Thoughts on the Education of Daughters

First page of the first edition of Thoughts

Thoughts on the education of daughters: with reflections on female conduct, in the more important duties of life is British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft's first published work. Issued in 1787 by her friend and publisher Joseph Johnson, Thoughts is a conduct book which offers advice on female education to the emerging British middle class. Although dominated by considerations of morality and etiquette, the text also contains basic child-rearing instructions, such as how to care for an infant.

An early version of the modern self-help book, eighteenth-century British conduct books drew on several literary traditions, such as advice manuals and religious narratives. There was an explosion in the number of conduct books published during the second half of the eighteenth century, and Wollstonecraft took advantage of this burgeoning market to publish Thoughts. Like other conduct books of the time, Thoughts fuses older genres with the new middle-class ethos. The book encourages mothers to teach their daughters analytical thinking, self-discipline, honesty, contentment in their social position, and marketable skills (in case they should ever need to support themselves). These goals reveal Wollstonecraft's intellectual debt to John Locke; however, the prominence she affords religious faith and innate feeling distinguishes her work from his. Her aim is to educate women to be useful wives and mothers, because, she argues, it is through these positions that women can most effectively contribute to society.

While much of Wollstonecraft's text is platitudinous and repeats the advice common to all conduct books for women, there are moments, such as her poignant description of the suffering single woman, that hint at her later feminist arguments in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). However, several critics have suggested that it is only in light of her later works that Thoughts appears to have radical undertones. The book was moderately successful, evidenced by its inclusion in several periodicals and its ability to attract reviews, but it was not republished until the rise of feminist literary criticism in the 1970s.

Biographical background

Like many impoverished women during the last quarter of the eighteenth century in Britain, Wollstonecraft attempted to support herself by establishing a school. However, in the late 1780s she was forced to close it because of financial difficulties. She next tried her hand at being a governess, but chafed at her lowly position and refused to accommodate herself to her employers. Finally, she decided to become an author, a precarious and somewhat disreputable profession for women during the eighteenth century; she wrote to her sister that she was going to become the “first of a new genus”.

Desperate to extricate herself from debt, Wollstonecraft wrote her first book, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, between the closing of her school and the beginning of her stint as a governess; she sold the copyright to Joseph Johnson for only ten guineas. However, it was the modest success of this publication, along with Johnson's encouragement, that emboldened Wollstonecraft to embark on a career as a professional writer.

Overview

The twenty-one chapters of Thoughts on the Education of Daughters explain how to educate a woman from infancy through marriage. The text begins with advice regarding the care of a baby, arguing that a mother should breastfeed her own child (a hotly debated topic in the eighteenth century), and ends with a chapter delineating the appropriate "public places" for young women to frequent. Covering a wide range of topics, the book outlines proper "moral discipline"; endorses early childhood reading; describes a rational approach to love, friendship and marriage; argues for Sabbath observance; lays out a woman's household duties; and explains the appropriate sense of benevolence she should feel for those around her. Many of the chapters criticize elements of what Wollstonecraft considers a pervasive and damaging education offered to women, such as "artificial manners", emphasis on fashion, card-playing and theater-going.

In her later works, Wollstonecraft repeatedly returned to the topics in Thoughts, particularly the virtue of hard work and the imperative for women to learn useful skills. Wollstonecraft suggests that the social and political life of the nation would greatly improve if women would acquire valuable skills instead of being mere social ornaments.

Genre: the conduct book

Title page from the first volume of the first edition of Chapone's Letters (1773)

Between 1760 and 1820, conduct books reached the height of their popularity in Britain; one scholar refers to the period as "the age of courtesy books for women". As Nancy Armstrong writes in her seminal work on the novel and the conduct book, Desire and Domestic Fiction (1987): "so popular did these books become that by the second half of the eighteenth century virtually everyone knew the ideal of womanhood they proposed".

