Thoughts on the Education of Daughters
Thoughts on the education of daughters: with reflections on female conduct, in the more important duties of life is the first published work of the British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft.
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).
Desperate to escape from debt, Wollstonecraft wrote her first book, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, and sold the copyright for only ten guineas to Joseph Johnson, a publisher recommended to her by a friend.
The modest success of Thoughts and Johnson's encouragement emboldened Wollstonecraft to embark on a career as a professional writer, a precarious and somewhat disreputable profession for women during the 18th century.
The first two chapters, "The Nursery" and "Moral Discipline", offer advice on shaping the child's "constitution" and "temperament", arguing that the formation of the rational mind must begin early.
She complains, for example, that women "squander" their money on clothing, "which if saved for charitable purposes, might alleviate the distress of many poor families, and soften the heart of the girl who entered into such scenes of woe".
[6] As Nancy Armstrong writes in her seminal work on this genre, 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".
[9] Chapone's work, in particular, appealed to Wollstonecraft at this time 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".
Thus, Thoughts appears to be torn between several sets of binaries, such as compliance and rebellion; spiritual meekness and rational independence; and domestic duty and political participation.
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.
[21] 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.
[23] 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 18th century.
Thoughts follows in the Lockean tradition 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 an advocacy of clear rules.
[27] 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 that of the professional man.
[29] In the chapter entitled "Unfortunate Situation of Females, Fashionably Educated, and Left without a Fortune" she writes, perhaps describing her own experiences: [T]o be an humble companion to some rich old cousin...
… 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.
[32] Wollstonecraft writes: He who is training us up for immortal bliss, knows best what trials will contribute to make us [virtuous]; and our resignation and improvement will render us respectable to ourselves, and to that Being, whose approbation is of more value than life itself.
[33] Although she drifted away from these beliefs and later adopted 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".
[34] 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".
