many points indeterminate. How can coeducation foster ‘human’ and ‘moral’ rather than ‘sexual’ character if coeducators differentiate maternal from paternal childrearing duties? How can such ontological differentiation avoid compromising sex equality or mutuality? C2. Public and Private Coeducation: Building a Coeducational Republic Wollstonecraft’s critiques of monarchist miseducation via both schooling and domestic childrearing, summarized in Chapter 3, lead her to the logical conclusion that: The only way to avoid two extremes equally injurious to morality, would be to contrive some way of combining a public and private education. Thus to make men citizens two natural steps might be taken, which seem directly to lead to the desired point; for the domestic affections, that first open the heart to the various modifications of humanity, would be cultivated, whilst the children were nevertheless allowed to spend great part of their time, on terms of equality, with other children. (W5, 230)

Thus she argues on one hand that ‘In order then to inspire a love of home and domestic pleasures, children ought to be educated at home’ (W5, 234), and on the other hand that ‘day schools, for particular ages, should be established by government, in which boys and girls might be educated together’ (W5, 239). Wollstonecraft’s notion of children’s coeducation at home depends upon women’s education in coeducational schools. If such an

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educational ideal of domesticity were universally practical, if it could be located in a world without mental illness, alcoholism and poverty, no child need ever suffer the abuse and neglect that has damaged her and her five younger siblings in Edward Wollstonecraft’s household. Philosophically assuming such an ideal’s broad practicality for the sake of her thought experiment, she also proposes ‘the necessity of establishing proper day-schools . . . these should be national establishments’ (W5, 234), public places ‘where boys and girls, the rich and poor, should meet together’ (W5, 239–240); schools for children aged five to nine should be ‘absolutely free and open to all classes’ (W5, 239), and ‘these would be schools of morality’ (W5, 241). She sketches broadly how such free public schools’ curriculum might serve her principled purpose of fostering moral human character rather than sexual character in children. Whether at home or at school, her coeducational aim of confounding the sex distinction by cultivating children’s mental and bodily strength therefore applies. For mental strength, ‘only that education deserves emphatically to be called cultivation of mind, which teaches young people how to begin to think’ (W5, 234–235). To educate young children for physical strength, they ‘should not be confined to any sedentary employment for more than an hour at a time’ (W5, 240). Although ‘an habit of personal order, which has more effect on the moral character, than is, in general, supposed, can only be acquired at home’ (W5, 236), schooling is vital to Wollstonecraft’s coeducational purpose, for ‘when children are confined to the society of men and women, they very soon acquire that kind of premature manhood which stops the growth of every vigorous power of mind or body’ (W5, 229). Rather than confining children to the indoors, therefore, she proposes, ‘The school-room ought to be surrounded by a large piece of ground, in which the children might be usefully exercised’ (W5, 240). For although she imagines that ‘Reading, writing, arithmetic, natural history, and some simple experiments in natural philosophy, might fill up the day’, and ‘The elements of religion, history, the history of man, and politics, might also be taught by conversations, in the Socratic form’, schools should not sacrifice children’s education for physical strength to educate their mental strength: ‘these pursuits should never encroach on gymnastic plays in

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the open air’ (W5, 240). She advocates teaching botany, mechanics, and astronomy in ways that simultaneously teach and entertain the children, through demonstrations. Wollstonecraft envisions children graduating from such schools at age nine to move to other schools, depending upon their abilities and purposes in life. Thus ‘young people’ of both sexes and ‘of superior abilities, or fortune, might now be taught, in another school, the dead and living languages, the elements of science, and continue the study of history and politics, on a more extensive scale, which would not exclude polite literature’ (W5, 240). Thus women might learn subjects to which monarchist miseducation has generally denied them access, such as ‘the progress of the human understanding in the improvements of the sciences and arts; never forgetting the science of morality, or the political history of mankind’ (W5, 249). In broadly and roughly sketching coeducational schooling, Mary Wollstonecraft addresses her purpose of educating children of both sexes and all classes for the independence upon which social equality depends. With pragmatic regard both to sexual character and class, she advises, ‘To prevent any distinctions of vanity, they should be dressed alike, and all obliged to submit to the same discipline, / or leave the school’ (W5, 240). On one hand, in the more advanced phase of schooling after age nine, ‘those who were destined for particular professions, might attend, three or four mornings in the week, the schools appropriated for their immediate instruction’ (W5, 242); on the other hand, in other schools: girls and boys, intended for domestic employments, or mechanical trades, ought to . . . receive instruction, in some measure appropriated to the destination of each individual, the two sexes being still together in the / morning; but in the afternoon, the girls should attend a school, where plain-work, mantua-making, millinery, &c. would be their employment. (W5, 240)

Coeducation for mutuality undistorted by sex must take place in both homes and schools, Wollstonecraft argues. ‘Were boys and girls permitted to pursue the same studies together,’ she suggests, ‘those

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graceful decencies might early be inculcated which produce modesty without those sexual distinctions that taint the mind’ (W5, 237). Indeed, she recommends that ‘in youth the seeds of every affection should be sown’ (W5, 229). Yet because ‘the respectful regard, which is felt for a parent, is very different from the social affections that are to constitute the happiness of life as it advances’ (W5, 229), her coeducational scheme suggests a need for some mutuality of moral purpose between school and home. Particularly with regard to education of young people’s emotions, for which her scheme suggests no strategic means in the event of family fracture or other dysfunction, she argues that if you wish to make good citizens, you must first exercise the affections of a son and a brother. This is the only way to expand the heart; for public affections, as well as public virtues, must ever grow out of the private character, or they are merely meteors that shoot athwart a dark sky, and disappear as they are gazed at and admired. (W5, 234)

In developing that claim, she reasons that ‘Few . . . have had much affection for mankind, who did not first love their parents, their brothers, sisters, and even the domestic brutes, whom they first played with’ (W5, 234), and further that ‘if marriage be the cement of society, mankind should all be educated after the same model, or the intercourse of the sexes will never deserve the name of fellowship’ (W5, 237). Thus she not only expects domestic affections to provide a necessary foundation for schooling, she also expects schooling to educate people for more moral and just engagement in the private coeducation of home-life, arguing that children ‘should be sent to school to mix with a number of equals, for only by the jostlings of equality can we form a just opinion of ourselves’ (W5, 245). Does she assume that children whose home lives have failed to educate their intimate affections can thus learn public affections, or that they cannot? Does she assume that children of both sexes from homes where the divine right of fathers, husbands, and eldest sons still prevails can appreciate without any particular instruction the coeducation

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for moral human character to be experienced through ‘jostlings of equality’ at school? Her sketch – a rough and incomplete sketch – of home-school interdependence in coeducation resembles the taken-for-granted institutional shape of that more thinly conceptualized coeducation in common practice throughout the Eurocentric English-speaking world’s wealthiest nations over two centuries after Wollstonecraft’s death. Her predictions have proven prophetic about the possibilities of coeducation, where her coeducational ends and means have been tried most vigorously and imaginatively, but the notion of sexual character has survived because those coeducational ends and means have scarcely been imagined, much less tried, throughout much of the world. No longer actually governed by the Divine Right of Kings, moreover, some nations have accepted government instead by ‘the chase after wealth’ to which ‘everything must give way; nay, is sacrificed’ till ‘all the endearing charities of citizen, husband, father, brother, become empty names’ (W6, 342). In these wealthy nations, Wollstonecraft’s critique of monarchist miseducation may therefore still strike a strangely thought-provoking note. Nonetheless, in these wealthy nations, the coeducational experiment she proposes in Rights of Woman has proven some women’s mental and physical strength while leaving many others’ sadly underdeveloped, enabled some women’s independence while leaving many others still dependent despite their extensive private and public labors, and shown a few the joy of mutuality undistorted by sex while leaving many, perhaps most, to struggle against harassment or other violence at home, in school, at work, and at war. With such substantial practical hindsight, her late modern readers may agree that the coeducational aims motivating Wollstonecraft’s sketch of coeducational home-school interdependence suggest many questions and problems that she does not consider. Part Three will gloss some of those inquiries that constitute a tradition of coeducational thought after her, and Part Four will suggest what rereading her work with critical hindsight and foresight may contribute to that tradition’s twenty-first- century development. With her extensive ‘animadversions’ in Rights of Woman – her rigorous critical review of published, popular educational thought by Rousseau, Fordyce, Gregory,

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Chesterfield, de Stael, Genlis, Chapone, Macaulay, and others (most of which Janet Todd has collected in her multi-volume Female Education in the Enlightenment)51 Wollstonecraft makes clear her belief that such writing does have power to stop or move the coeducational imagination. Thus the home-school interdependence that she idealizes in Rights of Woman does not stand alone in her imagined cultural configuration of coeducation: intellectual culture and mass media, then just beginning to flourish in print, are integral to it, as well.

Notes 1. Janet Todd (1991, 2004), ‘Introduction’, in Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley. Mary / Maria / Matilda. London: Penguin, xi. 2. Jane Roland Martin (1994), ‘A Professorship and Office of One’s Own’, in Changing the Educational Landscape: Philosophy, Women, and Curriculum. New York: Routledge, Chapter 6. 3. Changing the Educational Landscape, 1. 4. Coeducational thought may not be entirely new even to nineteenth-century African-American educational theorists such as Anna Julia Cooper, discussed in Part Three; Booker T. Washington, whose Tuskegee Institute was coeducational but with a sex-segregated occupational curriculum; and W.E.B. DuBois, who wrote poignantly of a woman student’s education aborted for family responsibilities, in ‘Of the meaning of progress’, in The Souls of Black Folk, New York: Signet Classic. The educational thought of Frederick Douglass, a feminist sympathizer, also merits examination in this regard. Except for Cooper’s likely contact with Wollstonecraft’s thought, this tradition’s coeducational thought has clear roots in its own particular pragmatic concerns and probably also in Plato’s argument for coeducation. 5. Mary Warnock (ed.) (1996), Women Philosophers. London: Everyman, xxiv. 6. Miriam Brody, ‘The vindication of the writes of women: Mary Wollstonecraft and Enlightenment rhetoric’, in Maria J. Falco (ed.) (1996), Feminist Interpretations of Mary Wollstonecraft. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 117.

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7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18.

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Carol H. Poston, Feminist Interpretations, 103. Brody, Feminist Interpretations, 108. Brody, Feminist Interpretations, 106. Wendy Guenther-Canada, Feminist Interpretations, 216. Warnock, Women Philosophers, xxix–xxx. Warnock, Women Philosophers, xxxiv. Warnock, Women Philosophers, xxxiv. Jane Roland Martin, Reclaiming a Conversation, 76. Martin, Reclaiming a Conversation, 91. Moira Gatens, ‘The oppressed state of my sex: Wollstonecraft on reason, feeling, and equality’, in Mary Lyndon Shanley and Carole Pateman (eds) (2003), Feminist Interpretations and Political Theory. State College: Pennsylvania State University Press, 116. Gatens, Feminist Interpretations and Political Theory, 116. Catherine Villanueva Gardner (2000), ‘Mary Wollstonecraft and the separation of poetry and politics’, in Rediscovering Women Philosophers: Genre and the Boundaries of Philosophy. Boulder, CO: Westview, 119; and in Gardner (2004) Women Philosophers: Genre and the Boundaries of Philosophy. Boulder, CO: Westview, 119. Gardner, Women Philosophers, 107, 120. Catriona Mackenzie, ‘Reason and sensibility’, in Linda Lopez (ed.) (1996), Hypatia’s Daughters. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 181–203. Guenther-Canada, Feminist Interpretations, 212. Gardner, Women Philosophers, 121. Jane Duran (2006), Eight Women Philosophers: Theory, Politics, and Feminism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 131. Martin, Reclaiming a Conversation, 182. Gardner, Women Philosophers, 121. Gardner, Women Philosophers, 121; see also Martin, Reclaiming a Conversation. ‘Miseducation’ is John Dewey’s philosophical term for education that arrests rather than fosters the growth and continuity of experience, Carter Godwin Woodson’s term for AfricanAmericans’ post-Emancipation enslavement by White education, Noam Chomsky’s term for education that exacts obedience rather than fostering independent thought, and Jane Roland

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30.

31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40.

41.

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Martin’s term for cultural transmission of violence, hatred, and bigotry from one generation to the next. Jane Roland Martin (1985), Reclaiming a Conversation: The Ideal of the Educated Woman. New Haven: Yale University Press, 77. Alan Richardson, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft on education’, in Claudia L. Johnson (ed.) (2002), The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 37. Jane Roland Martin, ‘What should we do with a hidden curriculum when we find one?’ in Changing the Educational Landscape: Philosophy, Women, and Curriculum (1994). New York: Routledge, Chapter 8. However, many Late Moderns unfamiliar with feminist theory often use the terms ‘gender’ and ‘sex’ interchangeably. Martin, Reclaiming a Conversation, 76, 77. Moira Ferguson (1993), Colonialism and Gender Relations from Mary Wollstonecraft to Jamaica Kincaid: East Caribbean Connections. New York: Columbia University Press, 9. Ferguson, Colonialism and Gender Relations, 22, 15. Ferguson, Colonialism and Gender Relations, 33. Ferguson, Colonialism and Gender Relations, 15. Susan Laird (2006), ‘On Wollstonecraft’s moral-educational aim “to strengthen the body”’, in JoPHE (Journal of Philosophy and History of Education) 56: 201–205. Laird, ‘Strengthen the body’. Amartya Sen (March 2005), ‘Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary!’ Feminist Economics, 11(1): 6. Catherine Macaulay also advocates coeducation in her Letters on Education, as noted in Part One, but without the extensive practical detail that marks Wollstonecraft’s more famous treatise. Here ‘republican’ does not refer to the Republican Party in the United States, nor does it presume to engage with technical precision any particular concept of ‘republican’ government studied or debated by contemporary political theorists; the term more simply and generally locates Wollstonecraft’s thought within Georgian England’s popular political controversies, to acknowledge her coeducational theorizing as a reasoned expression of strong sympathies with revolutionary American and

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French attempts to reject monarchies and establish constitutional republics. Barbara Taylor (2003), Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination. New York: Cambridge University Press, 142. Of course, ‘justice’ is an ambiguous, not to say amorphous, concept. Mary Poovey (1984), The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 91. Poovey, The Proper Lady, 85. Poovey, The Proper Lady, 86. William Wordsworth, in the ‘Preface’ to Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth (2005), Lyrical Ballads. New York: Routledge, 307. Taylor, Feminist Imagination, 18–19. Taylor, Feminist Imagination, 21. Susan Laird, ‘Rethinking Coeducation’, Studies in Philosophy and Education, 13, 361–78. Janet Todd (ed.) (1996), Female Education in the Age of Enlightenment. New York: Ashgate.

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Chapter 5

Coeducational Thought After Wollstonecraft

Many other scholarly volumes have chronicled Mary Wollstonecraft’s influence upon political and moral thought, as well as her influences upon English-speaking feminists and feminisms. But this volume’s explicitly biographical focus on her coeducational thought demands particular attention to immediate private reception of that thought, no less than to its long-term public influence. Wollstonecraft’s writing and teaching both exert immediate educational influences upon her survivors – William Godwin the widowed father, Fanny Imlay and Mary Godwin the orphaned daughters, and at least one of the King sisters whom she has taught as governess. Wollstonecraft’s student Margaret King betrays her class to become a prominent Irish revolutionary and also pursues medical training generally then denied to women. Because Wollstonecraft’s daughter by Godwin, later known as Mary Shelley, makes such a significant contribution to English literary culture, the private reception of Wollstonecraft’s educational thought has public consequence also. Illuminating some pragmatic critical questions about her educational thought, their private reception of her work reflects admiration and a tragic sense of loss, no less evident in Shelley’s classic novel of horror Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, published in 1831, than in Godwin’s Memoirs of the Author of ‘The Rights of Woman’ , written immediately after Wollstonecraft’s death, first published in 1798. A counterrevolutionary public makes immediate political use of the latter work to damage Wollstonecraft’s reputation, contrary to its grief-stricken author’s loving intentions, just as Hollywood’s commercial film representations of the former work have upstaged both Wollstonecraft’s profound influence upon it and its brilliant mythic originality as educational thought.

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Harriet Devine Jump reports in Mary Wollstonecraft and the Critics 1788–2001 that at first English reviewers respond favorably to Rights of Woman, because, instead of taking its overt ‘political agenda’ seriously, they receive it merely as ‘a treatise on female education’.1 Introducing that two-volume collection which documents mostly British reception of Wollstonecraft’s work, Jump explains that no one seems attentive to Wollstonecraft for ‘long stretches of time’, although ‘clusters of commentary’ do occur ‘around certain dates’, to suggest that more complex factors are at work. To understand these, it is necessary to examine a number of different but related issues, including the politics of the revolutionary era, Wollstonecraft’s personal reputation, the history of feminist ideology, and the changes in women’s legal status over the past two hundred years.2

The available evidence of both private and public reception of Wollstonecraft’s work underscores the continuing practical significance of her educational critique of monarchist sexual character. This chapter highlights reception of her work that suggests most clearly that critique’s actual or potential influence upon further development of coeducational thought in the English-speaking world, particularly through works of coeducational imagination in the nineteenth century, works of coeducational skepticism in the twentieth century, and works of coeducational ‘re-vision’ in the decades immediately before and after the millennium.

A. Private Reception: Afflicted Childrearing When Wollstonecraft dies, her failure to theorize the challenges of childrearing from the perspective of a widowed father becomes an acute practical problem for Godwin. Miranda Seymour’s biography Mary Shelley observes that [i]n theory, few men were better equipped to educate their daughters than Godwin; in practice he mournfully acknowledged that he lacked the proper experience and understanding by which ‘to direct the infant mind. I am the most unfit person for this office; she was the best qualified in the world. What a change’.3

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He admits in 1812 that Wollstonecraft’s daughters ‘are neither of them brought up with an exclusive attention to the system and ideas of their mother’, because he has inadequate ‘leisure . . . for reducing novel theories of education to practice’.4 Their two motherless daughters, toddler Fanny Imlay (to whom he is partial) and infant Mary (utterly devoted to him), depend upon several women friends as well as, primarily, Wollstonecraft’s Parisian au pair Marguerite Fourn´ee and a housekeeper, Louisa Jones, for maternal care when she dies. Wollstonecraft has criticized parents who depend upon hired women to nurse and raise their children, but Jones does teach Mary to read from her mother’s Lessons. Within a year after Wollstonecraft’s death, Godwin begins his deliberate search for a wife who might mother Fanny and Mary. When he does marry a widow, Mary Jane Clairmont, she brings her own son and daughter into the Godwin household. The new Mrs Godwin dismisses the hired women to whom Wollstonecraft’s daughters have by then become affectionately attached and imposes upon them a ‘ladylike’ upbringing complete with attendance at Anglican church services,5 taking the view that they require no formal education beyond a French-speaking stepmother, a governess, a tutor, and Godwin’s library. Never schooled according to their mother’s theory, therefore, Fanny and Mary neither experience nor seek any ‘jostlings of equality’, although they do grow up observing the jostlings of prominent intellectuals visiting their father, such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, and Thomas Carlyle. Meanwhile, Godwin himself – after having engaged his needy daughters’ intense attachment to him during his lonely grieving – accepts their stepmother’s decisions and ‘gratefully’ retreats ‘into his study’, leaving ‘the care of the children and the running of the household almost entirely to Mrs Godwin’.6 Mary finds her stepmother difficult, as she and Fanny confront life in an enlarged blended family, and both girls mature into emotionally afflicted adulthood. Fanny commits suicide at age 22, feeling like an outcast within the Godwin stepfamily, especially after her sister Mary’s elopement at age 19 with the already-married poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, who has not returned her own love. Thus Wollstonecraft’s untimely death poses serious pragmatic questions about her educational theory of childrearing, particularly about its adequacy to the

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commonest familial challenge of widowhood (or later, divorce), its dependence upon biological mothers and categorical distrust of hired childcare workers with no consideration whatsoever of stepmothers’ difficulties, its inattention to relational challenges of emotional learning connected with common human losses and grief, and most especially its lack of specificity about paternal childrearing and young men’s education to comprehend and fulfill that responsibility. A Vindication of the Rights of Children has yet to be written! Wollstonecraft’s writings do educate her daughter Mary posthumously, however: Mary Godwin, whose only bodily knowledge of her mother is John Opie’s painted portrait of her, reads her mother’s works at her mother’s graveside, where according to Anne K. Mellor’s biography Mary Shelley she seeks ‘solace from nature and her mother’s spirit’ as she endures her blended-family upbringing.7 Mary’s elopement scandalizes and estranges Godwin; meanwhile, she and her poet-lover closely study her mother’s works together as they travel in Europe. Mary learns to write by emulating them. Famously, Mary Shelley authors the modern mythic novel Frankenstein, which merits serious study as a provocative philosophical fiction of education. As such it deserves attention as a centerpiece in any narrative of Wollstonecraft’s reception and influence as a theorist of coeducation. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein unmistakably resounds echoes of many works in Wollstonecraft’s educational oeuvre as well as of particular events in her mother’s life. Its portrait of Dr Victor Frankenstein caricatures the scientifically educated man of mental and physical strength, economic independence and chastity, who is nonetheless morally suspect. His professional scientific education at university overwhelms his early familial coeducation in domestic affections as he leaves behind the girl whom he has regarded as his best friend throughout boyhood to pursue his advanced scientific studies. Without mature devotion to mutual companionship of coupled equals, then, he never learns how to work and love at the same time; he thereby destroys many women whom he professes to admire and abdicates parental responsibility for the motherless monster he creates. Thus Mary Shelley’s modern myth extends Wollstonecraft’s thought to modern men’s miseducation and its professional devaluation of private coeducation in domestic affections, with its horrific images

