[3] After the American Revolution, Noah Webster used content from Emile in his best-selling schoolbooks and he also used it to argue for the civic necessity of broad-based female education.

Rousseau seeks to describe a system of education that would enable the natural man he identifies in The Social Contract (1762) to survive corrupt society.

For example, he endorses Locke's program of "harden[ing children's] bodies against the intemperance of season, climates, elements; against hunger, thirst, fatigue".

Rousseau believed that at this phase the education of children should be derived less from books and more from the child's interactions with the world, with an emphasis on developing the senses, and the ability to draw inferences from them.

Rousseau believed it necessary that the child must be taught a manual skill appropriate to his sex and age, and suitable to his inclinations, by worthy role models.

Rousseau argues that, while a child cannot put himself in the place of others, once he reaches adolescence and becomes able to do so, Emile can finally be brought into the world and socialized.

Book IV also contains the famous "Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar", the section that was largely responsible for the condemnation of Emile and the one most frequently excerpted and published independently of its parent tome.

Rousseau begins his description of Sophie, the ideal woman, by describing the inherent differences between men and women in a famous passage: In what they have in common, they are equal.

During the eighteenth century, women's education was traditionally focused on domestic skills—including sewing, housekeeping, and cooking—as they were encouraged to stay within their suitable spheres, which Rousseau advocates.

Mary Wollstonecraft, for example, dedicated a substantial portion of her chapter "Animadversions on Some of the Writers who have Rendered Women Objects of Pity, Bordering on Contempt" in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) to attacking Rousseau and his arguments.

[24]French writer Louise d'Épinay's Conversations d'Emilie made her disagreement with Rousseau's take on female education clear as well.

His political treatise The Social Contract was published in the same year as Emile and was likewise soon banned by the government for its controversial theories on general will.

[26] In the incomplete sequel to Emile, Émile et Sophie (English: Emilius and Sophia), published after Rousseau's death, Sophie is unfaithful (in what is hinted at might be a drugged rape), and Emile, initially furious with her betrayal, remarks "the adulteries of the women of the world are not more than gallantries; but Sophia an adulteress is the most odious of all monsters; the distance between what she was, and what she is, is immense.

Throughout the agonized internal monologue, represented through letters to his old tutor, he repeatedly comments on all of the affective ties that he has formed in his domestic life—"the chains [his heart] forged for itself".

[28] As he begins to recover from the shock, the reader is led to believe that these "chains" are not worth the price of possible pain—"By renouncing my attachments to a single spot, I extended them to the whole earth, and, while I ceased to be a citizen, became truly a man".

According to Voltaire, Emile is a hodgepodge of a silly wet nurse in four volumes, with forty pages against Christianity, among the boldest ever known...He says as many hurtful things against the philosophers as against Jesus Christ, but the philosophers will be more indulgent than the priests.However, Voltaire went on to endorse the Profession of Faith section and called it "fifty good pages... it is regrettable that they should have been written by... such a knave".