Conduct books integrated the styles and rhetorics of earlier genres, such as devotional writings, marriage manuals, recipe books, and works on household economy. They offered their readers a description of (most often) the ideal woman while at the same time handing out practical advice. Thus, not only did they dictate morality, but they also guided readers' choice of dress and outlined "proper" etiquette. Typical examples include Hester Chapone's Letters on the Improvement of the Mind (1773), which went through at least sixteen editions in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, and Catharine Macaulay's Letters on Education (1790). Chapone's work, in particular, appealed to Wollstonecraft and influenced her composition of Thoughts, because it argued "for a sustained programme of study for women" and was based on the idea that Christianity should be "the chief instructor of our rational faculties". Moreover, it emphasized that women should be considered rational beings and not left to wallow in sensualism. When Wollstonecraft came to write A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792, she drew on both Chapone and Macaulay's works.

Conduct books have traditionally been viewed by scholars as an important genre in the creation of bourgeois female subjectivity. They “helped to generate the belief that there was such a thing as a 'middle class' and that the modest, submissive but morally and domestically competent woman it described was the first 'modern individual'”. By developing a specifically bourgeois ethos through genres such as the conduct book, the emerging middle class challenged the primacy of the aristocratic code of manners. However, conduct books simultaneously constricted women's roles, propagating what has been called "the angel in the house" image (alluding to Coventry Patmore's poem of that name); women were encouraged to be chaste, pious, submissive, modest, selfless, graceful, pure, delicate, compliant, reticent, and polite:

...Man must be pleased; but him to please
Is woman's pleasure; down the gulf
Of his condoled necessities
She casts her best, she flings herself.
How often flings for nought, and yokes
Her heart to an icicle or whim,
Whose each impatient word provokes
Another, not from her, but him;
While she, too gentle even to force
His penitence by kind replies,
Waits by, expecting his remorse,
With pardon in her pitying eyes;
She loves with love that cannot tire...

However, a few scholars have argued that conduct books need to be more carefully differentiated from each other and that some of them, such as Wollstonecraft's, transformed traditional female advice manuals into "proto-feminist tracts". These scholars see Thoughts as part of a tradition that was adapting older genres to a new message of female empowerment, genres such as advice manuals for women's education, moral and spiritual works by religious Dissenters (those not associated with the Church of England), and moral satires. Wollstonecraft's text is similar to conventional conduct books because it promotes self-control and submission, traits that were aimed at garnering a woman a husband. Yet the text also challenges this prevailing portrait of the “proper lady” by introducing strains of religious Dissent that promote equality of the soul. The text thus appears to be torn between several sets of binaries: compliance and rebellion; spiritual meekness and rational independence; and domestic duty and political participation. This description of the conduct book and of Thoughts in particular challenges the earlier interpretation of the genre as a mere tool of ideological indoctrination.

Pedagogical theory

John Locke, author of Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693)

By the end of her life, Wollstonecraft had been involved in almost every arena of education: she had been a governess, a teacher, a children's writer, and a pedagogical theorist. Almost all of her works deal with education in some way. For example, her two novels are bildungsromans (novels of education); she translated educational works such as Christian Gotthilf Salzmann's Elements of Morality; and her Vindication of the Rights of Woman is largely an argument for the value of female education. As is evidenced by this broad range of genres, “education” for Wollstonecraft and her contemporaries included much more than scholastic training; it encompassed everything that went into forming a person's character, from infant swaddling to childhood curricular choices to adolescent leisure activities.

Wollstonecraft and other political radicals during the last quarter of the eighteenth century focused their reform efforts on education, because they believed that if people were educated correctly, Britain would experience a moral and political revolution. Religious Dissenters, especially, embraced this view and Wollstonecraft's philosophy in Thoughts and elsewhere closely resembles that of the Dissenters she met at Newington Green, such as the theologian, educator and scientist Joseph Priestley and the minister Richard Price. Dissenters “were most concerned with molding children into people of good moral character and habits”. However, political conservatives, who also believed that childhood was the crucial time for the formation of a person's character, used their own educational works to deflect rebellion by promoting theories of compliance. Liberals and conservatives alike subscribed to Lockean and Hartleian associationist psychology; that is, they believed that a person's sense of self was built up through a set of associations made between things in the external world and ideas in the mind; both Locke and Hartley had argued that the associations formed in childhood were nearly irreversible and must thus be guarded with care. Locke famously advised parents to keep their children away from servants, as they would only tell the children frightening stories that would foster a fear of the dark.