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of immoral consequences following from a sex-segregated academic and professional life devoted to ambitions of scientific rationality and learning at love’s expense. As a human not divine creation, deserted by his experimental creator, the motherless and homeless monster turned loose upon the world educates himself, an itinerant outcast hungry for love and companionship, but harmful and even murderous to others, ultimately beyond the fantastic power of his eventually desperate and terror-stricken scientist-creator to remedy. The novel thus makes a horrifying commentary on rationalist educational thought that divinizes modern science and professionalism but cannot comprehend the profound and continuing coeducational value of parental love, friendship, companionship – or women. If the problematic reception of Wollstonecraft’s coeducational thought in the Godwin household begs for critically constructive amendments to it, her students’ reception of her pedagogical practices begs some close examination too. Janet Todd reports in Daughters of Ireland that when Wollstonecraft serves as governess to Margaret and Mary King in Ireland, her ‘powerful personality’ has ‘intrigued, then moved, then overwhelmed’ these ‘wild’ and insolent, disaffected daughters of the titled aristocracy.8 She rewards their ‘adolescent yearnings for significance and love’ with empathetic understanding as well as some morally critical disdain for the miseducative monarchist values of their mother, for whom their own respect has already grown thin.9 After Wollstonecraft’s death, a counter-revolutionary public blames her two years as these girls’ governess for having incited their shocking rebellion in adulthood.10 Whereas Caroline King’s more favored daughter Mary becomes entangled in a tragic and scandalous love affair many years later, Wollstonecraft’s admiring student Margaret becomes a doctor, politically sympathetic with Irish rebels. Wollstonecraft has educated the King daughters in traditional Anglican pieties at sharp odds with Mary’s later sexual transgressions, but Todd cites some evidence of Wollstonecraft’s continuing influence only upon Margaret – a thought-provoking narrative relevant to her critique of monarchist miseducation, particularly of mothers’ contribution to it. Wollstonecraft’s employer Caroline King models for her daughters a life of ‘indolence and self-indulgence’, ‘gluttony and luxury’,

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preoccupying herself with fashionable dress, lap dog, and affected chatter ‘in prepackaged phrases’.11 Wollstonecraft counters this maternal example with her own ‘insolent and attractive’ coarse clothing and discourages interest in fashion;12 consequently, Margaret adopts an attitude of ‘dislike of indiscriminate consumption’.13 Wollstonecraft substitutes their rote learning of ‘accomplishments’ and foreign words and phrases aimed at the drawing-room superficiality they witness at their mother’s side with her own pedagogy aimed at ‘encouraging the girls to enjoy thinking and to learn morality from vicarious experience’.14 The King girls are ‘charmed’ by Wollstonecraft’s alternative to their mother’s kind of sociability, by ‘how intelligent women’ can indeed ‘talk together rationally without the gushing, artificial compliments and faked warmth of high life’.15 Therefore, the girls’ rational and moral disrespect for their mother’s way of life grows under Wollstonecraft’s tutelage, furnishing persuasive evidence that Rousseau’s ‘disdain for the primary parental figure could develop into political disdain for parental monarchy or hereditary government of any sort’.16 By the time Caroline King dismisses Wollstonecraft, she has ‘taught them of a life outside the charmed Ascendancy’, and she has ‘encouraged them to question received family wisdom and follow their own bent’.17 Although the King girls never again see Wollstonecraft, Margaret maintains a correspondence with her for many years afterwards. Upon Wollstonecraft’s departure she resolves that her own ‘chief objects’ should be ‘to correct those faults she had pointed out &c to cultivate my understanding as much as possible’.18 Later remembering Wollstonecraft’s belief that girls should learn the elements of anatomy and medicine, Margaret seeks such education, translating German medical books into English, advising about childish ailments, doctoring others, and attending medical lectures abroad dressed like a man. Although Margaret consents to her parents’ choice of Lord Mount Cashell as her husband even as Wollstonecraft is penning Rights of Woman, she refuses to practice feminine wiles, breastfeeds her children, studies Wollstonecraft’s educational thought along with other readings on childhood and adolescence, puts much of Wollstonecraft’s theorizing into practice, takes interest in politics as an informed citizen, and befriends intellectual women from whom

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she can learn much. As a consequence she betrays her class by growing to sympathize with the struggle for Irish independence from England, provides clandestine lodgings to rebels, writes pamphlets for the cause, and begins writing a three-volume novel of Irish history. After Wollstonecraft’s death, making an exception to her own Irish nationalist rule of receiving no English people, Margaret becomes for Wollstonecraft’s two daughters the surrogate mother their mother had been for her19 – for which purpose she adopts the name of Wollstonecraft’s lead teaching character in Original Stories from Real Life, ‘Mrs Mason’.20 Todd observes ‘the latest flowering of Wollstonecraft’s teaching’ in Pisa, Italy, where Margaret holds a ‘fortnightly philosophical and literary salon’ that she calls ‘the Academy of Lunatics’, some of whose participants later become involved in that nation’s ‘patriotic revival, as their hostess had once done in Ireland’.21 In Margaret’s last days, she and Mary Shelley’s stepsister Claire Clairmont share their dreams of ‘a society of liberated women and children’.22 Such reception of Wollstonecraft’s pedagogical practice matures into privately self-educative reception of her educational thought as well. Thus it raises questions that Wollstonecraft has not yet considered integral to her coeducational thought at the time of her death. For example, questions arise concerning the inter-class politics of mother-teacher relations and the world-changing potential of a teacher’s loving commitment to disaffected, insubordinate students’ emotional honesty and moral growth at odds with parental vanity and foolishness. How should a government-funded day school respond to such likely teacher-mother conflicts? Reception of Wollstonecraft’s coeducational thought within the Godwin and King families also constitutes a critical caveat about some possible dangers of feminizing and privatizing childrearing, of putting motherhood or fatherhood instead of concern for children themselves at the center of coeducational thought about childrearing. As an adult art or responsibility, does childrearing produce or require a virtuous aspect of ‘sexual character’ culturally or naturally particular to women that Wollstonecraft does not theorize? Or does this adult art or responsibility, childrearing, require a special kind of loving intelligence that any person, regardless of sex,

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may develop to greater or lesser degree if adequately educated to do so? If private homes are, as Wollstonecraft has suggested, the primary source of such coeducational agency, whence should such coeducational agency come when a mother dies or when a mother’s or father’s education or temperament is inadequate to the task? Private reception of Wollstonecraft’s coeducational thought poses these questions for future generations to consider, whereas Frankenstein bears witness to its potential public influence: a reminder of the profound, often hidden human pain wrought by continuing modern philosophical neglect of Wollstonecraft’s concerns about the value of educating both sexes’ capacities to feel, express, and participate in mutual domestic affections basic to human survival and social justice.

B. Public Reception: Sexual-Character Defamation One century after Wollstonecraft writes her thought experiment in coeducation, Anna Julia Haywood Cooper (1858–1964), one of the first Black feminist orators, reports in A Voice from the South that the United States then has 198 colleges for women and 207 coeducational colleges and universities (Cooper, 1891). A teacher of ancient and modern languages as well as mathematics and sciences, principal of an all-Black coeducational high school, president of the coeducational Frelinghuysen University for working-poor Blacks, and a leader in the social settlement movement as well as the Colored Women’s YWCA and Negro Women’s Club movements, she becomes in 1925 the fourth African-American woman to earn a PhD.23 She travels to Paris in relentless pursuit of ever more advanced learning, also like Wollstonecraft insofar as she goes there to study the French Revolution, whose disposition toward slavery is Cooper’s dissertationtopic at La Sorbonne. An alumna of the first US college to become coeducational (also racially desegregated), Oberlin in Ohio, Cooper remarks that the creation of a ‘Ladies’ Course’ there in 1833 had been ‘felt to be an experiment – a rather dangerous experiment – and was adopted with fear and trembling by the good fathers’. With dry wit she further imagines aloud, that these men

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looked as if they had been caught secretly mixing explosive compounds and were guiltily expecting every moment to see the foundations under them shaken and rent and their fair superstructure shattered into fragments. (Cooper, 1891, 49)

Continuing her story of the first coeducational experiment in American higher education, Cooper pokes polite fun at their revolutionary academic drama: ‘But the girls came, and there was no upheaval’ (Cooper, 1891, 49). However, she goes on to explain, ‘Once in a while one or two were found choosing the gentlemen’s course. Still no collapse . . .’ Soon, ‘the dear, careful, scrupulous, frightened old professors’ discover that the ladies’ and gentlemen’s courses of study have equal numbers of women enrolled in them, so that ‘a distinctively Ladies’ Course, inferior in scope and aim to the regular classical course, . . . could not exist’ (Cooper, 1891, 50). She never cites Wollstonecraft. Instead citing various other women’s and men’s thoughts – in much the same critical spirit as Wollstonecraft’s ‘Animadversions’ in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman – Cooper’s elegant oration engages the same still-revolutionary humanistic deconstruction of sexual character through which Wollstonecraft constructs her republican concept of coeducation, albeit to amend Wollstonecraft’s thought experiment with her own constructively critical new formulation. Wollstonecraft’s thought experiment in coeducation does not address directly the question of higher education that her English predecessor Mary Astell has raised in the late seventeenth century (as noted in Part One). But in A Voice from the South Cooper pleads for higher education founded upon a conception of coeducation that is unmistakably Wollstonecraft’s legacy: for women’s ‘intellectual development’, for their ‘self-reliance and capacity for earning a livelihood’ so that they might be ‘less dependent on the marriage relation for physical support’, and for ‘friendship without misunderstanding’ that can diminish their compulsion to ‘look to sexual love’ as ‘the one sensation capable’ of giving ‘vim to the life’ they lead (Cooper, 1891, 69). Thus reiterating without citing key points of Wollstonecraft’s coeducational agenda for humanizing both women

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and men, Cooper enlarges Wollstonecraft’s argument for maternal education to advance the notion that coeducation enables ‘a “mothering” influence’ of national consequence and encourages women ‘to administer to the world the bread it needs as well as the sugar it cries for’ (Cooper, 1891, 57). She argues that coeducation transmits ‘the potential forces of [woman’s] soul into dynamic factors’ that have ‘given symmetry and completeness to the world’s agencies’ (Cooper, 1891, 57). Invoking with her own religious thought a symbiosis of reason and ‘the law of love’ (Cooper, 1891), comparable to that evident in religious thought which Wollstonecraft has made foundational to her coeducational thought experiment a century before, Cooper rethinks the coeducational experiment’s significance with poetic metaphors of sexual embodiment: So only could it be consummated that Mercy, the lesson she teaches, and Truth, the task man has set himself, should meet together: that righteousness, or rightness, man’s ideal, – and peace, its necessary ‘other half’, should kiss each other. (Cooper, 1891, 57)

Thus, in 1891, making her oratorical plea to a coeducational audience to educate ‘not the boys less, but the girls more’, and to teach ‘our girls’ that ‘there is a race with special needs which they and only they can help’(Cooper, 1891, 79), Cooper extends Wollstonecraft’s coeducational thought experiment, relative to African American coeducational thought (DuBois, 1995; Washington, 1968). Has Cooper read Wollstonecraft’s Rights of Woman? Over the two-plus centuries following Rights of Woman’s first publication in London in 1792, and in Boston and Philadelphia in 1792 and 1794 respectively, Wollstonecraft’s educational critique of sexual character has figured centrally, albeit rarely cited, in White Anglophone coeducational thought. Reporting that it is ‘widely discussed’ in the post-Revolutionary American republic, Barbara Miller Solomon notes that ‘vague references to its content and the author in private journals and letters abound’ such that her thought has made its ‘mark on many more individuals than acknowledged her publicly’, to such an extent that Wollstonecraft precipitates ‘an explosion of feminist

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consciousness in the English-speaking world’.24 Plausibly, then, one may guess that Cooper, as a prominent and scholarly woman-educator deeply concerned about human rights, has likely read Rights of Woman.25 Even if she has not read it, she has clearly felt its indirect influence; in either case, it is still possible that Cooper dare not brand her own coeducational thought with the ‘Scarlet Letter’ of association with Wollstonecraft’s name.26 Prominent White American educator Emma Willard imports many of Wollstonecraft’s ideas into her own highly original and influential thought experiments concerning maternal education and children’s coeducational schooling, for example, but scorns Wollstonecraft’s sexual reputation and does not own the influence.27 English Bluestocking Hannah More judges Wollstonecraft’s posthumously published, unfinished novel Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman ‘a direct vindication of adultery’ and refuses to read her Rights of Woman on principle,28 all the while theorizing education for girls whose aims in many respects resemble Wollstonecraft’s. In The Domestic Revolution Eve Tavor Bannet suggests that, in fact, the conservative women who scorn Wollstonecraft’s iconoclasm, ironically ‘carried every feminist point and, step-by-step over the longue dur´ee, successfully implemented every plank of the seventeenth-century egalitarian platform’ proposed by Astell.29 (As noted in Part One, Astell has proposed higher education for women.) As the coeducational experiment that Wollstonecraft proposes in Rights of Woman takes on myriad practical forms throughout the English-speaking world, rarely does any coeducational thought published before Martin’s Reclaiming a Conversation in 1985 credit Wollstonecraft directly. For Wollstonecraft’s public reception-andinfluence tale begins as a tale of counter-revolutionary sexualcharacter defamation and dogmatism – what might here be summed up in the term ‘Scarlet Letter Effect’ – mixed with often evident, but in that political climate necessarily covert, constructive and critical engagement of her coeducational thought on sexual character. As historian Gerda Lerner explains in The Creation of Feminist Consciousness, William Godwin’s publication of her correspondence with Gilbert Imlay along with his own account of her life makes ‘apparent that she had had an illegitimate child and lived with two men

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outside of marriage’.30 At the same time, he misrepresents her as an atheist like himself. Thus, after Wollstonecraft’s death, Rights of Woman becomes ‘a dangerously political text’,31 subject to vicious satire, such as Thomas Taylor’s A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes, which specifically scorns her view that children’s sex education should be straightforward. She becomes ‘a sexually voracious virago’ in the public mind also as a consequence of a biography of Henry Fuseli.32 Even as the public record includes no commentary on Wollstonecraft’s thought, however, she is ‘still being read surreptitiously in some quarters’,33 perhaps most notably by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. For the next century, her writings must wear the scarlet letter, as it were, as her name becomes a symbol ‘of debauchery and of the linkage between feminism and deviance’.34 Lerner points out that almost identical sexual-character attacks silence public interest in the writings of other remarkable women intellectuals and that in Wollstonecraft’s case this scarlet letter effect is still evident in the historical record even as late as the 1950s, thus discouraging many ‘women from having access to her work and from taking it seriously’.35 However, as exemplified by Cooper’s case and many others, including that of English philosopher and feminist John Stuart Mill, Wollstonecraft’s influence upon modern coeducational thought is often no less undeniable than undocumented. The clear practical upshot of Wollstonecraft’s reception-and-influence tale is that the critical concept central to Wollstonecraft’s critique of monarchist miseducation – sexual character – never ceases to matter. In On Liberty Mill engages questions about national education that Wollstonecraft raises in Rights of Woman, opposing her idea of government-funded schooling even as, implicitly, he commends her critique of the divine right of fathers: ‘One would almost think that a man’s children were supposed to be literally, and not metaphorically, a part of himself, so jealous is opinion of the smallest interference of law with his absolute and exclusive control over them’ (Mill, 1991, 116). Both the content and the style of his arguments about men’s miseducation in The Subjection of Women resound with the likely influence of Wollstonecraft’s critique of monarchist miseducation: ‘The self-worship of the monarch, or of the feudal superior, is matched

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by the self-worship of the male’ (Mill, 1991, 560). But readers will search his texts in vain for any mention of Wollstonecraft, even as he theorizes (with some revision) the main points of her critique of sexual character. Indeed, his late wife Harriet Taylor, to whom he dedicates On Liberty with acknowledgment of her substantial direct influence upon his thought, is one among the mid-century English feminists whom Alice Rossi claims to have been ‘uniform in their disapproval’ of Wollstonecraft.36 Could this be another instance of the scarlet letter effect? Mill’s The Subjection of Women contributes nonetheless significantly to ensuring that subsequent generations continue to read Rights of Woman. Later nineteenth-century reception of Wollstonecraft’s work does recognize it again as a contribution to educational thought. For example, Elizabeth Robins Pennel’s 1885 biography, which Cooper may have read, praises Rights of Woman for ‘its “admirable” educational recommendations’,37 and Emma Rauschenbusch Clough’s ‘impressively researched’ PhD thesis at the University of Bern, in Switzerland, Study of Mary Wollstonecraft and the Rights of Woman, is republished in London in 1898, with its recognition of ‘The progress that had been made in female education in the hundred years since Wollstonecraft’s death.’38

C. Coeducational Thought’s Growth to Maturity In A Room of One’s Own Virginia Woolf theorizes that ‘masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice’ (Woolf, 1929, 65). Wollstonecraft’s Rights of Woman, whose influence Woolf clearly feels, is the outcome not only of Astell’s work and that of the women of Grub Street and Catherine Macaulay before her (discussed in Part One). Rights of Woman is also a precocious offspring from a revolutionary historical moment, which only matures into a ‘masterpiece’ of recognized coeducational thought through many years of women’s and men’s ‘thinking in common’, as well as their debating, about sexual character and education in its light, after its publication.

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Three decades after Ralph Wardle’s engaging literary biography of Wollstonecraft revives scholarly interest in her work at mid-century, Dale Spender dedicates her massive volume Women of Ideas (And What Men Have Done To Them) first to Mary Wollstonecraft and then also to thirteen other women, ‘Whose Earnest Lives and Fearless Words, in Demanding Political Rights for Women, have been, in the Preparation of these Pages, a Constant Inspiration to THE EDITORS’ (Spender, 1982, xi). This encyclopedic 800-page volume published in 1982 includes many other women too, with references to Wollstonecraft dispersed throughout, which document the enormity of her work’s significance. Spender’s tome has been almost a sine qua non for a whole generation’s self-education, a motivation for research about the history of ‘thinking in common’ that finally produces broad feminist recognition of Wollstonecraft’s ‘masterpiece’. Woolf’s observation applies also to subsequent ‘masterpieces’ of coeducational thought that have continued Wollstonecraft’s conceptual project of critical and normative inquiry concerning sexualcharacter miseducation and coeducation. Only one of their authors has worked in a university faculty as a professional philosopher of education – Jane Roland Martin, whose Reclaiming a Conversation, The Schoolhome, Changing the Educational Landscape, Coming of Age in Academe, Cultural Miseducation, and Educational Metamorphoses constitute the most substantial and philosophically rigorous body of coeducational thought ever written, profoundly generative for ‘thinking in common’ of precisely the sort Woolf cites. Other authors of coeducational thought ‘masterpieces’ extending Wollstonecraft’s inquiry have been literary artists, whose coeducational thought might never have been recognized as such if it were not for Martin’s insights into the theoretical significance of their contributions to this line of inquiry in diverse genres of writing. Besides devoting a chapter of Reclaiming a Conversation to Mary Wollstonecraft, for example, Martin makes frequent reference in that work to Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, which prompts subsequent philosophical inquiry into Alcott’s theories of maternal and coeducational teaching in both that work and its two sequels, Little Men and Jo’s Boys, as well as prompting Martin’s own further philosophical reflection on coeducational schooling in The Schoolhome 39 (Martin,

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1985, 1992; Laird, 1988, 1995). She also devotes a chapter of Reclaiming a Conversation to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ideal of the educated woman, which a decade later prompts further philosophical study of Gilman’s thought on women’s teaching and men’s learning in relation to the concept of coeducation (Martin, 1985; Laird, 1995). In 1988, Martin participates as a featured speaker in a major symposium honoring the fiftieth anniversary of Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas (Ruddick et al, 1988), recognizing its signal contribution to coeducational thought, reflection upon which she integrates subsequently into her study of Mill’s The Subjection of Women and into The Schoolhome (Martin, 1994, 1992). Thus Martin’s philosophical insight into past literary contributions to coeducational thought has proven profoundly generative for recent coeducational thought that has made scarce mention of Wollstonecraft’s. Yet Wollstonecraft clearly has influenced such literary contributions to coeducational thought, whose contexts also further illuminate the reception-history of Wollstonecraft’s work no less than its particular influence on their coeducational imagination and skepticism. Louisa May Alcott (1832–88) imaginatively develops Mary Wollstonecraft’s normative concept of republican coeducation through the medium of autobiographical fiction for young people and their adult friends. Shortly after her birth, her father Amos Bronson Alcott (1799–1888), whose record of her infancy and early education is one of the first published American diaries of child development, collaborates with school reformer Elizabeth Palmer Peabody (1804–94) to found the Temple School, an early experiment in coeducation and racial desegregation. Later herself a collaborator with Peabody in an early kindergarten, a teacher who runs her own schools for children, and an abolitionist teacher of adult literacy, Alcott thus grows up among the Transcendentalists of New England, including Margaret Fuller (1810–50). At the age of four or five, Alcott accompanies her father to the Temple School, when Fuller is teaching there, until a financial crisis and scandal force it to close in 1837, but soon thereafter an experimental Alcott School opens in London, honoring her father’s work as an experimental educator. While still a girl, Alcott reads and supports the ‘Declaration of Sentiments’ of the Seneca Falls women’s rights convention in 1848, and in an 1855 essay that Alcott

