The Personal Is Political 267sarcasm to show how supposedly progressive eighteenth-century educa-
tional practices, such as those inspired by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile
(1762), are in fact prejudicial forms of “prescription” that stifl e the full de-
velopment of human beings. In response to Rousseau’s “ridiculous stories”
which aim “to prove that girls are naturally attentive to their persons,” she
points out that he is mistaking the effect for the cause (69). Girls are not
born coquettes, but rather are made vain by following the “daily example”
of their mothers and the encouragement of their fathers (69). In a dry aside,
she appeals to her empirical observations as a governess and schoolteacher
to issue her fi nal, devastating critique of Rousseau’s patriarchal view of
female development: “I have, probably, had an opportunity of observing
more girls in their infancy than J. J. Rousseau —I can recollect my own
feelings, and I have looked steadily around me; yet, so far from coincid-
ing with him in opinion respecting the fi rst dawn of the female character,
I will venture to affi rm, that a girl, whose spirits have not been damped by
inactivity, or innocence tainted by false shame, will always be a romp, and
the doll will never excite attention unless confi nement allows her no alter-
native” (69). Her modest understatement of her experience with teaching
young girls undermined the authority of Rousseau’s theoretical generaliza-
tions more effectively than a direct assertion of her expertise. It also paved
the way for her explication of her substantive view of how girls ought to
be raised to be strong and independent in both mind and body. Her vi-
sion of girls and boys freely playing together, outside the home or in the
schoolyard, became a tenet of nineteenth-century feminist theories of edu-
cation, especially in the United States (Botting and Carey 2004). Coedu-
cation, including athletics, has since become a civil right in most modern
democracies.
Alongside misguided notions of female education, Wollstonecraft pin-
pointed the institution of patriarchal marriage, held in place by legal pre-
scriptions such as coverture, entail, and primogeniture, as another major
cause of women’s oppression. In the late eighteenth-century culture of
sensibility, girls were raised to believe that they should fi nd a mate like
they encountered in romantic novels of the era (Mellor [1975] 1994, xii).
Wollstonecraft had no patience for such a frivolous view of women’s des-
tiny as drawn from what she mocked as “the herd of Novelists”: “I own it
frequently happens that women who have fostered a romantic unnatural
delicacy of feeling, waste their lives in imagining how happy they should
have been with a husband who could love them with a fervid increasing
affection every day, and all day” (58). Sarcastically undermining these la-
dies’ delusional fantasy of ever-increasing marital passion, Wollstonecraft