232 Ruth Abbey
This explains Wollstonecraft’s understanding of morality or virtue,
terms she seems to use interchangeably. In good Socratic-Platonic fash-
ion, she maintains that “virtue, to deserve the name, must be founded on
knowledge” (119; see also 141, 186, 187, 205).^11 Any individual who fails
to exercise reason is incapable of morality: only by understanding our con-
duct and motives can we be good. Following rules imposed by others or
acting on the basis of custom, convention, public opinion, or habit does not
qualify as moral behavior (77, 162). Because it is “a farce to call any being
virtuous whose virtues do not result from the exercise of its own reason”
(47), she inveighs against attempts “to educate moral beings by any other
rules than those deduced from pure reason, which apply to the whole spe-
cies” (59; see also 82).^12
The political level of Wollstonecraft’s argument comes last: humans
should have rights so that they can freely exercise their reason and un-
derstand their duties to themselves, their familiars, their fellow citizens,
and God. The possession of rights affords the freedom and opportunity to
unfold distinctively human capacities. Her endorsement of the rights dis-
course that was becoming prominent in Europe thus appears at the summit
of a much deeper argument, and it is this deeper argument that occupies
most of the Rights of Woman.
Wrongs Done To and By Women
Condemning relentlessly the way her society educates women, Wollstone-
craft employs the term “education” in both a broad and a narrow way. Its
broad meaning is equivalent to what is today called socialization, a general
process including the sorts of cultural signals, messages, and meanings
children imbibe informally as they mature (87, 102). Its narrower meaning
is closer to what we mean by education, referring to the formal transmis-
sion of knowledge, information, and skills that takes place during child-
hood and adolescence. Education in both senses was shaped by the wider
view about a person’s proper place in society. Thus the sort of education in
the narrow sense that Rousseau prescribes for Sophie in Book V of Emile
is a function of his view about women’s proper social role. When Woll-
stonecraft laments the sorry state of women’s education (29), she means
education in both senses, but her major focus is women’s socialization,
or what would today be called the social construction of gender. Were the
conception of women’s social role to change, as she hoped it would, then
the sort of education they receive, in the narrow sense, would need to be