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might have read, ‘Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft’, novelist George Eliot compares Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century to Wollstonecraft’s Rights of Woman, with favorable commentary on both women’s thought. A decade later, before writing Little Women, Alcott goes to London herself, where the debate on women’s rights is ‘gathering momentum’.40 (Charles Kegan Paul writes his two-volume biography William Godwin, his Friends and Relations a decade later, restoring enough respectability to Wollstonecraft to make it possible for late nineteenth-century British feminists to claim her publicly as ‘an important forerunner’.)41 On this 1866 trip, Alcott meets many such feminists, including the prolific intellectual-activist and author Mathilde Blind, who in 1878 publishes an essay sympathetically and seriously appraising all of Wollstonecraft’s writing.42 Herself a suffragist who signs her letters ‘yours for reform of all kinds’, Alcott also meets Mill in London just three years before first publication of his The Subjection of Women, as well as political leaders; Elizabeth Garrett, a pioneering doctor; and feminists Frances Cobbe and Barbara Bodichon, an advocate for women’s rights and education. Thus, although Alcott may not read Wollstonecraft herself until 1879 (when historians are certain she does read Wollstonecraft), and although the influences of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, Maria Edgeworth, and Catharine Beecher on her educational thought have received more scholarly attention to date, she has probably had indirect contact with Wollstonecraft’s influence long before that date.43 She writes Little Women, Part I in 1868, Little Women, Part II in 1869, Little Men in 1871, and Jo’s Boys in 1886. All these works post-date her trip to London, when she is likely to have come into contact with Wollstonecraft’s ideas, at least indirectly, and the last work in the trilogy post-dates the record of her having read Wollstonecraft. Her father’s coeducational experiment, an autobiographical source for Little Men, may also have reflected contact with Wollstonecraft’s writing. Virginia Woolf’s (1882–1941) contact with Wollstonecraft’s thought before writing Three Guineas is certain. In the year after the Equal Franchise Act that in 1928 gives British women the right to vote, Woolf publishes ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’ in Nation and Athenaeum, almost

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concurrently with J.M. Dent’s celebratory publication of Rights of Woman together with Mill’s The Subjection of Women and a ‘sensible and fair-minded’ introduction by political historian George Caitlin in one Everyman volume.44 Later published in The Second Common Reader , Woolf’s essay makes Wollstonecraft come alive in the cultural landscape of English fervor over the French Revolution as ‘a woman . . . with very bright eyes and a very eager tongue’. In Wollstonecraft’s visage Woolf reads the conflict of those many contradictions that confront her in France, her realization that the Revolution is ‘not so simple after all’: a ‘face, at once so resolute and so dreamy, so sensual and so intelligent, and beautiful into the bargain with its bright coils of hair and the large bright eyes that Southey thought the most expressive he had ever seen’ (Woolf, 1931, 157, 159). With this artful, vivid portrait Woolf introduces her reading of Wollstonecraft as a theorist who (had she lived longer) ‘was going to reform education’, whose sadly abbreviated ‘life had been an experiment from the start, an attempt to make human conventions conform more closely to human needs’ (Woolf, 1931, 163), musing that [t]he life of such a woman was bound to be tempestuous. Every day she made theories by which life should be lived; and every day she came smack against the rock of other people’s prejudices. Every day too – for she was no pedant, no cold-blooded theorist – something was born in her that thrust aside her theories and forced her to model them afresh. (Woolf, 1931, 159)

Whereas late modern British feminist critics of coeducation often identify themselves explicitly as Wollstonecraft’s intellectual descendants (Steedman, 1992; Arnot et al, 1999), late modern American, Australian, and Canadian feminist critics of coeducation have often filtered their observations through Woolf’s theoretical lenses (Greene, 1978; Martin, 1992, 2000; Bogdan, 1992; Gaskell et al, 1989; Spender, 1982), particularly Three Guineas. In that work written on the eve of World War Two, first published in Atlantic Monthly in May–June, 1938, she does not cite Wollstonecraft by name, but Leonard Woolf’s memoirs published after her death refer to both A Room of One’s Own

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and Three Guineas as ‘political pamphlets’ that fitted into ‘a long line stretching back’ to Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.45 Indeed, Three Guineas merits acknowledgment as Woolf’s sympathetic but skeptical update of Wollstonecraft’s two Vindications. Although Martin’s philosophical analysis of Wollstonecraft’s ideal of the educated woman is expository, it resembles the March family trilogy and Three Guineas insofar as it is at the same time an original work in its own right. ‘Wollstonecraft’s Daughters’ in Reclaiming a Conversation has for over two decades served as virtually the only exposition available of Wollstonecraft’s educational thought by an educational theorist.46 As it happens, new knowledge about Wollstonecraft only illuminates the historical gender-and-genre circumstances that construct the very same problems that Martin highlights in her analysis of Rights of Woman, suggesting that Wollstonecraft does share pragmatic integrative values upon which Martin premises her critique, that she does struggle with the very same questions concerning binarism and emotional learning that Martin has raised about that text’s coeducational thought, and that she dies while still in the midst of that thought-struggle, leaving many questions still unanswered, many of which Martin duly takes up as her own research program. But the significance of her ‘Wollstonecraft’s Daughters’ far exceeds that of its expository function in relation to Wollstonecraft. Martin’s analysis has enduring philosophical and educational significance not only owing to its having introduced Wollstonecraft to historians of educational thought. For its significance also lies in its logically strategic originality as a cogent pragmatic critique of still taken-for-granted common wisdom about women’s education, and about coeducation – common wisdom based on past readings of Rights of Woman whose earlier sense of the work Martin’s exposition philosophically analyzes. Martin’s reading of Rights of Woman within this historically strategic context constructs premises for her own subsequent imaginative and critical thought experiments in coeducational schooling (in The Schoolhome), in coeducational higher education (in Coming of Age in Academe), and in coeducational culture at large (in Cultural Miseducation). In these thought experiments, Martin also takes up problems and ideas that Alcott’s coeducational imagination and Woolf’s coeducational skepticism formulate, as she redefines Wollstonecraft’s

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coeducational experiment on her own late modern terms – the sort of move that feminist poet, theorist, and educator Adrienne Rich has named: Re-vision – the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction – it is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves . . . We need to know the writing of the past, and know it differently than we have ever known it; not to pass on a tradition, but to break its hold over us. (Rich, 1979, 35)

C1. Coeducational Imagination Writing as a White, middle-class abolitionist republican patriot in New England during and after the US Civil War, Louisa May Alcott narrates in Little Women a mother’s exemplary teaching of what Wollstonecraft’s Rights of Woman has called ‘domestic affections’, teaching in a private home that is integral to coeducation as Wollstonecraft conceives it. That book’s sequels, Little Men and Jo’s Boys, represent a coeducational school’s imaginative reconstruction of Marmee’s teaching in Little Women, thus demonstrating serious thought about coeducation’s problems and possibilities.47 Alcott does not cite Wollstonecraft’s coeducational thought explicitly, but she does rewrite and relocate it implicitly, with attention to her own different educational landscape in a post-revolutionary English-speaking republic that does not have a national system of universal governmentfunded day schooling and whose people of African descent and White women still do not enjoy full rights of free citizenship. Like Wollstonecraft, she writes as a self-educated woman, applying literary artistry to her coeducational thought’s construction for an intergenerational coeducational audience. She adapts the popular moralpedagogical children’s fiction genre of Wollstonecraft’s Real Life and Maria Edgeworth’s The Parent’s Assistant to the purpose of developing in rich narrative detail many ‘hints’ that Wollstonecraft’s thought experiment has sketched for republican coeducation, blending that predominantly feminine-gendered genre with the genre of Jean-Jacques

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Rousseau’s Emile, the philosophical novel of education. Alcott shares Wollstonecraft’s optimistic commitment to coeducation that aims, regardless of sex, for young people’s physical and moral strength, economic independence and political equality, and mutuality in friendship and parental partnership. She reclaims also Wollstonecraft’s aim of dignifying motherhood as an institutional site of moral coeducational agency, a crucial corrective for patriarchal miseducation both public and private. Drawing upon both autobiographical material and fictional invention to construct her educational history of three generations of the March family, Alcott’s coeducational thought sustains the republican optimism of Wollstonecraft’s Rights of Woman even as it pragmatically tests and revises some of her proposals for coeducation. Extending without contradicting Wollstonecraft’s coeducational thought experiment, the March family trilogy represents religious education not as an institutional matter of doctrine, ceremony, or personal identity. Religious education in these works takes the form of daily private selfexamination through literary engagement with ‘guide-books’, regular candid intimate talks with morally observant caring adults, and open conversations with loved ones about special joys and dreams and troubles. The aims of such religious education are ethical and social: self-respecting honesty, neighborly benevolence, and merciful love integrated into a communitarian spirit of moral learning through daily living. But Alcott’s trilogy does not marginalize arts education as Rights of Woman does; even though all three books satirize sentimentalism and female accomplishments of which Wollstonecraft is also critical, the playful exercise of artistic imagination through theater, story, song, and letters looms large and loving in the March family’s learning together to imagine the moral possibilities of their unfolding lives, including autobiographical hero Jo March’s experimental practice of coeducation itself. Whereas Wollstonecraft argues strongly for coeducation whose teaching and learning occur both in homes and in day schools, Alcott imagines a different kind of residential school from the ones that Wollstonecraft has critiqued, to locate coeducation of children’s domestic affections in school, together with academic learning. She represents this configuration in terms similar to Wollstonecraft’s,

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however, to make the home-like school a ground from which domestic affections can grow into broader social affections: ‘. . . I’ll tell you that one of my favorite fancies is to look at my family as a small world, to watch the progress of my little men, and, lately, to see how well the influence of my little women works upon them . . .’ ‘Not more than the lads help them; it is mutual, I assure you . . . Dear me, if men and women would only trust, understand, and help one another as my children do, what a capital place the world would be!’ and Mrs Jo’s eyes grew absent, as if she was looking at a new and charming state of society in which people lived as happily and innocently as her flock at Plumfield. (Alcott, 1870, 798)

Thus Alcott does not fit the school to a form of government; she imagines the school as a utopian space from whose educational creativity a just society grows. The world beyond Plumfield scarcely exists in Little Men; they encounter worldly challenges only upon graduation from Laurence College in Jo’s Boys, challenges from which they learn, through the college’s guidance, to become engaged in artistic, scientific, professional and other work of social conscience, such as the causes of American Indians’ survival and woman’s suffrage. But her critique of miseducation in this trilogy is liberal and patriotic, not radical or revolutionary like Wollstonecraft’s. For it does not critique an entire system of either government or political economy, though it does criticize the sexual politics of education as well as povertybased educational deprivation. Thus Alcott ratifies Wollstonecraft’s concerns about a republic that fails to extend the right of education to all; she also addresses Wollstonecraft’s concern about children’s learning in the presence of parents’ mistreatment of servants. Although Jo March opposes slavery, her happy home-like school, Plumfield, depends upon the domestic labors of a Black coachman, Peter, and Black woman cook, Asia, who contribute genially to the children’s education, and Little Men makes no mention of their schooling or their children’s (if they have any). Why not? Similarly the March family in Little Women depends upon the domestic labors of Hannah, who

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contributes to the girls’ care and education, but the novel makes no mention of her life beyond that employment. Perhaps autobiographically representing Alcott’s own unpleasant experiences employed in private domestic service, both these cases stand out as figures imploring the same sort of loving attention and education that is shared among all the other characters of these books. Alcott does theorize other aspects of girls’ miseducation particularly, in both its sense as a negative achievement and its sense as pedagogical errors.48 Her affectionately drawn caricature of Wollstonecraft’s lady of sensibility is Amy. However, Alcott’s tragic figure of miseducation for sexual character is Beth, a sickly, selfsacrificing and ever-helpful homebody too timid to go to school. Against such cases from Little Women, Alcott presents the spirited figure of Nan, whose active learning of physical and mental strength, economic and political independence, and all-around friendliness constructs much of Little Men’s coeducational narrative. A Wollstonecraft heir indeed, Nan grows up to become a doctor. But Alcott acknowledges, as Wollstonecraft does not seem to recognize, that coeducation inevitably poses problems and challenges. Little Men focuses repeatedly upon the problems and challenges of educating the sexes together that Wollstonecraft has not imagined, problems and challenges posed typically by those activities most bound up with taken-for-granted assumptions about sexual character, such as athletics, domesticity, hospitality, mischief, and juvenile vice. As a mother, Jo matches Wollstonecraft’s ideal of citizenmotherhood, in Little Men embellishing upon Marmee’s example from Little Women. For her working life combines the mothering of her own children with the teaching of other people’s children and her writing career – as founder of an experimental school. The school has a classroom over which Professor Bhaer presides, but most of the school’s teaching occurs outside it, over which Mrs Jo presides: children grow medicinal plants as well as vegetables; care for animals and one another; cook food, celebrate feasts, and entertain one another; make a museum, make music and put on plays; form clubs and have pillow fights; and present their writing at regular school gatherings. In sum, they don’t just learn the long list of humanities and sciences that Wollstonecraft specifies for republican education – though they

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are physically active precisely as she insists they should be. Instead of defining school entirely around book-learning, the Bhaers also teach the Plumfield children how to live together playfully and responsibly. Exemplifying mutual partnership that Wollstonecraft idealizes in parents’ coeducational agency, Professor Bhaer defends girls’ rights against boys’ mischievous backlash and resentful sense of entitlement, and Mrs Jo strengthens girls’ courage, caring, and self-assertion, teaching them how to convert their anger into effective creative action on their problems so that strained relationships can deepen rather than rupture. Thus the concrete vividness of Alcott’s narratives of coeducational practice builds upon Wollstonecraft’s ideas to theorize approaches to the problems encountered in early coeducational experimentation. Following Little Men’s publication, Peabody publishes a record of the Temple School where she, Bronson Alcott, and Margaret Fuller have undertaken the coeducational experiment it has fictionalized (Peabody, 1874). Thus Wollstonecraft’s proposed experiment in coeducation comes to life in the US, albeit most vividly through Alcott’s fiction based upon the experiment Peabody has documented. Little more than a generation later, however, despite liberal sympathies with feminism and outspoken advocacy for coeducation at the University of Chicago, John Dewey seems oblivious to the problems and challenges of coeducation that form the substance of Little Men’s engaging narratives,49 instead writing that ‘An ounce of practice is worth a pound of theory; it is absurd to treat the question of coeducation as one to be debated on theoretical or abstract grounds’ (Dewey, 1911). However, Ella Flagg Young, Alice Chipman Dewey, and a group of teachers working with Dewey undertake coeducation experimentally at the University of Chicago Laboratory School, as documented with photographs and narratives by two teachers from the school, Katherine Camp Mayhew and Anna Camp Edwards (Mayhew and Edwards, 1936). These examples may bring to mind Cooper’s tirelessly thoughtful work educating working-poor African-American students in school, university and social settlement, no less than the little school that Wollstonecraft founds together with a collective working women’s household in Newington Green, where she educates herself via the mentorship of Mrs Burgh and Rev. Dr Price. Martin

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has explained in Reclaiming a Conversation that ‘we must understand that some of the most interesting theories of female education may have been authored not by single individuals but by groups of individuals – for instance, those founding and running schools’ – where the experimental work of coeducational imagination begins in earnest (Martin, 1985, 181). C2. Coeducational Skepticism Writing as a White, ‘middle-brow’, anti-fascist pacifist in England on the eve of World War Two, exactly one decade after the Equal Franchise Act that allows British women to vote, Virginia Woolf critiques imperialist miseducation in Three Guineas just as Wollstonecraft critiques monarchist miseducation in Rights of Woman. Woolf does not cite Wollstonecraft’s work explicitly, but she does rewrite and update it implicitly, for her own different educational landscape in a modern imperialist nation afraid of the looming Nazi threat. Like Wollstonecraft, she writes as a self-educated woman denied formal schooling and higher education. She applies literary artistry to her construction of coeducational thought, as she blends the genre of the political-philosophical treatise, deployed by Wollstonecraft, with that of the epistolary fiction, deployed by Catherine Macaulay, to address a coeducational audience about the question of coeducation in relation to the aim of preventing war. Sharing Wollstonecraft’s indignation about a long English history of categorically denying women education, economic independence, political influence and developmental freedom, Woolf reclaims also many of her moral concerns about sexual character’s miseducative construction via professionalism, property, and paternalism. Each ‘guinea’ is an essay response to a different fund-raising letter, as well as an amount given for each cause; one guinea is roughly the amount that Woolf receives for publishing one book review, or pays for a visit to the doctor. The three fund-raising causes to which she addresses her thought and generosity are women’s education, women’s advancement in professions, and protection of ‘culture and intellectual liberty’, all of which she conceives as bound up in the cause of preventing war (Woolf, 1938, 88, 100). As Woolf

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studies documentary evidence of such sexual character construction in English biographies, photographs and daily newspapers, however, she questions patriotism’s meaning and value for twentieth-century Englishwomen, thereby theorizing a profound ethical ambivalence about likely effects upon women of their participation in university coeducation uncritical of an uncivilized, imperialist sexual character. Acknowledging women’s severely limited power to transform university coeducation’s ends and means, she concedes the necessity of their material support for and skeptical participation in it. But rather than argue for coeducation that aims to civilize sexual character by neutralizing it into undifferentiated humanity, as Wollstonecraft does, Woolf develops a comparative moral and political critique of sexual characters of ‘educated men’ and their daughters, and of their education either for war or for ‘civilized’ living. From that educational critique, she then formulates for ‘the daughters of educated men’ an alternative ethic of civilized, ad hoc educational creativity and cultural criticism even as she commends prevention of war as an aim that men and women can share. Woolf’s ontological-aesthetic account of imperialist sexual character focuses upon militarism and belligerence: ‘For though many instincts are held more or less in common by both sexes, to fight has always been the man’s habit, not the woman’s. Law and practice have developed that difference, whether innate or accidental’ (Woolf, 1938, 6). Initially published with photographs of men in various sorts of elaborate military garb, Three Guineas points out, as Rights of Woman does, men’s fondness for dress that ‘serves to advertise the social, professional, or intellectual standing of the wearer’, chiding the men in her audience that their finest clothes are those they wear as soldiers to make ‘a ridiculous, a barbarous, a displeasing spectacle’, against which she juxtaposes universal human horror and disgust at pictures of bombed-out houses and dead bodies (Woolf, 1938, 20–21). Against such disquieting images of men in imperial military splendor, Woolf juxtaposes the comparative simplicity of women’s clothing, designed only for beauty and sexual attraction, and points out that ‘all the weapons with which an educated man can enforce his opinions are either beyond our grasp or so nearly beyond it that even if we used them we could scarcely inflict one scratch’ (Woolf, 1938, 12). Thus

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she reconfigures Wollstonecraft’s imagery of monarchist sexual character to make a case for sexual difference where Wollstonecraft makes a case for its denial. Like Wollstonecraft, though, Woolf places ‘the dance around the sacred tree of property’ at the core of her analysis of imperialist sexual character’s political-economic aspect (Woolf, 1938, 74). Whereas men’s education is costly, women’s is ‘unpaid-for’ learning from four hard teachers: poverty, chastity, derision, and freedom from unreal loyalties (Woolf, 1938, 78). Whereas men’s professions incline them toward an existence like that of ‘a cripple in a cave’, a man who has lost sight, sound, speech, humanity, and health in pursuit of money; women have mostly only one profession, again ‘unpaid-for’, which consists in marriage: in ‘bringing nine or ten children into the world’, in ‘running a house, nursing an invalid, visiting the poor and the sick, tending here an old father, there an old mother’ (Woolf, 1938, 72, 77). Observing that men’s university education inclines them to make wars, she considers women’s unpaid-for education and profession and concludes that ‘these, if not educated, still were civilized women’ (Woolf, 1938, 79). Woolf repeatedly breaks off the text of Three Guineas mid-sentence with an ellipsis ‘. . .’ to denote an emotional disconnection that marks the psycho-ethical aspect of imperialist sexual character, for ‘[t]here are still subjects that educated people, when they are of different sexes, even though financially independent, veil, or hint at in guarded terms, and then pass on’ (Woolf, 1938, 120). Although she does not engage Wollstonecraft’s concerns about chastity and libertinism, she does share Wollstonecraft’s concern for mutuality because ‘without private there can be no public freedom’ (Woolf, 1938, 120). In view of fathers’ ‘infantile fixation’, Woolf worries that Wollstonecraft’s domestic affections do not characterize women’s education in the private house, so much as cruelty, poverty, hypocrisy, and immorality (Woolf, 1938, 130). From this critique of imperialist miseducation’s sexual character, Woolf concludes that women should maintain connection with the four hard teachers of their unpaid-for education, but transform each one, so that together they constitute an ethic to live, learn, and work by. Poverty should become just enough money to live on, no more.