Wollstonecraft was significantly influenced by Locke's Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) (her title alludes to it) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile (1762), the two most important pedagogical treatises of the eighteenth century. With its emphasis on a parent-directed domestic education, a distrust of servants, a banning of superstitious and irrational stories (e.g. fairy tales), and a focus on clear rules, at the same time paired with affection for the child, Thoughts follows in the Lockean tradition. Wollstonecraft breaks from Locke, however, in her emphasis on piety and devotion and her insistence that the child has “innate” feelings which guide her towards virtue.

Themes

Thoughts advocates several educational goals for women: independent thought, rationality, self-discipline, truthfulness, acceptance of one's social position, useful skills and faith in God.

Joseph Highmore's illustration of Pamela teaching her children (1743–45)

Education of women

Wollstonecraft envisions the “daughters” in her book as one day becoming mothers and teachers. She does not propose that women abandon these traditional roles because she believes that it is as pedagogues that women can most effectively improve society. Wollstonecraft, and other writers as diverse as the evangelical moralist Hannah More, the historian Catherine Macaulay and the feminist novelist Mary Hays, argue that since women are the primary caregivers of the family and educators of children, they should be given a sound education. They decry the traditional and what they saw as decadent "accomplishment"-based education, which focused on "skills" such as dancing. The ideal woman in Thoughts is, as Wollstonecraft scholar Gary Kelly writes, “rational, provident, realistic, self-disciplined, self-conscious and critical", an image that resembles the professional man. However, by envisioning a masculine role for women, one that they could not actually perform in the public sphere, Wollstonecraft leaves women without much of a place in society; the picture Wollstonecraft drew of the roles for women was ultimately confining and limiting.

Thoughts is insistent, following Locke and associationist psychology, that a poor education and an early marriage will ruin a woman. Wollstonecraft argues that if no attention is paid to girls as they are growing, they will turn out poorly and marry while still intellectual and emotional children. Such wives, she contends, perform no useful role in society and, indeed, contribute to its immorality. She would expand upon this argument five years later in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

Wollstonecraft's most passionate writing in Thoughts focuses on the lack of career opportunities for women (governess, companion and teacher were the only possibilities) as well as the horrors of these situations (she had experienced all three), a theme that would dominate her later novel Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman. In her chapter entitled "Unfortunate Situation of Females, Fashionably Educated, and Left without a Fortune" she writes:

Perhaps to be an humble companion to some rich old cousin . . . It is impossible to enumerate the many hours of anguish such a person must spend. Above the servants, yet considered by them as a spy, and ever reminded of her inferiority when in conversation with the superiors. . . . A teacher at a school is only a kind of upper servant, who has more work than the menial ones. A governess to young ladies is equally disagreeable. . . . 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. . . . It is hard for a person who has a relish for polished society, to herd with the vulgar, or to condescend to mix with her formal equals when she is considered in a different light. . . . How cutting is the contempt she meets with!—A young mind looks round for love and friendship; but love and friendship fly from poverty: expect them not if you are poor!

Religion

While Wollstonecraft's comments on female education hint at some of her more radical arguments in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, the religious tone of the text, also found in Mary: A Fiction, is generally interpreted by scholars as conservative. The religion presented in Thoughts is one of the “pleasures of resignation”, a belief that the afterlife is awaiting and that the world is ordered by God for the best. Although Wollstonecraft would later drift away from these beliefs and adopt a more permissive theology, Thoughts is “steeped in orthodox attitudes, advocating 'fixed principles of religion' and warning of the dangers of rationalist speculation and deism.” Wollstonecraft even agrees with Rousseau that women should be taught religious dogma rather than theology; clear rules, she maintains, will restrain their passions.

