The Perfect Woman: Rousseau and Wollstonecraft Essay --

If scholarship is done right, it is that which is done impartially. The topic of this paper, the perfect woman, written by a man, may give those with prejudgments a ready answer to it; without the due analysis required by it. Reading both authors now, it is easy to bash Rousseau with sexism and stamp Wollstonecraft with feminism. But such was not my task, rather I examined both with an unprejudiced eye to the best of my ability. Thus, I hope the same is reciprocated by my reader, and take my interpretations and criticisms with the same impartial mind. To begin, then, my argument, I assert that although Rousseau and Wollstonecraft effect disparate views on the best education for women, the supposed disagreement of their model of the perfect woman is specious; their concept of the human species and its purpose is truly in contention. It is imperative to outline such mode of education regarded by each as the best to raise a woman. Since Wollstonecraft critiques much of Rousseau’s, I begin with his model. â€Å"Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the author of things; everything degenerates into the hands of man,† is the first line of Book I in Rousseau’s Emile or On Education (161). Emile is not a book for a social system of education, but one specifically for the â€Å"tender and foresighted mother, who [is] capable of keeping the nascent shrub away from the highway and securing it from the impact of human opinions†(162). Therefore, the mother is advised to â€Å"observe nature and follow the path it maps out to you† in the education of her children, the same nature which Rousseau has taken to educate the imaginary Emile and Sophie: the man and the woman; the future husband and wife. Therefore, in educating the perfect woman, the futu... ...o a role of mother and wife in both), but in their account of humanity. The charge of sexism on Rousseau and the badge of feminism on Wollstonecraft render their arguments elusive, as if Rousseau wrote because he was a sexist and Wollstonecraft because she was a feminist, which is certainly not true. Their work evinced here by the authors questioned the state of man and woman in relation to their conception of what it should be, what its purpose, and what its true species. With an answer to these questions, one concludes the inhumanity of mankind in society, and the other the inhumanity of mankind in their natural, barbarous state. The one runs from society, to the comforts and direction of nature; the other away from nature, to the reason and virtue of society. The argument presented may be still elusive, and the work in vain, but the point not missed, perhaps.