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Chastity should become a refusal to commit ‘adultery of the brain’, by which she means ‘selling your mind without love’ (Woolf, 1938, 78). Derision should become commitment to obscurity. Freedom from unreal loyalties should become divestment of prides of all sorts – family, nation, religion, school, sex. Engage in cultural criticism and the arts, she advises, the profession of literature perhaps – but as an unofficial Society of Outsiders, informally bound by this ethic grounded in the unpaid-for education of their mothers. Among such outsiders’ activities, which closely resemble the projects to which Cooper devotes her life in the southern US, Woolf suggests experimental schooling in particular, and the text gives some clue to what sort of coeducation she prizes, although she acknowledges that material constraints make such coeducational imagination at yet impractical: ‘you must rebuild your college differently’, she suggests (Woolf, 1938, 33). Within Three Guineas Woolf engages in her own thought experiment akin both to Wollstonecraft’s and to Alcott’s as she pauses to imagine how a college should be: ‘Surely in view of these questions and pictures you must consider very carefully before you begin to rebuild your college what is the aim of education, what kind of society, what kind of human being it should seek to produce’ (Woolf, 1938, 33). She does not imagine this new college specifically as sex-segregated space, and some details of her vision resemble Wollstonecraft’s ‘hints’. It should have no chapels, carved stone or stained glass, also no ‘museums and libraries with chained books and first editions under glass cases’ (Woolf, 1938, 33). With its pictures and books ‘new and always changing’, it should be an ‘experimental’ and ‘adventurous’ institution, ‘young and poor’ – perhaps like Alcott’s Laurence College in Jo’s Boys, although Woolf does not cite that work (Woolf, 1938, 33). ‘Let it therefore take advantage of those qualities,’ Woolf suggests, thus explaining how women’s four hard teachers might become a coeducational ethic (1938, 33). For its unusual curriculum must exclude ‘the arts of dominating other people’ as well as ‘the arts of ruling, of killing, of acquiring land and capital’ (Woolf, 1938, 34). Instead, again (although she does not cite Alcott), its curriculum should perhaps be something like that at Plumfield: ‘only the arts that can be taught cheaply and practised by poor people’, including ‘the arts of human intercourse; the art of understanding other people’s lives and

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minds, and the little arts of talk, of dress, of cookery that are allied with them’ (Woolf, 1938, 34). Woolf conceptualizes the aims of this imaginary college that she considers then beyond reach: The aim of the new college, the cheap college, should be not to segregate and specialize, but to combine. It should explore the ways in which mind and body can be made to co-operate; discover what new combinations make good wholes in human life. The teachers should be drawn from the good livers as well as from the good thinkers. (Woolf, 1938, 33–34)

In Woolf’s ideal college, ‘competition would be abolished’, and ‘People who love learning for itself would gladly come there. Musicians, painters, writers, would teach there, because they would learn’ – just as Jo March Bhaer does while teaching at Plumfield and pursuing a writing career besides (Woolf, 1938, 34). Once Woolf comes to the point of abolishing advertisement and degrees, she comes up against the realities of women’s survival in an imperialist culture on the brink of war, and decides to give her guinea to the old women’s college after all, with some conditions. While citing those conditions she calls upon educators to think: ‘If we are asked to teach, we can examine very carefully into the aim of such teaching, and refuse to teach any art or science that encourages war. Further, we can pour mild scorn upon chapels, upon degrees, and upon the value of examinations’ (Woolf, 1938, 36). In other words, so long as women are stuck with the existing educational system, she advises making women’s use and experience of the old college conform to the values reflected in her imagined new one. In this way, much as Cooper does in the southern US, women might ‘remain outside’ men’s anti-war society, adhere to their own civilized ethic derived from women’s unpaid-for education, and work at ‘finding new words and creating new methods’, albeit in cooperation with their aim, to prevent war (Woolf, 1938, 143). Woolf’s coeducational skepticism has found a wide audience among women in North America and Australia. Adrienne Rich’s

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‘writing as re-vision’ extends to her reading of Woolf as she applies her own later thought to US education in the late twentieth century: If there is any misleading concept it is that of ‘coeducation’: that because women are sitting in the same classrooms, hearing the same lectures, reading the same books, performing the same laboratory experiments, they are receiving an equal education. They are not . . . (Rich, 1979, 241)

Consequently, just as Woolf imagines the new, cheap, poor college, Rich generates her own thought experiment in higher coeducation, which she names a ‘woman-centered university’, and also theorizes the necessary character of feminist teaching as ‘taking women students seriously’ and of women’s learning as ‘claiming an education’ (Rich, 1979, 125, 231, 237). Dale Spender similarly addresses children’s schooling and women’s teaching in Invisible Women and with Elizabeth Sarah in their edited anthology Learning to Lose, taking direct inspiration from Woolf’s Three Guineas (Spender, 1982; Spender and Sarah, 1980). Such coeducational skepticism begins to establish among women educators a ground of ‘thinking in common’ within which Martin embarks upon her coeducational re-vision. C3. Coeducational Re-Vision In Reclaiming a Conversation Martin reads Rights of Woman as a professional philosopher of education who is also a mother. Philosophically she locates Wollstonecraft in the canonical company of the two most-often cited philosophers of education before Dewey – Plato and Rousseau – and also in the challenging company of Catharine Beecher and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, to whose once influential educational thought she restores lost recognition and philosophical significance. Her reading of Wollstonecraft is central to her examination of how these five philosophers have conceptualized ideals of the educated woman in relation to what she calls the ‘productive and reproductive processes of society’ (Martin, 1985, 6). She explains that the former include cultural, political and economic activities, whereas

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the latter include ‘not simply conception and birth but the rearing of children to more or less maturity and associated activities such as tending the sick, taking care of family needs, and running a household’ (Martin, 1985, 6). Wollstonecraft’s thought experiment in coeducation is the topic of her ‘conversation’ with Plato, who educates women only for productive processes of society; meanwhile, Martin focuses upon Wollstonecraft’s critique of Rousseau, who educates women only for reproductive processes of society, thus laying logical groundwork for a nuanced reading of how differently the three women in her conversation define both sets of processes, evaluate their moral, social, and political significance, and propose to educate women for them. Wollstonecraft, for example, does not think much about Beecher’s concern to educate homemakers, and Wollstonecraft’s conception of citizen-motherhood is far less radical than Gilman’s aim to educate women for a ‘cultural ideal’ of motherhood. The title of Martin’s chapter concerning Rights of Woman, ‘Wollstonecraft’s Daughters’, signals her accurate perception that this text empathizes with daughters’ perspectives on women’s education more emphatically than it does with mothers’. Can a woman educated according to Wollstonecraft’s imagined experiment have learned how to delight in the company of her children? How can she learn to display enough feeling and emotion to be a good mother? Raising such questions, Martin reflects a perspective previously missing from professional philosophy of education, made explicit only in her acknowledgments: ‘To my sons I dedicate this book so that they will know that it has been shaped as much by what I have learned from being their mother as by any scholarly training I have had’ (Martin, 1985, xi). But having already critiqued similar oversights in R.S. Peters’ ideal of the educated person and in analytic-philosophical conceptions of teaching (Martin, 1994), she develops her own original coeducational thought in critical response to Wollstonecraft’s formulation of women’s education for motherhood, arguing that in her understandable concern ‘to reveal Rousseau’s misogyny, she ignores Sophie’s positive qualities . . . the patience and gentleness, zeal and affection necessary for rearing children’ (Martin, 1985, 98). This apt critical insight concerning Wollstonecraft’s critique of Rousseau becomes central to Martin’s own rethinking of coeducation, in which she

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proposes, ‘When we claim Sophie’s and Emile’s virtues for both sexes, trait genderization becomes everyone’s problem’ (Martin, 1985, 196). Wollstonecraft has not had the privilege of witnessing such ‘positive qualities’ as ‘patience and gentleness, zeal and affection’ in her own mother, whose submissiveness to an abusive husband nonetheless does match Rousseau’s image of Sophie’s relation to Emile. Under such circumstances, Wollstonecraft’s ability to see Sophie’s virtues would be almost miraculous. Moreover, since she is not yet a mother when she publishes Rights of Woman, she cannot yet match Martin’s profound pragmatic insights into the physical and emotional challenges that motherhood poses for a rational woman – challenges to which Martin judges Wollstonecraft’s coeducational ideal in Rights of Woman philosophically inadequate: ‘an ideal of female education that gives pride of place to traits traditionally associated with males at the expense of others traditionally associated with females’ (Martin, 1985, 100). Far outweighing any interpretive questions that other ‘non-philosophical’ works in Wollstonecraft’s educational oeuvre may raise about the development of Wollstonecraft’s thought more generally on this particular point,50 this critique fulfills nonetheless a crucial logical function in the development of coeducational thought after Wollstonecraft, for it constitutes a valid pr´ecis and critique of the prevailing gender-blind liberal conception of coeducation. Since Wollstonecraft’s Rights of Woman is the most likely source of that conception, regardless of what her other works may suggest, this critique is strategically astute. Martin questions that prevailing conception of coeducation when she questions Wollstonecraft’s apparent ‘assumption . . . that it is coherent to embrace Plato’s radicalism concerning women’s education while adopting Rousseau’s traditionalism concerning women’s domestic functions’ (Martin, 1985, 91). This analysis has profound importance for coeducational thought as a critique of faulty logic upon which progressives have typically founded coeducational practice. Martin’s maternal-philosophical critique of Wollstonecraft’s Rights of Woman thus begins constructing a new philosophical landscape – a coeducational landscape – in which it later becomes possible to situate and appreciate the significance of Wollstonecraft’s educational thought in other writings of less

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explicitly ‘philosophical’ genres, with particular regard to emotional learning, which is vital to moral parenthood. At the same time, through this conversation, Martin constructs an argument for a new ‘gender-sensitive ideal’ upon which to found coeducation: ‘we must constantly be aware of the workings of sex and gender because in this historical and cultural moment, paradoxically they sometimes make a big difference even if they sometimes make no difference at all’ (Martin, 1985, 195). Although Wollstonecraft’s critique of monarchist miseducation does exemplify what it might mean to be constantly aware of such gender politics, Martin quite rightly observes that Wollstonecraft’s thought experiment in coeducation seems to presume that coeducation will require no such hyper-vigilance, to anticipate no difficulty whatsoever in educating both sexes for mental and physical strength, for economic and political independence, for mutuality with one another. Thus Martin teaches us that Wollstonecraft’s conception of coeducational ends will require educators to maintain the same sort of critical alertness so evident in her theory of monarchist miseducation, despite its seeming anachronism. Only through such gender-sensitivity, ever alert to the continuing possibility of sexual-character miseducation, might Wollstonecraft’s coeducational experiment succeed. Moreover, Martin’s reading of Rights of Woman suggests that the workings of gender include not only the faults Wollstonecraft so vigorously analyzes in women and men, but also virtuous qualities of emotional sensitivity and expression required by childrearing. For the value Wollstonecraft places upon such empathic qualities is not emphatic in Rights of Woman as it is, for example, in Real Life and especially in her posthumously published Lessons. Godwin and his new wife fail to sustain such qualities after their marriage in their relations with Fanny and Mary, qualities such as Margaret King appreciates in Wollstonecraft’s teaching that she misses in her own mother’s childrearing practices. Martin names such qualities ‘care, concern, and connection’, which she nicknames for curricular purposes ‘the 3 Cs’. In The Gender Question in Education, Ann Diller, Barbara Houston, Kathryn Pauly Morgan, and Maryann Ayim have joined the conversation that Martin has reclaimed, developing among them a subtly nuanced and critical, practical discussion of the concept of gender

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sensitivity and the ethic of care, with Morgan explicitly citing their project’s connection to Wollstonecraft (Diller et al, 1996). At the same time, Martin’s analysis in Reclaiming a Conversation lays the foundation for her own thought experiments in coeducational schooling and higher coeducation. In The Schoolhome and Coming of Age in Academe Martin responds to Woolf’s coeducational skepticism by reviving coeducational imagination, through what Rich has called ‘writing as revision’. In both works, she locates herself and her readers on Woolf’s metaphoric bridge in Three Guineas, between the public world and the private house, as a location from which to examine coeducational institutions of learning, to discern their problems, purposes and possibilities. Implicitly, Martin engages Wollstonecraft’s concern that coeducation should be neither public nor private, but both public and private, without naively accepting her idealism about homes as possible sites for universal education in ‘domestic affections’, but also without denying the public significance that Wollstonecraft attaches to such educative home life. Martin is concerned in The Schoolhome about the lives of children of both sexes, most of whose parents must work away from home just in order to maintain homes for them, and find the effort enormously difficult. Too often, she fears, television becomes a questionable substitute for absent, stressed, and over-worked parents. She does not argue for residential, private home-like schools like Alcott’s Plumfield, but instead she rereads Maria Montessori’s conception of the casa dei bambini to propose a new notion of the coeducational, multicultural school as a ‘moral equivalent of home’ (Martin, 1992, 40). Implicitly, she addresses Wollstonecraft’s concerns about miseducative sexual character by further elaborating her own concept of gender-sensitivity – as an Aristotelian golden mean with regard to courage, loyalty, and self-assertion on one hand and with regard to care, concern, and connection on the other hand. For she suggests that miseducated sexual character becomes evident when excesses or deficiencies of such virtues are present: courage, for example, is the golden mean between fear and boldness, whereas concern is the golden mean between disinterest and self-sacrifice (Martin, 1992). To prevent and correct miseducative sexual character, she recommends integrating ‘learning to live’ into the curriculum proper via strategies

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similar to Alcott’s in Little Women and Little Men, by making collaborative activities such as theater and newspaper the pedagogical vehicles for integrating a multicultural curriculum with learning to live (Martin, 1992, 85). Martin shares Wollstonecraft’s concern that children of both sexes should learn to love home, so she insists that domesticity and ‘domephobia’ (hatred and fear of things domestic) should become objects of coeducational and multicultural study in schoolhomes (Martin, 1992, 155). The teaching Martin envisions in the schoolhome resembles that which has been philosophically conceptualized from readings of Alcott as well as from late twentieth-century African-American women’s educational thought and fiction (Laird, 1989, 2002; hooks, 1994). Similar concerns permeate Martin’s thought about educating young adults: the conceptually thin practice of higher coeducation alienates women, Martin observes, by estranging them from each other, from their lived experience, and from women’s occupations – including education itself. She cites Woolf’s image of ‘the procession of the sons of educated men’ to consider women in academe metaphorically as ‘immigrants’ into a ‘promised land’ that has for a long time been the preserve of men (Martin, 2000, 75). ‘Where once the outcome was the exclusion of women, now it is containment’ (Martin, 2000, 120). Therefore, in Coming of Age in Academe, she constructs a new conceptual vocabulary for theorizing higher coeducation, referring to a mixed-sex faculty as a ‘co-professoriate’ and to a gender-inclusive curriculum as a ‘cocurriculum’ (Martin, 2000, 100, 101). This new vocabulary enables her analysis of higher coeducation as miseducation for what Wollstonecraft might call sexual character – as a ‘sex-gender system’, whose ‘new gender tracking’ in both professoriate and curriculum fosters ‘the prevailing view that women are not capable of doing meaningful work outside their private homes, let alone of doing significant scholarly research’ (Martin, 2000, 77). Here the miseducative ontological, political-economic, and social-ethical aspects of sexual character commingle as a consequence of chilly classroom climates for women students, a hostile climate for women professors, backlash against women’s studies, and harassment of feminist scholars. As an antidote that women might apply to such miseducative coeducation, Martin urges an aim of transforming

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rather than assimilating to academe. The strategy she recommends resembles Jo’s strategy at Laurence College in Alcott’s Jo’s Boys: she urges women to convene across disciplinary boundaries in small ad hoc groups ‘to share gender-related troubles, plan courses of action, and swap ideas about women at work, at home, and in the world’ and also ‘to rock the boat’ (Martin, 2000, 165–8). Further recommending larger collective efforts at transformation, she points out how AfricanAmerican cultural and educational theorist bell hooks has taken ‘the lived experience of black women as both the point of departure of her own feminist theorizing and its point of return’ (Martin, 2000, 176). Indeed, hooks has in precisely this way theorized an ‘engaged pedagogy’ whose aim, like Martin’s, is ‘to transgress those boundaries that would confine’ students, to connect ‘ideas learned in university settings and those learned in life practices’ (hooks, 1994, 13, 15). Martin recognizes that theoretical understanding of what she calls ‘cultural miseducation’ is vital to the possibility that such ‘actions great and small’ may have the effect of transforming academe or of transforming schools into schoolhomes (Martin, 2002; Martin, 2000, 159). Just as Wollstonecraft recognizes that monarchist miseducation of sexual character comes about through various societal institutions, the property system, and the monarchic form of government itself, Martin theorizes similarly in Cultural Miseducation that people learn hatred, violence, and bigotry (reflected in the monarchist sexual character that concerns Wollstonecraft) through what she has named ‘multiple educational agency’ (Martin, 2002, 32). She observes that such cultural miseducation comes about when a culture confronts a ‘problem of generations’, failing to deliberate adequately about the value of its ‘cultural stock’ before passing it on to the next generation or receiving it from the last one (Martin, 2002, 3, 9). Therefore, she recommends an educational strategy akin to that which both Wollstonecraft and Woolf deploy in their analyses of miseducation, which she calls ‘cultural book-keeping’ – that is, to discriminate between ‘cultural assets’ and ‘cultural liabilities’, classifying the latter as ‘dead relics’ and the former as ‘living legacy’ or ‘cultural wealth’ (Martin, 2002, 3, 54, 87). In other words, coeducational engagement in cultural studies becomes vital to address cultural miseducation of the sort that Wollstonecraft theorizes as monarchist miseducation in

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Rights of Woman, of the sort that Alcott represents as girls’ miseducation in Little Women, of the sort that Woolf theorizes as imperialist miseducation in Three Guineas, or of the sort that motivates hooks’ Teaching To Transgress. Implicit in Martin’s conception of cultural miseducation, then, is the insight that the very possibility of gendersensitive coeducation may hang upon academic and popular efforts – like Cooper’s efforts at the turn of the last century – to engage both narrowly and broadly in such cultural studies: a conclusion that points toward the contemporary relevance of Wollstonecraft’s coeducational thought.

Notes 1. Harriet Devine Jump (2003), ‘Introduction’ in Mary Wollstonecraft and the Critics, 1788–2001, volume I. London: Routledge, 3. 2. Jump, ‘Introduction’, 2. 3. Miranda Seymour (2000), Mary Shelley. New York: Grove Press, 37–8. 4. Anne K. Mellor (1988), Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters. New York: Routledge, 8. 5. Seymour, Mary Shelley, 49. 6. Mellor, Mary Shelley: Her Life, 13. 7. Mellor, Mary Shelley: Her Life, 20. 8. Janet Todd (2003), Daughters of Ireland: The Rebellious Kingsborough Sisters and the Making of a Modern Nation. New York: Ballantine, 85. 9. Todd, Daughters of Ireland, 85. 10. Todd, Daughters of Ireland, 205, 225. 11. Todd, Daughters of Ireland, 90. 12. Todd, Daughters of Ireland, 98. 13. Todd, Daughters of Ireland, 96. 14. Todd, Daughters of Ireland, 88. 15. Todd, Daughters of Ireland, 91. 16. Todd, Daughters of Ireland, 100. 17. Todd, Daughters of Ireland, 106. 18. Todd, Daughters of Ireland, 115. 19. Todd, Daughters of Ireland, 294.

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24.

25.

26.

27.

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See also Seymour. Todd, Daughters of Ireland, 297. Todd, Daughters of Ireland, 298. Charles Lemert (1998), ‘Anna Julia Cooper: the colored woman’s office’, in Charles Lemert and Esme Bhan (eds), The Voice of Anna Julia Cooper . Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1–43. Barbara Miller Solomon (1985), In the Company of Educated Women: A History of Women and Education in America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 10–11. Historians of coeducation have yet to study the failures of both inter-racial and inter-sexual mutuality evident in cultural neglect that has befallen Cooper’s brilliant, controversial coeducational thought, only in 1988 reclaimed by Mary Helen Washington and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. along with other African-American scholars of both sexes, as well as by Nicole Pitts (1999), ‘Anna Julia Cooper: not the girls less, but the boys more’, in Connie Titone and Karen Maloney (eds), Women’s Philosophies of Education: Thinking Through Our Mothers. New York: Prentice Hall, Chapter 4. The Scarlet Letter is the title of a nineteenth-century novel in the US (New England) by Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose female hero is condemned to wear forever the scarlet letter ‘A’ (for adultery) as a sexual pariah, after she becomes pregnant by the local preacher. Barbara Miller Solomon notes the ‘shades of Mary Wollstonecraft’ in Emma Willard’s argument that ‘in educating the female sex, the first object should not be ‘to prepare to please the other’, in Company of Educated Women, 26. Solomon also notes the backlash against Wollstonecraft, p. 16. For insight into Willard’s scorn for Wollstonecraft’s heterosexual life as well as many other ‘shades of Mary Wollstonecraft’ in Willard’s thought on maternal education and coeducational schooling, worthy of further research, I am indebted also to Lucy Townsend (Project Director, Emma Willard Papers), panelist on Emma Willard, ‘Motherhood, Education, and Feminism’, National Women’s Studies Association, 30 June 2007, St Charles, IL. On Emma Willard’s thought concerning motherhood and education, in which Wollstonecraft’s influence is evident, but not acknowledged, see: An address to the public: Particularly to the

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28. 29.

