304 Appendix 1
Rebekah as an example of mothers whose affection for her children
was “brutish.” Her suggestion that women like Rebekah “violate their
most sacred duties” for the sake of their children might be a reference
to Rebekah’s aiding Jacob in his scheme to cheat his idolatrous brother,
Esau, out of his inheritance.
Richardson, Samuel (1689 –1761). English novelist. He is known for per-
fecting the epistolary novel. His fi rst novel, Pamela (1740), became im-
mediately popular. Two later novels, Clarissa (1748) and Sir Charles
Grandison (1753), were also well received. Wollstonecraft uses two of
Richardson’s most famous characters, Clarissa and Lovelace, to criti-
cize Richardson’s portrayal of women as helpless to exercise and main-
tain their own honor and virtue.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712–1778). Pivotal Enlightenment political
theorist, philosopher, novelist, and musical composer. He was one of
Wollstonecraft’s most important intellectual infl uences. She was highly
critical of Rousseau’s failure to extend to women the same educational
measures that he outlined for the male protagonist of his Emile, or On
Education (1762). Emile was widely read and infl uential among educa-
tional theorists in the eighteenth century. In it Emile’s tutor contrives a
series of schemes intended to provide his charge with a negative educa-
tion — an education intended to preserve the student’s natural goodness
as he learns to pursue his self-preservation, and only then to enter soci-
ety without becoming the slave of public opinion out of amour-propre
(self-love dependent on the opinions of others). Wollstonecraft’s own
philosophy of education shares Rousseau’s endorsement of a mother’s
breast-feeding her children, emphasis on the students’ autonomous in-
volvement in their own education, and attention to the importance of
physical play for a liberating education.
Although Wollstonecraft addresses Emile explicitly in the Rights
of Woman, she also engages many of Rousseau’s other works in that
work and elsewhere. Rousseau’s fi rst major work was published in 1750
after it won the prize from the Academy of Dijon for answering the
question, Have the arts and sciences contributed to the refi nement of
morals? In Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts or First Discourse
(1750), Rousseau is highly critical of the effect that the progress of civi-
lization and advancement in the arts and sciences have had on morals.
In the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft also appears to be interested
in refuting several of Rousseau’s claims in this work. Rousseau wrote
A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality or Second Discourse in 1755,
which treats one of the central questions in Rousseau’s work: how hu-