SOURCE: “Introduction,” in Thoughts on the education of daughters, by Mary Wollstonecraft, 1787. Reprint: Oxford: Woodstock Books, 1994, n.p.

[In this introduction, Wordsworth compares Mary Wollstonecraft's Thoughts on the education of daughters, a social conduct manual, with John Locke's Some thoughts concerning education (1693).]

The Nursery—Moral Discipline—Exterior Accomplishments—Artificial Manners—Dress—The Fine Arts—Reading—Boarding-Schools—The Temper—Unfortunate Situation of Females, Fashionably Educated, And Left Without A Fortune—Love—Matrimony—Desultory Thoughts—The Benefits Which Arise From Disappointments—On The Treatment of Servants—The Observance of Sunday—On The Misfortune Of Fluctuating Principles—Benevolence—Card-Playing—The Theatre—Public Places

Wollstonecraft did not provide Thoughts on the education of daughters with a Table of Contents, but a glance at the list she might have included tells us a good deal about the book. Aside from beginning in the nursery, she appears not be interested in structure. Though Wollstonecraft and her sisters have for two years been running a school, education here plainly has nothing to do with a curriculum. Implied in the listed headings is a decided moral emphasis: manners are artificial, disappointments beneficial; by implication, principles should be steady, Sunday should be observed, we are to practise benevolence and think twice about card-playing. Standing out from other headings by virtue of its length and personal tone (and unintended pun) is ‘Unfortunate Situation Of Females, Fashionably Educated, But Left Without A Fortune’. This is not, it seems, an egalitarian work—and not one that is written from an entirely detached position.

Wollstonecraft's overall title, of course, suggests that her book is a sequel to Locke, Some thoughts concerning education (1693). In print at least, Locke had ignored the existence of girls; Wollstonecraft, in the enlightened 1780s, would give them their due. But if this was indeed her intention, she soon found how hard it was to achieve. Her sole reference to Locke occurs on page eleven:

To be able to follow Mr Locke's system (and this may be said of almost all treatises on education) the parents must have subdued their own passions, which is not often the case in any considerable degree.

The marriage state is too often a state of discord; it does not always happen that both parents are rational, and the weakest have it in their power to do most mischief.

How then are the tender minds of children to be cultivated?—Mamma is only anxious that they should love her best, and perhaps takes pains to sow those seeds which have produced such luxuriant weeds in her own mind. Or, what still more frequently occurs, the children are at first made playthings of, and when their tempers have been spoiled by indiscreet indulgence, they become troublesome, and are mostly left with servants; the first notions they imbibe, therefore, are mean and vulgar. They are taught cunning, the wisdom of that class of people, and a love of truth, the foundation of virtue, is soon obliterated from their minds.

To which Wollstonecraft adds, in what can only be an assertion of freedom from Locke, ‘It is, in my opinion, a well-proved fact, that principles of truth are innate.’ Abetted by their servants (about whom Wollstonecraft is consistently harsh), parents are destroying the love of truth with which the child is born. It is sort of counter-education. A similar process will turn to evil the innately good Creature in her daughter's novel, Frankenstein.

Locke, by contrast, had written his Thoughts as an aid to friends (both of them rational), who were anxious to do all that was right for their son. Deciding to publish, he not surprisingly put the work in a larger, more idealistic context:

The well Educating of their Children is so much the Duty and Concern of Parents, and the Welfare and Prosperity of the Nation so much depends on it, that I would have every one lay it seriously to Heart, and … set his Helping Hand to promote every where that Way of training up Youth, with regard to their several Conditions, which is the easiest, shortest, and likeliest to produce vertuous, useful, and able Men in their distinct Callings.

For a moment we are permitted the thought that all classes will be catered for, because all can be ‘vertuous, useful, and able’. Locke, however, tells us firmly ‘the Gentleman's Calling’ is

most to be taken care of … For if those of that Rank are by their Education once set right, they will quickly bring all the rest into Order.

(Educational writings, ed. Axtell, 112-13)

Adapted to a non-hereditary elite, Locke's faith reappears 100 years later in Godwin's Political justice:

Infuse just views of society into a certain number of the liberally educated and reflecting members; give to the people guides and instructors; and the business is done.