30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

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members of the Legislature of New-York, proposing a plan for improving female education. Apparently there were at least three early editions of this document, the first of which is no longer extant. Sarah Lucretia Hudson Willard, Emma Willard’s daughter-in-law, republished the first edition in 1869. The second edition was issued in Middlebury (VT): printed by J.W. Copeland, 1819. The third was published in Albany (New York): printed by I.W. Clark, 1819. See also: ‘The Relation of Females and Mothers Especially to the Cause of Common School Improvement’, Connecticut Common School Journal 4: 64–6 (15 March 1842); ‘Letter to Dupont de lˆa Eure on the Political Position of Women’, American Literary Magazine 2 (4): 246–54 (April 1848); also published in pamphlet form in Albany by Joel Munsell, 1848. Barbara Taylor (2003), Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 246. Eve Tavor Bannet (2000), The Domestic Revolution: Enlightenment Feminisms and the Novel. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 9. Gerda Lerner (1993), The Creation of Feminist Consciousness: From the Middle Ages to Eighteen-seventy. New York: Oxford University Press, 180. Jump, Introduction, 5. Jump, Introduction, 5. Jump, Introduction, 5. Lerner, Feminist Consciousness, 180. Lerner, Feminist Consciousness, 180. Alice S. Rossi (1973), ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’, in The Feminist Papers: From Adams to de Beauvoir . New York: Bantam, 39. Jump, Introduction, 7. Jump, Introduction, 8. Susan Laird, PhD dissertation (1988), Maternal teaching and maternal teachings: philosophic and literary case studies of educating . Cornell University, Chapter 4; Susan Laird (1991), ‘The ideal of the educated teacher: Reclaiming a Conversation with Louisa May Alcott’, Curriculum Inquiry 21, 3: 271–97; Susan Laird (1994), ‘Teaching in a different sense: Alcott’s Marmee’, in Audrey Thompson (ed.), Philosophy of Education 1993. Urbana, IL:

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44. 45. 46.

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Philosophy of Education Society; Susan Laird (1999), ‘Learning from Marmee’s Teaching: Alcott’s Response to Girls’ Miseducation’, in Janice M. Alberghene and Beverly Lyon Clark (eds), ‘Little Women’ and the Feminist Imagination. New York: Garland, 285–321; Susan Laird (2001), ‘Louisa May Alcott, 1832–88’, in Joy A. Palmer (ed.), Fifty Major Thinkers on Coeducation From Confucius to Dewey. London: Routledge, 132–8. Jump, Introduction, 7. Jump, 7. Jump, 190–8. Elaine Showalter (2005), ‘Chronology’, in Showalter (ed.), Louisa May Alcott: ‘Little Women’, ‘Little Men’, ‘Jo’s Boys’ . New York: The Library of America, 1067–77; Christine Doyle (1999), ‘Transatlantic translations: communities of education in Alcott and Bronte’; Susan Laird (1999), ‘Learning from Marmee’s teaching: Alcott’s response to girls’ miseducation’, both in Janice M. Alberghene and Beverly Lyon Clark (eds), ‘Little Women’ and the Feminist Imagination. New York: Garland, 267, 273, 289; Susan Laird (2001), ‘Louisa May Alcott’, in Joy A. Palmer (ed.), Fifty Major Thinkers on Education, From Confucius to Dewey. London: Routledge, 132–8. Jump, Introduction, 9. Cited by Naomi Black (2004), Virginia Woolf as Feminist. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 148. Literati have studied her educational thought in relation to Locke’s and Rousseau’s, albeit typically without reference to contemporary educational scholarship, publishing in contexts unlikely to reach educational scholars: e.g., Alan Richardson, Harriet Devine Jump. Susan Laird (1999), ‘Learning from Marmee’s teaching: Alcott’s response to girls’ miseducation’, in Janice M. Alberghene and Beverly Lyon Clark (eds), ‘Little Women’ and the Feminist Imagination. New York: Garland, 288, 289. Laird, ‘Learning from Marmee’s teaching: Alcott’s response to girls’ miseducation’, 290ff. Susan Laird, ‘Women and gender in John Dewey’s philosophy of education’, Educational Theory 38, 1, 111–29.

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50. Counter-evidence does appear in those other ‘minor’ works: Wollstonecraft’s repeated advocacy for deliberate pedagogical engagement of children’s care and compassion for animals as well as family members and distressed strangers, her self-educative ruminations as a near-suicidal single mother traveling alone with her child and au pair throughout Scandinavia, her fictional Mary’s imaginatively self-educative reliance upon divine parental love and guidance in the absence of actual parental love, her fictional Jemima’s poignant testimony of a thoroughly miseducative childhood without maternal love, and her posthumously published maternal Lessons.

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Chapter 6

The Art of Coeducational Thought

In the first post-millennial decade, monarchy is nearly obsolete. Coeducation is both commonplace and far from ideal: as Chapter 5 has explained, others have imagined it more vividly, critiqued it as miseducation, and conceptualized it more fully. Now largely beyond popular reach of parents, teachers, other childcare workers, and most self-educating adults, educational thought has become intensely academic, professionalized as several disciplinary specialties – sociology, history, philosophy of education. Mary Wollstonecraft’s diverse genres of writing on education – manuals, novels, stories, and treatises – do not neatly fit into such categories. Chapter 2 has noted the particular challenges her writing may pose for twenty-first-century philosophical readers, since it addresses readers’ emotions no less than their reason and makes her embodied presence felt in the text, thereby violating the convention of passionless, disembodied reason that distinguishes most academic thought. Has her educational oeuvre perhaps become a revolutionary ancestral work to be honorifically cited in passing, simply a useless anachronism or a mere historical curiosity, about which Jane Roland Martin might ask, ‘Is it a dead relic or a living legacy?’ What relevance can Wollstonecraft’s coeducational thought hold for twenty-first-century readers? Perhaps most obviously, Wollstonecraft’s coeducational analysis of monarchism constitutes a plea for twenty-first-century readers’ comparable coeducational analysis of global corporatism, which gives her eighteenth-century argument for government-funded universal schooling possible twenty-first-century relevance, particularly in the world’s poorest nations. According to UNICEF: 62 million of the estimated 115 million children in the world who are not in school are girls, according to 2002 figures. In Sub-Saharan

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Africa, 24 million girls were out of school in 2002. 85% of all girls out of school live in Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, East Asia and the Pacific. Two-thirds of the world’s 781 million illiterate adults are women.1

But even the roughest prospectus for such coeducational thought inspired by her educational oeuvre would require extensive exposition that material constraints here forbid. Particularly attentive to questions both logically prior and integral to that larger project, however, this chapter will more modestly address her educational oeuvre’s contemporary relevance through examination of two significant gaps in its text – her unfinished work that remains to be undertaken now, in educational landscapes far different from her own, landscapes that also project normative conceptions of sexual character. These logically inter-related gaps within her thought on ‘education of the heart’ – arts coeducation and coeducation for childrearing – signal gaps also in Anglophone educational thought more generally, so addressing them now could make significant contributions indeed.

A. The Arts Coeducation Gap In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman Wollstonecraft pleads for coeducation that will lead women and men ‘together in every pursuit. . . to observe the progress of the human understanding in the improvement of the sciences and arts’ (W5, 249). She envisions educated citizen-mothers who resist domestication by pursuing literature, or ‘attaching themselves to a science, with that steady eye which strengthens the mind, or practicing one of the fine arts that cultivate the taste’ (W5, 263). But, as Chapter 4 has pointed out, she contradicts her own aesthetic appreciation to marginalize fine arts education as mere ‘relaxations’, devaluation now as commonplace and problematic as coeducation itself. Historically, before the Late Modern era, the arts have constituted the curricular core of girls’ and women’s education, whether formal or informal. Variously conceived arts curricula for girls and women have ranged from culinary, textile, decorative, and other readily domesticated arts to performing and fine arts, both pious and secular, that also lend themselves readily to domestication,

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such as music, dance, painting, theater, and literature (notably, not sculpture or architecture!). Wollstonecraft recognizes that the domesticated arts have played prominent roles in educating women’s moral, spiritual, and sensual emotions – in cultivating sensibility and forming what she has called their ‘sexual character’. In the twenty-first century both sciences and arts pose profound and complex moral problems, and also educational problems. But in the eighteenth century Wollstonecraft seems to see women’s participation in the sciences as a moral corrective for the self-indulgent and anti-intellectual effects of their participation in the domesticated arts. Observing the rise of Newtonian science, she argues for women’s access to scientific education and scientific professions through coeducation – still a significantly troubling issue after the millennium. She does not, however, argue for any coeducational effort to challenge the designation of some arts as feminine, trivial, and domesticated, or of others as masculine, significant, and public. She imagines women as doctors, but not as architects, landscape architects, or urban designers, despite these fields’ obvious reflections of Newtonian influence and her own deep appreciation for architectural and natural beauty. Thus she leaves young women with taste and talent for design to fall back on decorative arts implicated in the monarchist sexual character she critiques; at the same time, she leaves to men (who remain heavily invested in that monarchist sexual character) the large work of designing homes, schools, universities, neighborhoods, and cities for the revolutionary new republics that capture her political imagination. She has the remarkable vision to imagine a new government-funded institution of universal education, but does not yet seem to recognize the need to imagine new ways of organizing neighborhoods, parks, and cities around the revolutionary moral-educational aims she has theorized – although her travels in Scandinavia begin to set her thinking in such directions. Nor does her vision of universal coeducation include an arts curriculum that might foster such imagination among common people of both sexes. Yet Godwin reports that one of Wollstonecraft’s ‘strongest characteristics was the exquisite sensations of pleasure she felt from the associations of visible objects’ (M, 233). She reviews theater for Joseph Johnson’s Analytical Review, admires Handel’s music in concert, and works closely with artistic men, both literary and visual artists, for

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whom imagery expresses both feeling and thought: William Blake illustrates her Original Stories from Real Life; she becomes entangled in a foolish and intensely disappointing but educative friendship with painter Henry Fuseli; and another painter, John Opie, remains her loyal friend for many years, painting several portraits of her. William Godwin writes philosophically within both the genre of the treatise and that of the novel, and despite his own rationalism, admires her taste and sensibility. Her collegial circle – Joseph Johnson’s circle – works in the immediate urban landscape recently changed by Christopher Wren’s great edifice, eager to throw off the monarchic ecclesiastical tyranny it represents. They claim the collective purpose of making language, imagery, and the educational power of print media accessible to a self-educating public, to common people – but not yet also the educational power of public landscapes and spaces. Wollstonecraft’s coeducational thought reflects that fateful gap, as does educational thought more generally. Yet her thought’s artfulness may offer twenty-first-century coeducators means to see that gap which educational thought more generally does not. Visual culture may be the twenty-first century’s critical counterpart of eighteenth-century London’s burgeoning print and conversational culture, from which Wollstonecraft’s thought emerges. Moreover, Susan Bordo (1993, 2003, xiii, 5–11, 18) credits Wollstonecraft’s critique of ‘artificial notions of beauty’ as an early forerunner of Michel Foucault’s twentieth-century critique of ‘docile bodies’ in her own massive brilliant study of Late Modern Western visual culture as ‘the empire of images’, representing ‘woman as body’. As John Berger (1972) shows also in Ways of Seeing , inspired by Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, the expert artistry of marketing – like the fine visual arts of early modernity – both depicts and elicits the sexual characters upon which modern commercial wealth depends, whose myriad audio, visual, print, performance, and cyberspace media pervade the Late Modern educational landscape, including homes, places of worship, schools, college and university campuses. Wollstonecraft’s posthumously published Hints – notes made in anticipation of the promised second part of Rights of Woman – suggest her intensifying interest in imagination as an educational aim

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and value, which might have displaced the Enlightenment rationalism often cited in Rights of Woman’s first and only ‘part’, had she lived to complete that work. Late Modern curricular reduction of arts education to professional preparation for talented elites produces commercially useful aesthetic naivet´e among mass consumers. Yet Virginia Woolf (1938, 98) admonishes readers of Three Guineas to ‘[f]ind out new ways of approaching “the public”; single it into separate people instead of massing it into one monster, gross in body, feeble in mind.’ Often, the twenty-first century’s media-saturated context does reduce us collectively to such a monster, a monster that seldom has even sufficient aesthetic-educational intelligence to question the routine design of schools that are visually indistinguishable from prisons and hospitals – ‘panopticons’, Foucault might call them. Therefore, existentialist Maxine Greene’s (1978, 42–52, 213–24) educational concept of moral ‘wide-awakeness’ to ‘the lived world’ – an educated attitude brilliantly exemplified in Wollstonecraft’s educational oeuvre almost two centuries earlier as well as in coeducational thought after her – may become vital to any present effort to educate young people. Arts education such as Berger has provided for late-twentieth-century BBC viewers can foster young people’s wide-awakeness: to see and understand the sexual characters that marketing evokes and deploys, to see and understand the designs that marketers have upon them, and to evaluate their moral consequences with critical perspicacity comparable to that evident in Wollstonecraft’s analysis of the miseducated, monarchist sexual character. Her philosophical analysis reflects her critical aesthetic engagement of her cultural experience of the Georgian English landscape. Chapter 5 has pointed out that Louisa May Alcott, Woolf, and Martin are unanimous in their recognition of artistic activities’ power to educate moral emotions. Representing a creative practice of recycling the over-sized domestic spaces of old wealth as ideal settings for educating common children whose dwellings are not so over-sized, Alcott recognizes the educative power of a setting’s visual aspect; she imagines her experimental school Plumfield as a spacious home and garden. Within that setting, domesticated arts become part of the coeducational curriculum, as one boy matures to take up tailoring

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for his profession. Both Alcott and Martin highlight the educative power of theatrical activities. Woolf constructs her critique of imperialist sexual character by examining photographs and biographies, and argues that literature is a uniquely civilized profession open to women, because paper is cheap. Indeed, theater, portraiture, biography, and fiction are all genres of character study (a list to which contemporary educators should add film), and Wollstonecraft’s central philosophical concern is moral education of human character in young people, so that they might not be reduced to mere sexual character. Not only is most of Wollstonecraft’s own thought on ‘education of the heart’ literary in form, requiring literary engagement to discern its fullest possible philosophical significance for education; so is much coeducational thought that reflects Wollstonecraft’s influence. In other words, constructive criticism of the arts-coeducation gap in the Wollstonecraft text may help to illuminate her coeducational thought’s contemporary relevance for a media-saturated visual culture, and at the same time address the gap that Martin has flagged in Wollstonecraft’s Rights of Woman on education of emotions, vital to coeducation, childrearing, and living itself. Visual study of Wollstonecraft’s life and thought may provide the most provocative means of critically engaging her conception of monarchist sexual character so that its twenty-first-century relevance can become sufficiently clear to stimulate new coeducational thought for present purposes. For miseducative preoccupation with appearances of all sorts – a familiar feature of twenty-first-century cultures – is a central object of moral critique in the reading of monarchist sexual character upon which she founds her plea for coeducation. Most twenty-first century biographies of Wollstonecraft feature illustrations, including reproductions of painted portraits by Opie and others; unfortunately, this volume does not. But this chapter’s discursive presentation of her visual biography surveys her life and thought via descriptive analysis of illustrations worthy of readers’ own efforts to find and view in other books, or in museums. Exploring her fascination with questions about visual interpretation of embodied thought and feeling, not just with superficial appearances, her visual biography displays her direct response to monarchist sexual character most vividly as simultaneously aesthetic and political.

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Various artistic portraits of her and other Georgian Englishwomen invite readers to meet Wollstonecraft herself, face to face, in her time and place, just as Woolf does in The Second Common Reader : to feel her presence before them, to see how her physical presence changes as her relational life and her thought change, to read the iconography of her educational landscape, to map the places and powers it assigns and denies to women of different classes, and to locate themselves in relation to her – to exercise what Deanne Bogdan (1992, 219) has called ‘embodied vision’. Reading Wollstonecraft’s visual biography as a retrospective reflection upon her educational oeuvre summarized in Part Two, then, readers can examine critically the normative meanings, aesthetic signifiers, ontological status, political-economic configurations, and social-ethical consequences of sexual character in their own educational landscapes as compared to hers, and question contemporary arts coeducation’s adequacy as preparation for the challenges of re-imagining and remaking them. The pragmatic relevance of Wollstonecraft’s educational critique of monarchist sexual character can become clear through such exercise of self-examination and imagination, of bodily sight inextricably intertwined with feeling and thought – generative for future coeducational thought, particularly concerning arts coeducation and adults’ coeducation for childrearing in an age shaped by global corporatism.

B. Wollstonecraft’s Visual Biography Wollstonecraft’s coeducational thought reflects an empirical concern with embodiment of human rationality and idealization of ‘sexual character’ as essentially ‘feminine’ or ‘masculine’, which she judges fallacious and implicates in culturally pervasive miseducation under monarchism. At least in part, this philosophical preoccupation with pragmatics of body-mind relations signals her own embodied reflection upon John Locke’s educational thought, which mostly concerns boys rather than girls, but does emphasize human understanding’s origin in sense experience. Because of such ongoing critical curiosity about the distortation of body-mind relations by the fallacious construction of sexual character, Wollstonecraft takes theoretical interest

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in the popular eighteenth-century practice of physiognomy, interpretation of human character by reading physical countenances. Meanwhile, conduct-book writer John Gregory, whose educational thought Wollstonecraft critiques in Rights of Woman, writes to his own daughter, ‘You will not easily believe how much we consider your dress as expressive of your characters’, listing a small inventory of feminine vices – ‘vanity, levity, sluttishness, folly’ – that women’s dress makes apparent.2 Visual interpretive activity becomes both morally substantial and critically integral to Wollstonecraft’s educational thought concerning sexual character, just as it does for both literary and visual arts in England during her lifetime. Portrait and landscape painting grow in popularity among the English at this time, often functioning to educate and persuade just as advertising, fashion, nature, and documentary photography do now – also functioning later as historical records of cultural events, personalities, differences, values, practices, and controversies. Painting thus becomes an object of political critique that engages Wollstonecraft. In A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), she criticizes an essentialist interpretation of the aesthetics of sexual character, which she considers misogynist, in Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, along with his pro-slavery defense of monarchism in Reflections on the Revolution in France. In this way, although even Wollstonecraft’s earliest writing centrally concerns girls’ education, her radical theorizing about sexual character begins through philosophical reflection upon both art and politics and later becomes educational in Rights of Woman. Meanwhile, friendly with artists in her intellectual circle, Wollstonecraft herself becomes the subject of four portrait paintings and at least one extant engraved portrait. Twenty-first-century students of Wollstonecraft can not only read these artistic representations of her physical countenance, but also interpret their diverse readings of her character and her thought. To read pictures in this way requires some elementary engagement in iconology, the classical art-historical practice of interpreting pictures’ allusive and signifying imagery.3 Such reading of pictures is akin but not identical to postmodern critical media studies of gender. Visual art thus interpreted becomes a vital medium representing dynamics

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of sexual character within the monarchist political economy of eighteenth-century England, upon which Wollstonecraft’s coeducational thought focuses.4 B1. A Visual Landscape of Sexual Character Formation Especially when deliberately and comparatively viewing these five portraits of her together within the mimetic context of other late eighteenth-century English paintings, twenty-first-century readers will find the intellectual and sexual iconoclasm and immense cultural significance of her character rendered immediately visible. Almost theatrically, the procession of these images renders a pictorial performance of the key premise of her coeducational thought, that sexual character is neither fixed nor innate, but a dynamic social and educational construction, potentially even self-contradictory. These paintings of Wollstonecraft and of other eighteenth-century Englishwomen compose a visual invitation to critical cultural inquiry concerning the unusual life from which her revolutionary thought on sexual character and education takes shape – critical cultural inquiry of exactly the sort she herself practices with regard to eighteenth-century sexual character. Middle-class women of the period employ themselves with extensive shopping and, keeping themselves abreast of London fashions, attempt to conform to them somehow, even if not on the grand scale of aristocratic ladies. With such ‘feminine’ preoccupations Wollstonecraft has little patience. In her first employment, as a lady’s companion in Bath, for example, she finds elaborate ladies’ fashions of the 1770s problematically frivolous and false with satin gowns, taffeta underskirts, hooped petticoats, laced corsets, ribboned hats, and ostrich plumes, as well as backcombed, frizzed, curled, and floured hair.5 While later working as governess to children of titled Irish aristocrats in 1786, she writes again with disgust for the triviality of ladies’ conversations and for the excessive time they spend on their make-up and dress. Later one of Wollstonecraft’s moral stories for children sympathetically portrays a little girl made to wear a long gauze dress with a severely laced silk slip underneath and ‘so stuck out with trimmings and artificial flowers that she could scarcely move’.6