Reception

Mary Wollstonecraft by John Opie (c. 1790-91)

Thoughts was only moderately successful; it was reprinted in Dublin a year after its initial publication in London, extracts were published in The Lady's Magazine, and Wollstonecraft included excerpts from it in her own Female Reader (1789), an anthology of writings designed “for the Improvement of Young Women”. The English Review noticed Thoughts favorably:

These thoughts are employed on various important situations and incidents in the ordinary life of females, and are, in general, dictated with great judgment. Mrs. Wollstonecraft appears to have reflected maturely on her subject; . . . while her manner gives authority, her good sense adds irresistible weight to almost all her precepts and remarks. We should therefore recommend these Thoughts as worthy the attention of those who are more immediately concerned in the education of young ladies.

However, no other journal reviewed it and Thoughts was not reprinted until the late twentieth century, when there was a resurgence of interest in Wollstonecraft among feminist literary critics.

As Alan Richardson, a scholar of eighteenth-century education, points out, if Wollstonecraft had not written A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), it is unlikely that Thoughts would have been considered progressive or even worthy of notice. One critic has even said that the text reads as if it were simply trying to please the public. Although one can see glimmers of Wollstonecraft's radicalism in this text, the “potential for critique remains largely latent;” however, Thoughts can also be viewed as paving the way for Wollstonecraft's more critical texts, Original Stories from Real Life (1788) and the Rights of Woman. Thus, one can either interpret Thoughts teleologically or dismiss it as a “politically naïve potboiler” written prior to Wollstonecraft's conversion to radicalism when she was writing the Rights of Men three years later.

See also

• Timeline of Mary Wollstonecraft

Modern reprints

• Wollstonecraft, Mary. Thoughts on the Education of Daughters. Clifton, NJ: A. M. Kelley, 1972. ISBN 0678009015.
• Wollstonecraft, Mary. Thoughts on the Education of Daughters. Oxford: Woodstock Books, 1994. ISBN 1854771957.
• Wollstonecraft, Mary. Thoughts on the Education of Daughters. London: Printed by J. Johnson, 1787. Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Retrieved on 18 July 2007.
• Wollstonecraft, Mary. The Complete Works of Mary Wollstonecraft. Ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler. 7 vols. London: William Pickering, 1989. ISBN 0814792251.

Bibliography

• Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. ISBN 0195061608.
• Jones, Vivien. "Mary Wollstonecraft and the literature of advice and instruction." The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft. Ed. Claudia Johnson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. ISBN 0521789524.
• Jones, Vivien. "The Seductions of Conduct: Pleasure and Conduct Literature." Pleasure in the Eighteenth Century. Eds. Roy Porter and Marie Mulvey Roberts. London: Macmillan, 1996. ISBN 0814766447.
• Kelly, Gary. Revolutionary Feminism: The Mind and Career of Mary Wollstonecraft. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992. ISBN 0312129041.
• Myers, Mitzi. "Pedagogy as Self-Expression in Mary Wollstonecraft: Exorcising the Past, Finding a Voice." The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women's Autobiographical Writing. Ed. Shari Benstock. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988. ISBN 0807817910.
• Poovey, Mary. The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. ISBN 0226675289.
• Richardson, Alan. "Mary Wollstonecraft on education." The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft. Ed. Claudia Johnson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. ISBN 0521789524.
• Sapiro, Virginia. A Vindication of Political Virtue: The Political Theory of Mary Wollstonecraft. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. ISBN 0226734919.
• Sutherland, Kathryn. "Writings on Education and Conduct: Arguments for Female Improvement." Women and Literature in Britain 1700-1800. Ed. Vivien Jones. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. ISBN 0521586801.
• Taylor, Barbara. Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. ISBN 0521661447.
• Todd, Janet. Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2000. ISBN 0231121849.

External links

• Mary Wollstonecraft: A 'Speculative and Dissenting Spirit' by Janet Todd at www.bbc.co.uk