(1793 Political justice i, 69)

Wollstonecraft in Vindication of the rights of woman (1792) is Lockean too in this respect, arguing the case for female education (a year before her future husband's treatise) on the grounds that women should naturally be the educators. Having in their charge both the males and the females of future generations, they are uniquely placed to bring about social change. Thoughts on the education of daughters does not arrive at this point. Written as it is at Stoke Newington, under the eyes of Richard Price, it accepts the positions (Lockean in origin) of rational dissent: ‘Universal benevolence is the first duty’ (p. 91). But neither the political scene, nor Wollstonecraft's own life, gives cause in 1786 for optimism. So far from addressing herself to Locke's well-intentioned and intelligent parents, willing to give time and thought to their offspring, she takes it for granted that they will be uncaring. ‘Mamma is only anxious that [the children] should love her best’; Papa is ineffectual, maybe worse.

Locke patiently constructs an ideal. Not until his work had been drafted was he asked how the Clarkes should bring up their two daughters. Then, in a letter of February 1685, he suggests for them the same education as their brother. His views in general are amazingly enlightened:

None of the Things they [children] are to learn should ever be made a Burthen to them, or imposed on them as a Task.

(Axtell, 172)

It will perhaps be wondered that I mentioned Reasoning with Children: And yet I cannot but think that the true Way of Dealing with them.

(ibid, 181)

Beating is the worst, and therefore the last Means to be used in the Correction of Children; and that only in Cases of Extremity, after all gentler Ways have been tried, and proved unsuccessful.

(ibid, 183)

As Children's Enquiries are not to be slighted, so also great care is to be taken that they never receive Deceitful and Eluding Answers.

(ibid, 230)

Thoughts on the education of daughters belongs to a different world. It takes the form of a manual, but is in truth a protest against contemporary society. Wollstonecraft may set out to offer advice comparable to Locke's—‘whenever a child asks a question, it should always have a reasonable answer given it'—but her sense of the disastrous current situation makes it impossible to stay on the level of practical suggestions.

Wollstonecraft's instinct is to fight. With Pope, for instance, who has stereotyped women as coquettes in the Rape of the lock, and famously denied them character in Epistle to a lady. But even as she comes back at him—‘there are quite as many male coquets as female, and they are far more pernicious pests to society’ (p. 81); ‘Most women, and men too, have no character at all’ (p. 111)—we feel that she is close to sharing his view. The women of whom she writes are at once trapped and collusive. Mamma has had little opportunity, and no encouragement, to become rational. Treated as a plaything herself in the nursery, she has been briefly exiled to the kitchen, then packed off to a boarding school, where ‘few things are learnt thoroughly, but many follies contracted, and an immoderate fondness for dress among the rest’ (p. 58). Leaving school, she has no other aim but marriage. ‘Scarcely out of the state of childhood herself’, she is ‘placed at the head of a family’ (p. 96). If she perpetuates the faults of her own upbringing it is little wonder.

As a female ‘fashionably educated and left without a fortune’, Wollstonecraft too is in a trap. With all her reservations about the married state, it is painful to be unmarriageable. Of the few jobs available to women in her situation—paid companion, school-teacher, governess—she has tried the first two, and will soon try the third. All are humiliating. ‘It is impossible to enumerate the many hours of anguish such a person must spend’, she wrote of being a companion:

Painfully sensible of unkindness, she is alive to every thing, and many sarcasms reach her, which were perhaps directed another way. She is alone, shut out from equality and confidence, and the concealed anxiety impairs her constitution; for she must wear a cheerful face, or be dismissed.

(p. 71)

As writer too, Wollstonecraft is trapped. Unable to see a way out of the cycle of indulgent mother, spoiled child, indulgent mother, she is compelled nevertheless to think of education in terms of marriage:

To prepare a woman to fulfil the important duties of wife and mother, are certainly the objects that should be in view during the early period of life.

(p. 58)

It is for this reason that Thoughts on the education of daughters increasingly draws the reader's attention to the love of God: ‘He who has made us must know what will tend to our ultimate good’ (p. 107). If not on earth, everything will be put right in ‘that world where there is neither marrying, nor giving in marriage’ (final words of Mary, a fiction, 1788).

Already in this her first book it is clear that the strength of Wollstonecraft's writing lies in determined personality and a refusal to accept what she sees to be wrong. She has yet to develop the more cutting tones of the second Vindication—‘I have, probably, had an opportunity of observing more girls in their infancy than J.J. Rousseau’ (he put his children at birth, one recalls, into a Foundling Hospital)—but she is very much herself. She has found her cause. The women she sees about her are not easy to fight for, but fight she will.