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Such alienated perceptions of eighteenth-century Englishwomen’s culture are formative for Wollstonecraft’s educational critique of sexual character in Rights of Woman as well as for her own development as a different sort of person, the sort of person who could write such a radically significant treatise. The visual record of Mary Wollstonecraft’s cultural presence in Georgian England, art photographically reproduced in most of her recent biographies, boldly contradicts the art-historical record’s iconography of eighteenth-century English womanhood generally.7 The Wollstonecraft portraits depict no elaborate coiffures with beads, ribbons, dramatic hats, or feathers; no alluring d´ecolletage with jewels, flowers, lace, embroidery, or ruffles; nothing suggesting her relationship by blood or marriage to a man of property and wealth. No beautifully colorful, grandly draped, fashionably frilled, or full petticoated long skirts that render her movement difficult if not impossible. No lap dog or fluttering fan, no useless hands or delicate pallor; nothing suggesting her ennui, idleness, or fragility. No gaze or glance ambiguously projecting her seductiveness and modesty. No musical instrument or score, sketchbook or romantic novel cradled passively or dreamily, suggesting her fashionable schooling in ladies’ ‘accomplishments’, which domesticate and trivialize women’s relationship to the arts by making them merely ornamental rather than intellectually significant or profoundly expressive. Rights of Woman sharply critiques the sexual character of womanhood generally suggested by such eighteenth-century iconography, especially evident in paintings by Sir Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough (Chapter 3 summarizes the logic of her critique). The five extant Wollstonecraft portraits’ iconography does not even resemble that of the few canonized paintings of the period’s poorer women, often profoundly diminished by their appearance in an immense landscape, as if indistinguishable from ‘Nature’ itself, if not overtly sexualized in a lavishly sensuous interior scene of seduction. The Wollstonecraft portraits depict no plain or torn dresses in solid earthy colors – no comely or rapturous nudes, either! No aprons, shawls, milk buckets, hearths, babies, clinging children, laboring men, peasant wagons, or brothel couches. Wollstonecraft passionately empathizes with such working-poor women in her critique of

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Burke’s misogyny, but her portraits do not locate her in their world. Like the often film-adapted novels by Samuel Richardson, Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, and Jane Austen that depict eighteenthcentury Englishwomen’s lives most vividly,8 the art-historical record of Wollstonecraft’s England documents an iconography of womanhood in which ladies are typically decorative while other women are domestic drudges or prostitutes – womanhood in all walks of life variously used, controlled, intellectually neglected, and visually appraised by men. A radically different iconography emerges in the portraits of Wollstonecraft, however, which bear men’s revolutionary witness to the same new sort of eighteenth-century woman she envisions in Rights of Woman: a self-respecting person of active intellect. B2. Wollstonecraft as Gender-Troubling Icon9 By the 1780s, ladies’ fashions remain elaborate, but somewhat less than in the previous decade, and Janet Todd (2000) cites sources describing Wollstonecraft’s own dress in the latter part of this decade as that of a ‘philosophical sloven’ (155). She wears something like a milk-woman’s coarse cloth habit with black worsted stockings, a beaver hat, and lank hair around her shoulders. Her poverty may in part explain her rustic dress, but such crudely unstylish clothing and hair most likely do signify her political sympathy with French revolutionaries rather than with fashionable royalists and aristocrats like her previous employers. Lyndall Gordon casts doubt upon the judgment encoded in these descriptions without challenging their sources’ accuracy. Correctly she contradicts their charge of slovenliness by pointing out Wollstonecraft’s frequent written comments on the importance of cleanliness and neatness, and raises questions about the possible misogyny of these sources with her observation that ‘This is the image of the unfeminine intellectual, dear to misogynist tradition.’10 But clearly Wollstonecraft cannot desire to appear ‘feminine’ in any sense then commonly understood if her writing on sexual character is honest, and her correspondence makes plain that she does desire intensely to be respected for her intellect at this time. As a physically active ing´enue intellectual struggling against poverty, she may be performing with bold imagination the late 1780s’

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otherwise utterly unimaginable equivalent of the Late Modern budget-constrained student of either sex, with clean-enough hair plainly plaited or pony-tailed if not cut short or innately curly, neatly dressed in well-worn but regularly laundered blue jeans and tee shirt or sweatshirt, as well as comfortable shoes or sandals or boots. Some of these portraits may fairly be viewed as direct ancestors of that commonplace ‘unisex’ image taken for granted in Late Modern Englishspeaking coeducational institutions of learning. Whatever the correct interpretive conclusion may be concerning the judgment reflected by available sources on Wollstonecraft’s visually projected character at this time, the evidence clearly demonstrates that she is daring to present herself as vastly different from other women, whether rich or poor, portrayed as intellectually inconsequential by the period’s art. Moreover, the iconography of artists’ portraits of Wollstonecraft does portray her embodiment of one central idea that grounds her most significant educational thought: her idea that ‘sexual character’ – or ‘gender’ in twentieth-century parlance – is mostly a false or artificial construct and should, therefore, except ‘where love animates the behaviour’, be deliberately ‘confounded’ through the cultivation of women’s physical strength and rational capacities for autonomous virtue (W5, 126). These pictures depict her dress as plain and neat, not slovenly, but as images of her sexual character they do impart philosophical significance to her dress. The five Wollstonecraft portraits display the same woman, albeit with several different sexual characters, none of which resembles the canonized artistic representations of Georgian femininity. Twenty-first-century viewers might apply the label ‘transgender’ to the earliest portrait of Wollstonecraft at age 32, commissioned by her abolitionist friend William Roscoe and painted by an unknown Liverpool artist in the same year she publishes Rights of Woman, 1791. The energy in her erect posture suggests the vigorous physical activity that she enjoys throughout her life; her hair is powdered, and her clothing is sober, in no eighteenth-century sense ‘womanly’ with its generous white cravat calling attention away from her breasts to her face; her lips are pinched with determination and a suggestion of quick wit; her hands are held to one side, her fingers active and intensely angular as if about to gesture some sharp comment, while

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her intelligent dark eyes stare gravely at the portrait’s viewers. This portrait depicting her as ‘a stateswoman about to speak’11 may help to explain visually Wollstonecraft’s vulnerability to pejorative caricature as a ‘masculine’ woman, as an ‘Amazon’ – the ‘Augustan code word for female pride and gender crossing’ insofar as Englishwomen’s mere act of writing becomes identified with an act of war against men.12 Small wonder, then, that Todd reports Wollstonecraft’s opinion of this unknown painter’s rendering of her character as too stern.13 Perhaps exaggerated in its Amazonian sternness, this portrait does at least make clear that Wollstonecraft is no one’s woman but her own. Gordon argues that the portrait reflects no intention to reproduce a realistic likeness of Wollstonecraft’s everyday appearance, but rather is ‘a statement designed to refute the lightweight image of women’s nature’.14 In Rights of Woman, as Part Two has noted, Wollstonecraft explicitly challenges the assertions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Burke, and many other philosophers that women of reason should be condemned as masculine, a challenge that becomes one premise for her argument that both girls and boys should be educated to reason so that they can be morally responsible to themselves, one another, their children, their work, their nation, their God, and humanity generally. Consistent with that challenge, the other three portraits, painted by Wollstonecraft’s Cornish friend Opie between 1792 and 1797, show a person with unmistakably the same features, quite differently confounding eighteenth-century notions of sexual character. Opie’s Wollstonecraft appears asexual and studious in two portraits of her, circa 1792, one of which, first published in 2005 by Gordon, has only recently been recovered after seventy years’ disappearance. In both these paintings, whose iconography unmistakably resembles that of other eighteenth-century paintings by Reynolds depicting schoolboys with their books,15 her intense and contemplative brown eyes look up from her book, as if she is about to engage the portraits’ viewers in lively conversations about the ideas she has just read. In both, too, her hair is powdered, her clothing plain, dark and shapeless. Consonant with Wollstonecraft’s theorizing in Rights of Woman, these portraits depict an active mind and a dramatically indeterminate even if not entirely absent sexual character, the embodiment of a rational and literate human character.

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By contrast, Opie’s last portrait, circa 1797, which the London Portrait Gallery has removed from storage for display only as recently as 1985,16 depicts Wollstonecraft during her second pregnancy – but framed as a head-and-shoulders picture, it does not show her pregnancy. Wearing a simple long-sleeved, softly draped, undecorated, modestly open-collared white dress with a high waist, she looks slightly away from viewers. An earlier engraving published by Claire Tomalin, which she dates circa 1795, depicts a slightly younger Wollstonecraft, similarly dressed, albeit in a revolutionary Frenchwomen’s hat. According to one friend writing somewhat later, after her return to England following the French Revolution, she has reportedly ‘grown more handsome over the last months’, now ‘tall, well-proportioned, full of form, with pleasing, expressive features and soft voice’.17 Opie is rumored to be courting Wollstonecraft, and his portrait of this same period similarly depicts her, auburn-haired in a black beret, perhaps sensuously but not flirtatiously projecting a thoughtful, dignified, and confident serenity: a ‘gentle, rather subdued and motherly-looking woman’18 exuding ‘the promise of womanly intelligence’.19 The Wollstonecraft biographies most often introduce her to their readers with this last sympathetically designed image, perhaps because it seems to be the least gender-troubling one: animated by love for her philosopher-friend Godwin, who feels no desire for ‘a man in a female form’,20 even if not also animated by Opie’s own attraction to her. Yet, when considered within the context of her other portraits as well as other paintings of more typical eighteenth-century women, this image can artfully highlight her central idea that sexual character is neither essentially nor ideally fixed, but responsive both to education and to love, if not primarily a product of artistic representation and imitation. Contextualized in this way, it does disclose the deliberate, dynamic quality of Wollstonecraft’s own refusals of mindless sexual character within an embodied, also dynamic intellectual life. At the same time it illustrates a revolutionary idea concerning women’s education, which she may derive from her study of Johann Kaspar Lavater’s Essays on Physiognomy,21 when she theorizes in Rights of Woman specifically that [t]o render the person perfect, physical and moral beauty ought to be attained at the same time; each lending and receiving force by

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the combination. Judgment must reside on the brow, affection and fancy beam in the eye, and humanity curve the cheek, or vain is the sparkling of the finest eye or the elegantly turned finish of the fairest features . . . (W5, 243)

B3. Arts Coeducation for Reading and Refusal What might Wollstonecraft’s visual biography teach her twenty-firstcentury readers? As noted in Chapter 4, because Wollstonecraft refuses many morally questionable aspects of feminine sensibility, but not others that carry intuitively clear moral substance, she responds ambivalently to the notion of ‘education through art’ that Bogdan (1992, 13) recognizes as ‘counter to Plato’s educational prescription for rational thought’. For that philosophical father of coeducation censors poetry for children in the Republic’s early books, but ‘banishes it altogether’ from adult experience in Book X (Bogdan, 1992, 13). In Re-Educating the Imagination, Bogdan re-opens normative inquiry concerning arts and coeducation that Wollstonecraft has started and left unfinished – a recent philosophical move important to twenty-first-century coeducational thought responsive to Wollstonecraft’s. Bogdan is concerned to theorize ‘reading’ as an activity – an activity obviously vital to Wollstonecraft – no less applicable to ‘ordinary existence’ than to literature. Wollstonecraft’s visual biography shows her reading of Georgian Englishwomen’s ordinary existence as a clear case of what Bogdan (1992, 165, 208) has named a ‘poetics of refusal’, which definitively ‘makes direct response logically prior’ – not just chronologically and psychologically prior – ‘to the critical response and which politicizes [aesthetic] engagement at the same time’. Particularly likely in the twenty-first century as a reader’s savvy response to commercial marketing of fashions that demean her or unduly restrict her movement, this poetics of refusal itself exemplifies a reading experience that potentially signifies education of self-respect and perhaps also education of what Aristotle recognizes as the essential political emotion: anger. Wollstonecraft’s visual biography demonstrates such a poetics of refusal, with its description of her tacit refusals of aesthetic norms for

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Georgian Englishwomen’s sexual self-expression through her dress, personal grooming, body language, and material accoutrements. She refuses to imitate Georgian femininity,22 locating herself outside the culture of aesthetic sensibility that defines it, to refuse confinement even by self-selected signs that might prematurely stabilize her self-definition. Wollstonecraft’s ever slightly shifting iconoclasm here exemplifies what Bogdan (1992, 237) has theorized as aesthetic engagement that reflects ‘the logical priority of direct response’. Wollstonecraft deploys that logic of response to refuse an intellectually and spiritually demeaning, feminized location as an essential condition of knowing. Even though she admires some philosophical writings on education that she has read by Locke and Rousseau, her visceral direct responses to the visual landscape of Georgian Englishwomen’s education defined by sexual character have logical priority over her deferentially corrective accommodation of their educational standards for girls and women (e.g. beauty). Wollstonecraft’s response to Rousseau’s portrait of Sophie as ideally passive and submissive in Emile is also visceral and direct, presenting another clear case of Bogdan’s poetics of refusal, as she declares with feeling: ‘What nonsense! when will a great man arise with sufficient strength of mind to puff away the fumes which pride and sensuality have thus spread over the subject!’ (W5, 94). Then instantly she embarks upon rigorously logical reasoning directly within that response of refusal, slicing and dicing syllogisms and analytic distinctions, to demolish his misogynist argument. She doesn’t just feel first and then think later, moving ‘beyond’ her emotions into critical distance – as disembodied thinkers do. Instead, she gives logical priority to her direct response: she acknowledges and values her feeling as a meaningful consequence of her disempowerment, and therefore integrates her feeling’s political meaning into her thinking, to claim for her thinking a consequential power with regard to her situation. Such direct responses of tacit refusal become integral to the logic of her political argument against sexual character as an educational premise and aim; that logic’s selfrespecting aesthetic iconoclasm reflects her own imaginative sense of a politically revolutionary, albeit personal and moral, relation with rational divinity (which Chapter 4 explains). In this way, owning

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rather than setting aside or compromising her direct responses as she thinks logically within and through her feeling, in order to understand rather than control it, Wollstonecraft’s philosophical criticism itself often takes on the expressive quality of art, and becomes an exemplar of self-educating emotion, no less aesthetic than moral – ‘embodied’. Recall how Wollstonecraft constructs her critique of monarchist miseducation around her portrait of Louis XIV. Wollstonecraft’s iconoclastic image, clearly grounded in her own critical aesthetics akin to Bogdan’s poetics of refusal, presents a potentially instructive countercase for coeducators to study as they confront the twenty-first century’s miseducative marketing of sexual characters as well as the moral characters of the educational landscapes within which such marketing takes place. What might twenty-first-century coeducators learn from Wollstonecraft’s reading of monarchist sexual character, from her refusal of it? In Three Guineas, Woolf (1938) clearly has learned a similar reading practice, adopting a poetics of refusal herself with regard to the word ‘feminist’ and to ‘the old college’, both of which she fantasizes burning, the first in order to see ‘Men and women working together for the same cause’ and the second in order to be rid of ‘this “education”’ and its ‘old hypocrisies’ (Woolf, 1938, 36, 102; Bogdan, 1992, 290–93). How might coeducators similarly learn to read now the panopticon fashions that evoke, contain, complicate, and market the sexual character of schools? Or the feudal-estate and ecclesiastical design concepts that still invoke, profess, mystify, and market the moral character of colleges and universities? What practices would a poetics of refusal require them to adopt if they were to insist upon schools, colleges and universities whose material forms express and foster the beauty (rather than the control or mere appearance) of their moral character as coeducational institutions?

C. Landscapes of Character Formation and the Coeducation-for-Childrearing Gap Wollstonecraft’s devaluation of aesthetic learning in her coeducational thought experiment rests uneasily alongside her explicit

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and lengthy theorizing about ‘education of the heart’, primarily in more-and-less autobiographical works of literary art heretofore inaccessible to philosophers of education. In all these fictional writings, both the absence and the affliction of intelligent, loving mothers figure hugely in daughters’ lives, as she reflects upon the freeing and confining, educative and miseducative power of various politicaleconomic, institutional, and natural landscapes, experienced by women and girls differently located within them. She thus substantiates Greene’s (1978, 2) claim two centuries later in Landscapes of Learning , ‘that persons are more likely to ask their own questions and seek their own transcendence when they feel themselves grounded in their personal histories, their lived lives.’ Mary, A Fiction and Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark study cultural and natural landscapes of emotional self-education through autobiographical fiction. Real Life and Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman both construct diverse narrative landscapes of sexual and moral character formation from the vantage point of different social, economic, and geographic locations, landscapes that become curricula for teaching compassion, benevolence, affection, mutuality, and passion for social justice. Thus, despite possible questions about the literary value of these philosophical-literary efforts, Wollstonecraft has claimed an artistic genre specifically for theorizing ‘education of the heart’ – ‘landscapes of learning’, Greene might call this genre. Yet another significant contribution that Wollstonecraft has made to educational thought, this genre represents a vital phase of artistic experimentation in her thinking both toward and beyond her philosophical formulations of monarchist sexual character and its coeducational remedies in Rights of Woman. The coeducational thought of Alcott and Woolf further develops this artistic genre, as landscapes of sexual character and moral character formation. Naomi Black explains how, in composing Three Guineas, Woolf collects many photographs, clippings, and biographical notes for a long time, to construct her reading of immoral sexual character formation within the imperial British educational landscape.23 Martin takes a similar approach while composing the home, school, and world landscapes of character formation in The Schoolhome. Also by a rigorously autobiographical, documentary,

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analytic, and comparative method that reflects Woolf’s acknowledged influence, Bogdan composes her reading landscape in intricate detail and tracks its complex changes in the aftermath of the Montreal Massacre, one of the most violently misogynist events in coeducational history, which has left ‘Canadian women . . . a chorus of yearners . . . for some recognition that their difference is life-threatening and for some change in the way things are’ (Bogdan, 1992, 195–200, 206, 239–46). (On 6 December, 1989, at Montreal’s coeducational engi´ neering school, L’Ecole Polytechnique, a male student separated the men from the women, expelling the men from the classroom at gunpoint, and went on a shooting spree, murdering fourteen women students while shouting, ‘I hate feminists’.)24 British arts educator and feminist historian Carolyn Kay Steedman (1986, 16) defines this genre’s working method of educational analysis in Landscape for a Good Woman when she explains that ‘The first task is to particularize’ the ‘profoundly a-historical landscape . . . And once the landscape is detailed and historicized in this way, the urgent need becomes to find a way of theorizing the result of such difference and particularity.’ Martin’s (1994) introduction to Changing the Educational Landscape, ‘One Woman’s Odyssey’, does precisely that, evoking the metaphor of educational thought as ‘turf’ to be transgressed and ‘terrain’ to be traversed while narrating her intellectual autobiography as a philosopher of education. More recently, also inspired by Woolf, in Ordinary Lessons Susan Douglas Franzosa (1999) has devised a brilliantly interactive and collaborative approach toward intellectual women’s reading of US landscapes of white girlhood in the 1950s – together reading photographs, other artifacts, and finally also one another’s autobiographical narratives of those educational landscapes as each composes her own. As Wollstonecraft’s artistic and educational heirs, all these twentieth-century theorists’ efforts to make sense of landscapes of sexual character and moral character formation have demonstrated the genre’s continuing dependence upon aesthetic engagement and artistic intelligence. Like Wollstonecraft, these authors infuse their educational thought with the simultaneously emotional and rational power of their morally wide-awake, socially and geographically situated, direct responses to their own lived worlds.

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This genre offers Wollstonecraft’s twenty-first-century readers an artistic approach to rethinking the challenge of coeducation-forchildrearing. Aesthetic engagement that landscape construction requires also becomes, as Iris Murdoch explains, vital means of training those powers of ‘loving attention’ that Sara Ruddick (1988) has conceived vital to thoughtful childrearing. Such landscapes of childhood character formation also present an agenda for further coeducational inquiry no less urgent in the twenty-first century than in the eighteenth – particularly evident in African-American fiction, of which Ntozake Shange’s Betsey Brown offers one philosophically noteworthy, brilliant example (Laird, 1989). Albeit with little of Wollstonecraft’s or Shange’s educational insight and without reference to either one, Amy Mullin has written the most thoroughly researched and subtle philosophical analysis of childcare to date, which reflects careful attention to the social, sexual, and economic diversity of landscapes within which childcare must occur. Contemporary educational thought gives scant attention to such landscapes, but Mullin analyzes many issues that have emerged from this study of Wollstonecraft’s life and thought, its reception and legacy. Martin has criticized Wollstonecraft’s failure to acknowledge Sophie’s domestic virtues. She must, however, have found them difficult to see, for her landscapes of character formation depict mothers as absent, foolish, poor, abused, abandoned, confined, and otherwise afflicted. Although Rights of Woman condemns hired childcare, the teaching figure of Mrs Mason in Real Life far exceeds any of Wollstonecraft’s fictional parents in childrearing wisdom. Except for the two girls whom Mrs Mason teaches, Wollstonecraft’s landscaping of character formation particularly studies the self-educative work that unmothered girl-children do for, with, and on themselves. Similarly, Wollstonecraft’s traveling single mother in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark is sad and solitary, lacking the paternal partnership presumed in Rights of Woman, and depends upon the hired help of an au pair . As if taking cues from these neglected literary texts in Wollstonecraft’s educational oeuvre, Mullin (2005, 122) signifies concerns akin to those Martin has raised in her maternal-philosophical reading of Rights of Woman, and challenges ‘the false and dangerous assumptions involved in the ideology of motherhood’. She examines

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Patricia Hill Collins’ (2000, 178–83) Black feminist concept of collective and individual ‘othermothering’, questions popular devaluation of caregiving work by hired parental assistants and professional childcare personnel, worries about mental and physical impairments that mothers may suffer, questions assumptions that childrearing is and should be a private responsibility rather than a larger social one, and conceptualizes mothering to include other serious financial, legal, religious, and social responsibilities besides childcare. She also considers children’s engagement in caregiving, an experience familiar to Wollstonecraft and many other elder siblings, especially elder sisters. Although Mullin (2005, 173) acknowledges that ‘[m]any caregivers seek to teach children physical, emotional and moral skills by means of play’, she does not philosophically examine the educational character of childrearing work that Wollstonecraft presents in Lessons, that Alcott narrates in Little Women and Shange narrates in Betsey Brown, nor does she seem to recognize the childrearing work of school teachers, as exemplified in Sapphire’s Push (Laird, 1989, 1998, 2002). But the childrearing landscape that Mullin analyzes does raise questions that Wollstonecraft’s educational oeuvre must raise for twenty-firstcentury readers when she argues that . . . we must think about how the benefits and burdens of childcare work are distributed differently to people of different sexes, social classes, and ethnicities and how the work itself is conceived differently when provided by people with those different characteristics. (Mullin, 2005, 122)

The landscapes-of-character-formation genre offers twenty-firstcentury educators a potential source of wisdom about childrearing as an endeavor of coeducational agency beyond Wollstonecraft’s indubitably flawed ideal of private citizen-motherhood. Part Three has documented how Wollstonecraft’s daughters confront, upon her death, a motherless educational landscape whose complexities expose serious inadequacies in her theory of coeducation solely dependent upon educated citizen-motherhood to administer the revolutionary republic’s childrearing. Twenty-first-century educators can amend

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the list of those inadequacies even more profusely now that electronic media, bureaucratic intrusions, wars, corporate layoffs, and detached/dislocated/forced/closeted/harassed intimacies have confounded the public-private distinction upon which she premises her coeducational scheme’s normative interdependence between citizenmothers and day schools. Twenty-first-century educators can read their own coeducational landscapes to consider the possibility that her scheme of functional complementarity between home and school may reflect pragmatic flaws similar to those that Martin (1985, 1994) analyzes in the complementary roles that Rousseau assigns Sophie and Emile. Twenty-first-century educators can also read their own coeducational landscapes through the pragmatist lens of Susan Birden’s (2005) Rethinking Sexual Identity in Education to name and question miseducative heterosexist assumptions that Sophie and Emile have bequeathed to coeducational thought, and can consider how Wollstonecraft’s critique of monarchist sexual character may affirm or discredit such assumptions, with what possible consequences. Martin’s Reclaiming A Conversation poses a challenge to twenty-firstcentury educators to invite ever broader participation in coeducational thought. How might Leila Ahmed’s Women and Gender in Islam deepen coeducational thought with the aim of non-violence that Wollstonecraft, Woolf, Martin, and Bogdan all commend? In this light, a poetics of refusal will be necessary with regard to Wollstonecraft’s passing commentaries on ‘Chinese bands’ for women’s feet and on ‘Mohametans’ as the two worst cases imaginable of female oppression. Such passing comments reflect popular Georgian-English prejudices; their careless stereotyping reeks of inconsistency with her otherwise profusely evident ‘affection for the whole human race’ (W5, 65). To integrate such affection-for-all into coeducational thought, interactive and collaborative local construction of diverse landscapes of sexual-character and moral-character formation around the world will be necessary – along with deliberate searches for such landscapes already composed, whether visually or verbally, or in song or on stage or film.25 Might such ‘cultural book-keeping’ (as Martin might call it) disclose relevance that Wollstonecraft’s critical theory of monarchist miseducation may still hold for a world in which multi-national

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corporations enjoy sovereign freedoms largely unchecked by public ethical scrutiny? As twenty-first-century educators read such landscapes, the possibility of coeducation that fosters imagination, physical and mental strength, political and economic independence in all, as well as private and public mutuality across lines of sex, race, class, religion, and national origin, will depend upon generous openness to the likelihood that one’s ‘imaginative heaven is bound to clash with another’s imaginative hell’ (Bogdan, 1992, 152). Now epistemologically and ethically central to educational thought concerning aesthetic engagement and arts (Bogdan, 1992), such emotional, political, and social conflicts, occasionally even murderous, have become commonplace in multicultural coeducation across myriad landscapes (Martin, 1992, 1994, 2000). Coeducational agency in childrearing may confront some adults as imaginative heaven and others as imaginative hell, especially in landscapes where coeducation for both children and adults, about and for childrearing, remains scarce. And where is such coeducation not still scarce? The arts-coeducation gap and the coeducation-for-childrearing gap within Wollstonecraft’s thought on ‘education of the heart’ beg for critical, creative scrutiny in the twenty-first century. Those who reclaim a conversation with Mary Wollstonecraft can refuse those gaps without refusing her coeducational critique of sexual character, by reading together its variations in diverse landscapes of learning and trying to understand one another’s imaginative heavens and imaginative hells with care, concern, and connection. In so doing, they may soon also find themselves – aesthetically and philosophically engaged – in coeducational analysis of global corporatism comparable to Mary Wollstonecraft’s coeducational analysis of monarchism.

Notes 1. UNICEF, Basic Education and Gender Equality. Retrieved 29 August, 2007 from http://www.unicef.org/girlseducation/ index bigpicture.html.

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2. Amanda Vickery (1998), The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England. New Haven: Yale University Press, 161. 3. W.J.T. Mitchell (1986), Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology, p. 2, paraphrases Erwin Panofsky, author of the art-historical classic Studies in Iconology (1939): ‘Panofsky separated iconology from iconography by differentiating the interpretation of the total symbolic horizon of an image from the cataloguing of particular symbolic motifs.’ 4. John Berger (1972), Ways of Seeing . London: British Broadcasting Corporation/Penguin. 5. Janet Todd (2000), Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 32–3. 6. Quoted by Todd, A Revolutionary Life, 135. 7. Here I refer especially to paintings by Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough. 8. Here I refer especially to novels by Samuel Richardson (e.g. Clarissa), Jane Austen (e.g. Sense and Sensibility), Henry Fielding, Daniel Defoe, et al. 9. Judith Butler (2006), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Butler’s work is a critique of French feminism that does not acknowledge Wollstonecraft, and thus reflects no apparent familiarity with her profound influence upon Simone De Beauvoir. Although Wollstonecraft does not refuse political identification with women as Butler does, pictures of her show that she does nonetheless engage in other identity subversions such as Butler might commend. 10. Lyndall Gordon (2005), Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft. New York: HarperCollins, 131. 11. Gordon, Vindication, 155. 12. G.J. Barker-Benfield (1992), The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Great Britain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 351. 13. Todd, A Revolutionary Life, 155. 14. Gordon, Vindication, 155. 15. I refer here to Joshua Reynolds’ ‘Academy’ series. 16. Bob Lamm (2004), ‘Liberating Mary’, Ms. Magazine, Fall. Last retrieved on 7 July 2007 from: http://www.msmagazine.com/ fall2004/liberatingmarywollstonecraft.asp.

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17. Todd, A Revolutionary Life, 376. 18. Claire Tomalin (1992), The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft. London/New York: Penguin, 255. 19. Gordon, Vindication, 347. 20. Todd, A Revolutionary Life, 380. 21. Mary Wollstonecraft’s translation of this work proves so slow that Johnson publishes Thomas Holcroft’s translation of it. Todd, A Revolutionary Life, 134. 22. Judith Butler (1991), ‘Imitation and gender insubordination’, in Diana Fuss (ed.), Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories. New York: Routledge, 13–31. 23. Naomi Black (2004), Virginia Woolf as Feminist. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, Chapters 3–4. 24. http://archives.cbc.ca/IDD-1–70–398/disasters tragedies/ montreal massacre/. 25. Eleanore Taft et al authored, choreographed and directed other students in a brilliantly imaginative city-park dance production involving audience members and passers-by as performers, satirically representing their own corporatist educational landscape: School of Dance, College of Fine Arts, University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK, April 2007. Especially within such open public venues, performing arts represent a rich medium for provoking educational thought outside academe.

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A. Works of Mary Wollstonecraft WOLLSTONECRAFT, M. and BRODY, M. (eds) (2004), A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. London: Penguin Classics. WOLLSTONECRAFT, M. and FERGUSON, M. (1980), The Female Reader (1789): a Facsimile Reproduction. Delmar, NY: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints. WOLLSTONECRAFT, M., GODWIN, W. and HOLMES, R. (eds) (1987), A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark; Memoirs of the Author of ‘The Rights of Woman’ . Harmondsworth, England/New York, NY: Penguin Books. WOLLSTONECRAFT, M., SHELLEY, M.W. and TODD, J.M. (eds) (2004), Mary and Maria; Matilda. London: Penguin Classics. WOLLSTONECRAFT, M. and TODD, J.M. (eds) (1993), Political Writings. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. WOLLSTONECRAFT, M. and TODD, J.M. (eds) (1993), A Vindication of the Rights of Woman; A Vindication of the Rights of Men. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics. WOLLSTONECRAFT, M. and TODD, J.M. (eds) (1995), Thoughts on the Education of Daughters. Bristol: Thoemmes Press. WOLLSTONECRAFT, M. and TODD, J.M. (eds) (2003), The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft. New York: Columbia University Press. WOLLSTONECRAFT, M., TODD, J.M. and BUTLER, M. (eds) (1989), The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, London & Washington Square, NY: Pickering & Chatto & New York University Press (sevenvolume set). WOLLSTONECRAFT, M. and TOMASELLI, S. (eds) (1995), A Vindication of the Rights of Men; With, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,

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and Hints. Cambridge, England/New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. WOLLSTONECRAFT, M. and WARDLE, R.M. (eds) (1979), Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. WOLLSTONECRAFT, M. and WORDSWORTH, J. (eds) (2001), Original Stories from Real Life: 1791. Washington, DC: Woodstock Books.

B. Primary Works of Coeducational Thought ALCOTT, L.M. and SHOWALTER, E. (eds) (2005), Louisa May Alcott: ‘Little Women’, ‘Little Men’, and ‘Jo’s Boys’ . New York: The Library of America. BIRDEN, S. (2005), Rethinking Sexual Identity in Education. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. BOGDAN, D. (1992), Re-educating the Imagination: Toward a Poetics, Politics, and Pedagogy of Literary Engagement. Portsmouth, NH: BoyntonCook/Heinemann. COOPER, A.J. and WASHINGTON, M.H. (eds) (1990/1991) A Voice from the South. New York: Oxford University Press (Schomburg Library). DEWEY, J. (1911), ‘Is co-education injurious to girls?’ Ladies’ Home Journal, 28. DILLER, A., HOUSTON, B., MORGAN, K.P., AYIM, M. and MARTIN, J.R. (1996), The Gender Question in Education: Theory, Pedagogy, and Politics. Boulder, CO: Westview. DUBOIS, W.E.B. (1995), ‘Of the meaning of progress’, in The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Signet Classic. EDGEWORTH, M. (1800, rpt. 1976), The Parent’s Assistant. New York: Garland. GREENE, M. (1978), Landscapes of Learning . New York: Teachers College Press. HOOKS, B. (1994), Teaching to Transgress. New York: Routledge. LAIRD, S. (1989), ‘The concept of teaching: Betsey Brown vs philosophy of education?’ in GIARELLI, J. (ed.) Philosophy of Education 1988. Normal, IL: Philosophy of Education Society.

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LAIRD, S. (1995), ‘Rethinking coeducation’, in Studies in Philosophy and Education, 13; 361–78. LAIRD, S. (1995), ‘Who cares about girls? Rethinking the meaning of teaching’, in Peabody Journal of Education 70: 82–102. LAIRD, S. (2003), ‘Befriending girls as an educational life-practice’ in FLETCHER, S. (ed.), Philosophy of Education 2002. Urbana, IL: Philosophy of Education Society. LAIRD, S. (2008), ‘Food for coeducational thought’, in STENGEL, B. (ed.), Philosophy of Education 2007 . Urbana, IL: Philosophy of Education Society. MACAULAY, C. (1995), Letters on Education. Oxford [England]/New York: Woodstock Books. MARTIN, J.R. (1985), Reclaiming a Conversation: The Ideal of the Educated Woman. New Haven: Yale University Press. MARTIN, J.R. (1992), The Schoolhome: Rethinking Schools for Changing Families. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. MARTIN, J.R. (1994), Changing the Educational Landscape: Philosophy, Women, and Curriculum. New York: Routledge. MARTIN, J.R. (2000), Coming of Age in Academe: Rekindling Women’s Hopes and Reforming the Academy. New York: Routledge. MARTIN, J.R. (2002), Cultural Miseducation: In Search of a Democratic Solution. New York: Teachers College Press. MARTIN, J.R. (2007), Educational Metamorphoses. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. MAYHEW, K.C. and EDWARDS, A.C. (1936), The Dewey School. New York: D. Appleton-Century. MILL, J.S. and GRAY, J. (eds) (1991), On Liberty and Other Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press. PEABODY, E.P. (1874), Record of Mr Alcott’s School, Exemplifying the Principles and Methods of Moral Culture. Boston: Roberts Brothers. PLATO, FERRARI, G.R.F. and GRIFFITH, T. (2000), The Republic. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press. RICH, A. (1979), On Lies, Secrets, and Silence. New York: W.W. Norton. RUDDICK, S., BURSTYN, J., GILLIGAN, C., MARTIN, J.R. and LAIRD, S. (1988), ‘Is research on women and education research on preventing war?’ Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas Fifty Years Later’. Chicago: AERA cassette/Teach ’em, Inc., RA8–16.43.

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SPENDER, D. (1982a), Invisible Women: The Schooling Scandal. London: Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative Society. SPENDER, D. and SARAH, E. (1980), Learning to Lose: Sexism and Education. London: Women’s Press. WASHINGTON, B.T. (1968), The Future of the American Negro. New York: Haskell House. WOLLSTONECRAFT, M. and MILL, J.S. (1955a), The Rights of Woman. London: J.M. Dent/New York: E.P. Dutton. WOLLSTONECRAFT, M. and MILL, J.S. (1955b), The Rights of Woman, The Subjection of Women. London: J.M. Dent/New York: E.P. Dutton. WOOLF, V. (1929), A Room of One’s Own. New York: Harcourt. WOOLF, V. (1938), Three Guineas. New York: Harcourt.

C. Other Primary Sources AUSTEN, J. and BALLASTER, R. (ed.) (1995), Sense and Sensibility. London: Penguin. BLAKE, W. and HOLMES, R. (2007), Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience. London: Tate, Facsimile Edition. BURKE, E. (1790), Reflections on the Revolution in France. Raleigh, NC/Boulder, CO: Alex Catalogue/NetLibrary. BURKE, E. and BOULTON, J.T. (1987), A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. BURKE, E., TURNER, F.M. and MCMAHON, D.M. (eds) (2003), Reflections on the Revolution in France. New Haven: Yale University Press. CROSS, B.M., BEECHER, C.E., FULLER, M. and THOMAS, M.C. (1965), The Educated Woman in America: Selected Writings of Catharine Beecher, Margaret Fuller, and M. Carey Thomas. New York: Teachers College Press. HAWTHORNE, N. (2002), The Scarlet Letter: Complete Text with Introduction, Historical Contexts, Critical Essays. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. JOHNSON, S. (1785), Prayers and Meditations. London: T. Cadell. JUMP, H.D. (ed.) (2003), Mary Wollstonecraft and the Critics, 1788–2001. London/New York: Routledge.

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KERSEY, S.N. (ed.) (1981), Classics in the Education of Girls and Women. Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press. LAVATER, J.C. and HOLCROFT, T. (1869), Essays on Physiognomy: Translated from the German of John Caspar Lavater . London: William Tegg. LAVATER, J.C., HOLCROFT, T. and HILL, S. (1794), Essays on Physiognomy for the Promotion of the Knowledge and the Love of Mankind. First American edition. Boston: Printed for William Spotswood, and David West. LOCKE, J., GRANT, R.W., and TARCOV, N. (eds) (1996), Some Thoughts Concerning Education; and, Of the Conduct of the Understanding . Indianapolis: Hackett. PAINE, T. (1791), Rights of Man: Being an Answer to Mr Burke’s Attack on the French Revolution. London: Printed for J.S. Jordan. RICHARDSON, S. and ROSS, A. (eds) (1986), Clarissa Or, the History of a Young Lady. London: Penguin Classics. ROSSI, A. (ed.) (1973), The Feminist Papers: From Adams to de Beauvoir . New York: Bantam. ROUSSEAU, J.J. and BLOOM, A. (eds) (1979), Emile, or On Education. New York: Basic Books. SHELLEY, M.W. (ed.) (2000), Frankenstein or, The Modern Prometheus. New York: Signet Classic. TITONE, C. and MALONEY, K. (eds) (1999), Women’s Philosophies of Education: Thinking through Our Mothers. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. TODD, J.M. (ed.) (1996), Female Education in the Age of Enlightenment. London: Ashgate (multi-volume set). WILLARD, E. (1819), An Address to the Public: Particularly to the Members of the Legislature of New-York. Albany: I.W. Clark. WILLARD, E. (1842), ‘The relation of females and mothers especially to the cause of common school improvement’, in Connecticut Common School Journal 4: 64–6, 15 March 1842. WILLARD, E. (1848), ‘Letter to Dupont de lˆa Eure on the political position of women’, in American Literary Magazine 2 (4): 246–54. WOOLF, V. (1932), The Second Common Reader . New York: Harcourt. WORDSWORTH, W. and COLERIDGE, S.T. (2005), Lyrical Ballads. New York: Routledge.

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D. Wollstonecraft Anthologies CRACIUN, A. (ed.) (2002), Mary Wollstonecraft’s ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’: A Sourcebook. London: Routledge. WOLLSTONECRAFT, M. and MAZEL, E. (eds) (1995), Ahead of Her Time: A Sampler of the Life and Thought of Mary Wollstonecraft. New York: Bernel Books. Distributed by Brunner/Mazel. WOLLSTONECRAFT, M. and POSTON, C.H. (eds) (1988), ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, the Wollstonecraft Debate, Criticism. New York: Norton. WOLLSTONECRAFT, M., SOLOMON, B.H. and BERGGREN, P.S. (eds) (1983), A Mary Wollstonecraft Reader . New York: New American Library. WOLLSTONECRAFT, M. and TODD, J.M. (1990), A Wollstonecraft Anthology. New York: Columbia University Press.

E. Biographies BRODY, M. (2000), Mary Wollstonecraft: Mother of Women’s Rights. Oxford: Oxford University Press. BUSS, H. M., MACDONALD, D.L. and MCWHIR, A. (eds) (2001), Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley: Writing Lives. Waterloo, Ont., Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. DESALVO, L.A. (1989), Virginia Woolf: the Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on her Life and Work. Boston: Beacon Press. ELBERT, S. (1984), A Hunger for Home: Louisa May Alcott and ‘Little Women’ . Philadelphia: Temple University. ELBERT, S. (1987), A Hunger for Home: Louisa May Alcott’s Place in American Culture. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. FERGUSON, M. and TODD, J.M. (1984), Mary Wollstonecraft. Boston: Twayne Publishers. GOLDMAN, E. (1981), ‘Mary Wollstonecraft: her tragic life and her passionate struggle for freedom’, Feminist Studies 7 , 114–21. GORDON, L. (2005), Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft. New York: HarperCollins. JACOBS, D. (2001), Her Own Woman: the Life of Mary Wollstonecraft. New York: Simon & Schuster.

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JOHNSON, P.A. (2000), On Wollstonecraft. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/ Thomson Learning. JUMP, H.D. (1994), Mary Wollstonecraft: Writer . New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf. LAIRD, S. (1995), ‘Working it out with Jane Roland Martin’, Peabody Journal of Education, 71, 1: 103–13. LAIRD, S. (2001), ‘Louisa May Alcott’, in PALMER, J. (ed.), Fifty Major Thinkers on Education. London: Routledge, 132–8. LAIRD, S. (2001), ‘Jane Roland Martin’, in PALMER, J. (ed.), Fifty Modern Thinkers on Education. London: Routledge, 203–9. LEE, H. (1996), Virginia Woolf . New York: Vintage. LEMERT, C. and BHAN, E. (eds) (1998), The Voice of Anna Julia Cooper , Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. MARTIN, J.R. (2001), ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’, in PALMER, J. (ed.) Fifty Major Thinkers on Education. London: Routledge, 69–73. MELLOR, A.K. (1988), Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters. New York: Routledge. ROSSI, A. (ed.) (1973), The Feminist Papers: from Adams to de Beauvoir . New York: Bantam. SAPIRO, V. (1996), ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’, in CHAMBLISS, J.J. (ed.), Philosophy of Education: An Encyclopedia. New York: Garland, 683–6. SAXTON, M. (1977), Louisa May: a Modern Biography of Louisa May Alcott. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. SEYMOUR, M. (2000), Mary Shelley. New York: Grove Press. SPENDER, D. (1982b), Women of Ideas and What Men Have Done to Them: From Aphra Behn to Adrienne Rich. London/Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul. STERN, M.B. (1950), Louisa May Alcott. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. SUNSTEIN, E. (1975), A Different Face: The Life of Mary Wollstonecraft. Boston: Little, Brown. TODD, J.M. (2000), Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life. New York: Columbia University Press. TODD, J.M. (2000), ‘Letters’, in London Review of Books, 14 December 2000. TODD, J.M. (2003), Daughters of Ireland. New York: Random House.

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TOMALIN, C. (1992), The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft. London: Penguin. WARDLE, R. (1951), Mary Wollstonecraft: A Critical Biography. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press.

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TAYLOR, B. (2003), Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination. Cambridge, UK/New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. TITONE, C. (2004), Gender Equality in the Philosophy of Education: Catharine Macaulay’s Forgotten Contribution. New York: P. Lang. TODD, J.M. (1976), Mary Wollstonecraft: An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland Pub. TODD, J.M. (1986), Sensibility: An Introduction. London/New York: Methuen. TODD, J.M. (2002), ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters’, in JOHNSON, C.L. (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft. Cambridge, UK/New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. TYACK, D. and HANSOT, E. (1990), Learning Together: A History of Coeducation in American Schools. New Haven/New York: Yale University Press/Russell Sage Foundation. UNICEF (2007), ‘Basic education and gender equality’, retrieved from http://www.unicef.org/girlseducation/index bigpicture.html. VICKERY, A. (1998), The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. WARNOCK, M. (ed.) (1996), Women Philosophers. London: Everyman.

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abuse childhood, 24, 67–8, 81, 136, 145 sexual, 136 spousal, 33, 81 of women, 185, 216 accomplishments feminine, 84, 122, 160, 174, 206 ornamental, 121 superficial, 120 Ahmed, Leila Women and Gender in Islam, 218 alcoholism, 22, 28 Alcott, Amos Bronson, 169, 177 Alcott, Louisa May, 169–70, 174–6, 188, 201–2, 214 Jo’s Boys, 168, 175, 181, 189 Little Men, 168, 175–6 Little Women, 168, 173, 175–6, 217 American Indians, 175 animals care for, 125, 134 cruelty to, 92 in curriculum, 112 Arden, Jane, 28, 34 Arden, Mr, 28 arts architecture, 27, 121, 199 coeducation gap, 198–203

dance, 122 domestic, 199, 201 and education of emotions, 112, 120–1 fine, 120, 122, 136, 198, 204 and imagination, 118–24 music, 120, 122 as ‘relaxations’, 122, 136, 198 sculpture, 199 theatre, 120, 202 Astell, Mary, 48, 163, 165, 167 Austen, Jane Sense and Sensibility, 71, 73 Ayim, Maryann, 186 Bannet, Eve Tavor The Domestic Revolution, 165 Barbauld, Anna, 16 beauty, 89, 102, 105, 127, 129, 210, 212 intellectual, 128 Beecher, Catharine, 170, 183–4 Berger, John Ways of Seeing , 200 Birden, Susan Rethinking Sexual Identity in Education, 218 Bishop, Meredith, 33 Black, Naomi, 214

235

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Blair, Hugh Letters on Rhetoric, 38 Blake, William, 14, 17, 200 Blind, Mathilde, 170 Blood, Fanny, 30–1, 33, 37 Blood, George, 37 Bodichon, Barbara, 170 Bogdan, Deanne, 203 Re-Educating the Imagination, 211 Bordo, Susan, 200 breastfeeding, 24, 44, 103, 139, 141 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 166 Burgh, Hannah, 33–5 Burgh, James The Art of Speaking , 18 Thoughts on Education, 37 Burgh, Rev. Dr James, 35 Burke, Edmund, 100, 207 A Philosopical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, 204 Reflections on the Revolution in France, 79, 82 care, ethic of, 187 casa dei bambini, 187 Chapone, Hester, 50, 70, 149 character human, 144–5 moral, 80, 86, 94, 124, 144 of coeducational institutions, 213 sexual, 26, 30, 144–5, 148, 166, 176, 187–8, 200–1, 210

Index

artificial construct, 87, 208 deconstruction of, 129, 139, 163 defamation, 162–7 essentialist interpretation of, 204 formation, 205–7, 214 idealization of, 203 imperialist, 179–80, 202 men’s, 88, 90 monarchist, 70, 98, 102–8, 135, 180, 202 and monarchist hidden curriculum, 85–98 and republican coeducation, 124–34 Rousseau’s formulation of, 87 women’s, 63, 88, 94, 137–9, 199, 206, 212 Chesterfield, Philip, Lord, 70, 149 childrearing, 23, 97–8, 136, 140, 161 afflicted, 156–62 coeducational gap, 213–19 coeducative, 142–3, 198 curriculum for, 186 hired childcare, 139, 157–8, 216–17 children see abuse; breast-feeding; childrearing Clairmont, Claire, 161 Clairmont, Mary Jane, 157 Clare, Mrs, 29 Clare, Rev. John, 29

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class, 21, 130–1 aristocratic, 31, 38 different, mutual education among women of, 47 hauteur, 32 intelligentsia, 49–50 middle, 22–3, 94–5, 103, 131, 173, 205 mother-teacher relations, 161 propertied, 92, 95, 112 serving, 45, 83, 95, 103–4, 131, 175–6 stratification, 136 working-poor, 23, 162, 177, 206 see also slavery Clough, Emma Rauschenbusch Study of Mary Wollstonecraft and the Rights of Woman, 167 Cobbe, Frances, 170 coeducation, 47, 51–3, 63, 110–11, 130, 183 arts, 198–203, 211–13 combining public and private, 144–9 concepts of critical, 75 liberal, 185 normative, 70, 75, 110, 125, 169 thick, 61–2, 64, 110, 124–5, 134 thin, 62, 64, 110, 124, 148, 188 critics of, 171 gender-sensitive, 190 higher education, 163, 179, 183, 188

237

at home, 143, 147 miseducative, 188 multi-institutional, 136 national system of, 134–49 ‘philosophical mother of’, 14, 19 republican, 70, 74, 76, 109–49, 169, 173, 176 of mind and body, 127 and non-violent revolution, 135 religious foundations of, 118 three purposes of, 125 coeducational agency, 136–44, 162, 174, 177 childrearing, 142, 213–19 experiments practical, 163–4, 169–70, 177 theoretical, 126, 129, 136, 148, 165, 172, 183, 186 imagination, 173–8 readership, 64 re-vision, 156, 183–90 skepticism, 178–83 thought, 61–76, 197–219 African American, 164 literary contributions to, 64 ‘masterpieces’ of, 168 after Wollstonecraft, 155–90 Collins, Patricia Hill, 217 Condorcet, Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de, 35 conversation, 61–2, 65–66, 70, 112, 118, 145, 184, 200

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Cooper, Anna Julia Haywood, 163, 165, 177, 181 A Voice from the South, 162–63 co-professoriate faculties, 188 curriculum, 74, 137, 145–6, 181–2, 187 arts, 123, 136, 198–9, 201 childrearing, 186 ‘cocurriculum’, 188 coeducational, 122, 201 gender–inclusive, 188 hidden, 78, 86 monarchist, 85–98 moral, 92 multicultural, 188 toddler, 142 Dawson, Sarah, 31 de Sta¨el, Baroness Anne-Louise-Germaine, 69, 149 ‘Declaration of Sentiments’ (1848), 169 Dewey, Alice Chipman, 177 Dewey, John, 177 Diller, Ann, 186 Divine Right of Kings, 12, 53, 63, 77–86, 91, 96, 99, 148 domestic affections, 21, 106, 141–2, 144, 147, 158, 162, 173–5, 180, 187 domesticity, 188 dress fashionable, 139, 160, 205, 207, 211 iconoclastic, 207–11 men’s, 179

Index

philosophically expressive, 129, 204, 208, 212 Edgeworth, Maria, 50, 170 education African American thought, 188 arts, 174, 198 of character, 79, 128 cultural, 41 of emotions, 45, 47, 121, 147, 186, 199, 211 Georgian culture of, 28–9 of the heart, 70–1, 121, 198, 202, 214 for the home, 37 laissez-faire, 25, 77, 99–108 maternal, 25, 46–7, 139, 164, 168, 173 men’s, 86, 90–1, 100 moral, 26, 45, 79, 101, 107, 110, 121, 124, 201 compassion, 112–13 divine source of, 111–24 ‘wide-awakeness’, 201 for motherhood, 137–44, 184 mutual, 46 patriarchal, 78 private, 99–105, 187 governesses, 99–100 parents, 101–4 tutors, 100, 136 public, 99, 106–8, 118, see also schools for public service, 132 of reason, 50, 116, 121 religious, 174 revolutionary, 77

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scientific, 28, 138, 158, 160, 199 sexual, 129, 166 travel as, 40 university, 180, 188–9 unpaid-for, 180–2 women’s, 45, 47–52, 120, 183, 185, 198, 210 see also coeducation ; miseducation ; self Edwards, Anna Camp, 177 Eliot, George, 170 embodiment, 203 ‘embodied vision’, 203 of human character, 209 intellectual life, 210 of rationalism, 203 sexual, 164 textual, 67, 72, 197, 213 visual, 202 emotion see education ; reason Equal Franchise Act (1928), 170 family environment, 101–2, 135 fatherhood, 94, 102–4, 136–38, 144, 158 ‘divine right’ of fathers, 131, 147, 166 widowed fathers, 136, 143, 155–7 feminism, 47–8, 109, 135, 155, 164, 166, 189 American, 171, 182 Australian, 171, 182 British, 170–1 Canadian, 171 post-, 61

239

feminist, 213 black, 217 teaching, 183 thought, 75 Fordyce, Dr James, 69, 148 Fordyce, George, 17 Foucault, Michel, 200 Fourn´ee, Marguerite, 40, 157 Franklin, Benjamin, 35 Franzosa, Susan Douglas Ordinary Lessons, 215 friendship, 21, 28, 30, 125, 132–4, 138, 163 see also marriage Fuller, Margaret, 169, 177 Woman in the Nineteenth Century, 170 Fuseli, Henry, 14–17, 166, 200 Gainsborough, Thomas, 206 Garrett, Elizabeth, 170 gender, 87, 186, 208 -and-genre, 62–9, 71–2, 172 sensitivity, 186–90 sex-gender system, 188 troubling icon, 207–11 Genlis, Stephanie, Comtesse de, 70, 149 Theodore and Adelaide, 38 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 169, 183–4 Godwin, Mary see Shelley, Mary Godwin, William, 15, 17, 44–7, 155–6, 186, 200, 210 Memoirs of the Author of ‘The Rights of Woman’ , 155

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Greene, Maxine, 201 Landscapes of Learning , 214 Gregory, Dr John, 69, 148, 204 Hardwicke Marriage Act (1753), 43 Hays, Mary, 16, 40, 48 Hewlett, John, 36 Holcroft, Thomas, 17 hooks, bell, 189 Horne Tooke, John, 17 Houston, Barbara, 186 humanist individualism, 112–13 Hume, David, 69

Index

Johnson, Joseph, 12–20, 36 Jones, Louisa, 157 Kant, Immanuel, 122 King, Caroline, Lady Kingsborough, 38, 159 King, Margaret, 155, 159–61 King, Mary, 159 King, Robert, Lord Kingsborough, 38

iconoclasm, 39, 165, 205, 212–13 iconography gender-troubling, 207–11 of womanhood, 206–7 iconology, 204 Imlay, Fanny, 39–40, 42, 142, 155, 157 Imlay, Gilbert, 39–43 independence, 67, 131 political and economic, 125, 130–2, 138, 174, 176 women’s, 50, 52, 115, 132, 178 interdependence of citizen-mothers and day schools, 218 home-school, 148–9, 218 of mind and body, 128–9 of the sexes, 73

landscape of character formation, 213–19 coeducational, 185 educational, 74, 203 imperial, 214 monarchist, 135 Georgian English, 201, 212 of learning, 214, 219 public, 200 visual, of sexual character formation, 205–7 see also Wollstonecraft, Mary Lavater, Johann Kaspar Essays on Physiognomy, 210 libertinism, 97–8 Locke, John, 23, 39–40, 70, 85–6, 107, 122, 127, 136–7, 203 Some Thoughts Concerning Education, 37, 69 Louis XIV, 81–2, 84, 213

Jefferson, Thomas, 35 Johnson, Dr Samuel, 28, 36, 121 Prayers and Meditations, 36

Macaulay, Catherine, 19–20, 42, 70, 149, 167, 178 Letters on Education, 52, 64

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Index

marriage, 85, 180 moral requirements, 46 as mutual friendship, 32, 39, 45–6, 140, 147, 177 as property relation, 92 resistance against, 32, 44 Martin, Jane Roland, 168–9, 178, 184–6, 188, 201–2 Coming of Age in Academe, 187 Reclaiming a Conversation, 61 The Schoolhome, 168–9, 187, 214 Mason, Miss, 34 mass media, 135, 149, 200, 218 Mayhew, Katherine Camp, 177 mentorship, 28 Mill, John Stuart, 166–70 On Liberty, 166–7 The Subjection of Women, 166–7, 169 Milton, John, 113 miseducation, 49, 63, 84 cultural, 189 imperialist, 178 men’s, 86, 90, 158, 166 monarchist, 67, 70, 74, 77–108 patriarchal, 174 private, 99–105 public, 106–8 women’s, 38, 74, 86, 176 misogyny, 89, 135, 184, 204, 207, 212, 215 modesty, 97, 115, 147 monarchism, 21–32 see also character, sexual; curriculum, hidden; landscape, educational;

miseducation; property; sexual politics; Wollstonecraft, Mary monarchy, 80–4 Montessori, Maria, 187 Montreal Massacre (1989), 215 More, Hannah, 50, 165 Morgan, Kathryn Pauly, 186 motherhood, 24, 32, 101–5, 140, 164, 174, 185, 214, 216 citizen-, 176, 184, 217–18 cultural ideal, 184 education for, 137–44 miseducative, 104–5 ‘othermothering’, 217 widowed mothers, 104 Murdoch, Iris, 216 mutuality, 132–4, 138, 140, 142, 146, 180 educative, 134 between men and women, 132, 144 between women of different classes, 132 nature, 27, 118–21 Opie, John, 158, 200, 209–10 oppression, 92–3 economic, 74 resistance against, 31–2, 110 of women, 89, 218 Paine, Thomas, 17, 41 Rights of Man, 92

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parents and children, affection between, 141, 147 coeducational agency, 177 ‘divine right’ of, 85, 99–108 mutually loving, 46, 140 over-worked, 187 patriotism, 137, 175, 179 Paul, Charles Kegan William Godwin, his Friends and Relations, 170 Peabody, Elizabeth Palmer, 169, 177 Pennel, Elizabeth Robbins, 167 Pestalozzi, Johann Heinrich, 170 physical exercise, 126, 129, 138, 145 physiognomy, 128, 204, 210 Piozzi, Hester, 69 Plato, 183–5 Republic, 51–2, 64 Pope, Alexander, 113 poverty, 112, 175, 197 power, 81–4 Price, Rev. Dr Richard, 33, 35 Priestley, Joseph, 35 professions, the, 85, 91, 95, 136, 178, 180 clergy, 96 military, 88, 90–1 property, 178, 180 monarchist system, 91–3, 95, 101, 130 see also marriage ; women rationalism, 73 Enlightenment, 70, 201

Index

reading, 211–13 reason and emotion, 69–73, 112–19 and imagination, 123 ‘inward-turning faculty’, 119 and religion, 115 women’s capacity for, 113–15 refusal, poetics of, 211–13, 218 religion, 112–18 Anglicanism, 36, 117 Dissent, 17, 34–35, 44 Lutheranism, 80 and reason, 115 ‘Romish customs’, 36, 117 see also Wollstonecraft, Mary religious education, 174 emotion, 112–18 imagination, 27 inquiry, 79 superstition, 117 re-vision, 173 see also coeducational revolution American, 93 French, 40–2, 162, 171 Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 206 Rich, Adrienne, 173, 182–3, 187 rights of children, 136 human, 41, 93 women’s, 17, 41, 95, 169 see also Divine Right of Kings Roscoe, William, 208

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Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 41, 70, 76, 85, 87, 107, 116, 118, 130, 136–8, 148, 183–5 Emile, 18, 38, 64, 69, 84, 173, 212 La Nouvelle Helo¨ıse, 18 Ruddick, Sara, 216 Sapphire Push, 217 Sarah, Elizabeth, 183 ‘scarlet letter effect’, 165–7 schoolmasters, 106 schoolmistresses, 32–4 schools boarding, 106 boys-, 38, 106 coeducational, 144, 173 day-, 25, 28, 34, 135, 137, 144–5, 174, 218 design of, 201 girls-, 33, 106–7 government funded, 25, 75, 107, 109, 135, 161, 166, 197, 199 home-school, 175 school-home, 188–9 as utopian spaces, 175 self -education, 17–18, 27–8, 43–4, 47, 74, 115, 118, 120, 214, 216 -esteem, 143 -expression, 120 -respect, 118, 211 -worship, 166–7

243

sensibility, 26–7, 71–2, 199 defined, 26, 121 feminine, 112, 118–25, 176, 211–12 refusal of, 118–24 sentimentality, 174 novels, 26, 29 sex distinction, 102, 125–30, 132, 134, 137, 145, 180 equality, 51–2, 125, 130–2, 137, 144 gender system, 188 segregation, 47–53, 106, 159 ‘the uneducated’, 66–7 uni-, 208 sexual aesthetics, 128 chastity, 97–8 double standard, 78, 98, 132 economy, 78, 86, 91–6 essentialism, 78, 92, 94 immorality, 97–8 metaphysics, 77, 80 ontology, 78, 86, 88–91, 102, 138 politics, 175 monarchist, 77 see also character; education; embodiment Shange, Ntozake Betsey Brown, 216–17 Shelley, Mary (n´ee Wollstonecraft Godwin), 11, 47, 142, 155, 157–8 Frankenstein, 155, 158–9, 162 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 157–8

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Skeys, Hugh, 33 slavery, 91, 93–4, 162 abolition of, 74 anti-, 12, 35, 137, 175 Smith, Adam The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 83 Spender, Dale Invisible Women, 183 Women of Ideas, 168 St Jerome, 51–2 Steedman, Carolyn Kay Landscape for a Good Woman, 215 strength mental, 88, 95, 102, 124–30, 145, 176 moral, 124, 174 physical, 88, 102, 124–30, 145, 176 suicide, 157 see also Wollstonecraft, Mary Swift, Jonathan, 70 Talleyrand-Perigord, Charles Maurice de, 41 Taylor, Harriet, 167 Taylor, Thomas A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes, 166 Temple School, 169 truth, 25, 69, 116, 130 tyranny, 93 domestic, 84, 92, 94 ecclesiastical, 200 institutional, 136 of men, 92 of parents, 85, 102

Index

violence, 148 domestic, 23 revolutionary, 40 see also abuse; slavery; tyranny; war Voltaire, 81–2 war, 90–1, 178 anti-, 137, 182 prevention of, 179 Wardle, Ralph, 168 Warnock, Mary, 65 Wharton, Edith House of Mirth, 73 Willard, Emma, 165 Wollstonecraft, Charles, 22 Wollstonecraft, Edward John (father), 21 Wollstonecraft, Eliza, 22, 33, 37 Wollstonecraft, Elizabeth (n´ee Dickson, mother), 21, 24, 31 Wollstonecraft, Everina, 22, 33, 37 Wollstonecraft, Henry, 22 Wollstonecraft, James, 22 Wollstonecraft, Mary appearance, 12–13, see also Wollstonecraft, Mary, visual biography birth, 11 death, 47 landscapes educational, 32–9, 47–53 monarchist domestic, 21–32 philosophical, 14–20 revolutionary, 39–47 mentors, 28, 35, 40

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psychological difficulties, 20–1, 27, 43, 72 religious life, 27, 36 suicide attempts, 40, 43 visual biography, 202–13 works Education of Daughters, 26, 33, 37–8, 74, 78–9, 95, 100, 106, 120 Female Reader , 18, 33, 48, 74 French Revolution, 39–42 ‘Hints’, 45, 116, 121–2, 200 Lessons, 46, 74, 142–3, 186, 217 Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman, 23, 74, 81, 131, 165, 214 Mary, A Fiction, 18, 74, 114, 117, 214 Real Life, 18, 33–4, 74, 79, 112, 186, 214 Rights of Men, 74, 79–80, 90, 117–18, 204 Rights of Woman, 17–20, 32, 48, 52, 62–3, 65–6, 68–70, 75, 80, 93, 110, 156–90 Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, 15, 40, 43–4, 74, 78, 84, 96, 119, 121, 128–9, 214 writing for Analytical Review, 14, 19–20, 93, 199 Wrongs of Woman, 45, 92 Wollstonecraft, Ned, 22 women in academe, 188 Amazons, 209 Bluestockings, 49–52

245

capacity for independence, 32 citizens, 50, 52, 131, 138, 140 civilized, 90, 180 coquette, 97, 105 dehumanized, 79, 110 doctors, 170, 199 educated, 61, 169, 172, 183 liberated, 161 middle-class, 22, 94–5, 103, 131, 205 as ‘overgrown children’, 89 patriots, 137 professors, 188 as property, 22, 92–3 prostitutes, 132 rational, 88, 138, 185 self-educated, 173, 178 souls, 113–14 students, 188 suffrage, 175 teachers, 33 uneducated, 66 working-poor, 23, 206 Woolf, Leonard, 171 Woolf, Virginia, 170, 180, 182, 187–8, 214 ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’, Nation and Athenaeum, 170–1 A Room of One’s Own, 167 The Second Common Reader , 203 Three Guineas, 169, 171–2, 178–9, 181, 201, 213 Wordsworth, William, 17, 66, 119 writing autobiographical, 14, 20, 43, 169–70, 174, 214–15

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writing (cont.) genres, 62, 65–6, see also gender-and-genre children’s fiction, 173 epistolary, 64, 178 philosophical novel, 174 poetry, 12, 29–30, 47, 119, 122, 211

Index

political-philosophical treatise, 178 satire, 166 translations, 14, 18–19, 65 women’s, 70 Young, Ella Flagg, 177