Ali Abdi
“Women are naturally children educators.”
Mahmood Ahmadinejad, Iranian President
In this essay I will examine the intertwining relation of the three concepts of woman, wife and human nature in the three non-contemporary texts of Emile (1762) by Rousseau, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) by Mary Wollstonecraft, and The Subjection of Women (1861) by John Stuart Mill. In other words, I will explain how Rousseau, Wollstonecraft, and Mill’s analysis of human nature provided them a framework on which they made their assumptions about the appropriate position of a woman in the society. I will argue that despite the apparent differences in their arguments they all eventually interwove the two concepts of woman and wife, as if all today women are future wives. Such prescription even exists in the policy makers’ words of the 21st century.
Mary Wollstonecraft, the English white middle-class writer of the 18th century, wrote her essay in 1792, just three years after the French Revolution. At that time, the exalting values of the Age of Enlightenment were spreading across Europe. That was the time of debates, contradictions and ambiguities Thinkers and philosophers of the time, including Jean Jacques Rousseau, were theorizing about different controversial concepts concerning human beings such as freedom, justice, reason, individuality and, more specifically, human nature.
Rousseau elaborated in his work Emile that nature of man and woman is not, and should not be constituted the same, “either in character or in temperament”. He strongly suggested that in order to stay in-line with nature and preserve the social order, men and women should not be educated in the same manner and women must preserve “emotionality” – a word in contrast to reasoning within the given context of the late 18th century – and they must “please and be useful to us (which he means men)” because “these are the duties of women at all times”. Marriage contract for Rousseau was a basis on which an ordered civil society could be constructed. Rousseau believed that if a woman wants to make a positive contribution to maintaining the social order, she must follow the indications of her “nature” and learn early in life how to play the role of an appropriate wife in her future family (Rousseau 1762). Through Rousseau’s eyes, women were naturally wives.
Wollstonecraft dedicated the fifth chapter of her essay, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, to criticizing Rousseau’s assumptions of the nature of men and women, in particular Rousseau’s claim about the natural incapability of women in reasoning. She regarded reasoning as “the simple power of improvement … of discerning the truth” and more notably as an “emanation of divinity” which “connects the creature with the Creator” and “distinguishes human beings from animals” (Wollstonecraft 1793: 111, 134, 154). Having said that, she entertained that since men and women are both “creatures” of God and since God doesn’t discriminate between its creatures, so “nature of men and women are of the same kind” and “the nature of reason must be the same in all” (Wollstonecraft 1793: 111).
Unlike Rousseau, who prescribed two different modes of education for women and men because of their presumed different nature, Wollstonecraft argued for an identical education and blamed men for preventing women from having a proper education, which had resulted in the ostensible natural defect of the latter. She questioned the idea advocated by Rousseau that the “emotional” habits of girls are their nature, but rather claimed that “their (girls’) minds are corrupted” and “weakened” because of the improper education they receive (Wollstonecraft 1793: 180). Since men and women have the same intellectual abilities, Wollstonecraft strongly argued that women should be educated “rationally” in order to give them the opportunity to contribute to society.
But what I see problematic in Wollstonecraft’s argument is that for her the ultimate goal of identical education was to make “virtuous” and, at the same time, “reasonable” women (wives) who can be better “companions” to their husbands, which looks contradictory. How can an identical education lead women just to this boundary of being a virtuous wife and lead men to be the active subjects of the public life? Wollstonecraft was actually trying to make non-object wives. She argued then that should men want happiness and more “faithful wives”, it would be an intelligible decision of them to “snap the chains” of women (wives) in order to provide them the same education (Wollstonecraft 1793: VI, 201, 342).
This slippage in meaning/word usage between women and wives is found many times through the pages of her essay. For instance, where she wrote about the effects of improper education on girls’ behavior, she stated that “… females [and young girls] … are made women of when they are children”, and by women she meant wives, who lack “reasoning”, and whose minds are “weakened” because of their inappropriate education (Wollstonecraft 1793: 262, 319).
I believe that such slippage occurs for two basic reasons. First, at the time in which Wollstonecraft was writing, the mainstream and dominant trend of thought was to transform the disordered nature into an ordered one. The aim was to hold nature as the foundation of a robust civil society. In the eyes of late 18th century thinkers, conjugal rights within the marriage contract were crucial to preserve the stability of social order which claimed to survive on the basis of an ordered nature. Wollstonecraft didn’t distance herself from this dominant discourse. Even for her, women’s main role was identified to be educating the future free men of the realm of public, that is to say republic, within family structure.
Second, the way she looked at the concept of virtue and its relation to human nature actually shaped her argument. Wollstonecraft argued that all human beings are equal in nature and they all have the same ability of reasoning, which distinguishes them from animals. She then praised virtues as the “offspring of reason” which means everybody, either man or woman, must stay virtuous in the society. As I found through the pages of her book, she once respected marriage as the “foundation of almost any social virtue” (Wollstonecraft 1793: 155,181). So for her, as I clarified, reasoning women of today are naturally virtuous and better wives of future.
Wollstonecraft, if she can talk from her grave now, may not agree with my interpretation. She criticized Rousseau unequivocally and tried to show that what looks like s nature is just a convention. She didn’t follow exactly the same footsteps of Rousseau, but as I see she actually finished in quite a similar destination. It seems as if just two new terms of reasoning and virtuous were added to Rousseau’s claim of the natural status of women as wives in society.
Although Wollstonecraft’s argument doesn’t seem revolutionary for a twenty-first- century reader, it affected some of the thinkers after her time, including John Stewart Mill, an influential liberal anti-slavery thinker of the 19th century. Mill, under the influence of his companion Harriet Taylor, wrote one of the earliest essays on women’s liberation, The Subjection of Women in 1869, more than seventy years after Wollstonecraft’s essay.
Like Wollstonecraft, Mill believed that reason distinguishes human beings from animals. Hence, every person, man or woman, naturally has the capacity of reasoning. He also joined Wollstonecraft in holding inappropriate education and “forced repression” responsible for the “apparent” natural inferior status of women in society, by which women were brought up in the belief that their ideal character is “submission” and “yielding to the control of others” (Mill 1869: 232).
Yet, Mill, unlike Wollstonecraft, asserted that the “nature” of two sexes is not known to anyone because “they (two sexes) have only been seen in their present relation to one another” so anything which is now called the nature of women is an “artificial” thing (Mill 1869: 236). Rejecting the perceptions associated with nature of women, Mill believed in the importance of education in building women’s characters. Nevertheless the goal of education was quite different for him. In the eyes of Mill, since the “natural” vocation of a “reasoning woman” was not that of “virtuous wives”, the aim of education should not be based upon such a false claim either (Mill 1869: 244).
But what mainly distinguishes Mill’s work from that of Wollstonecraft, and what distinguishes Mill from many of the thinkers of his time, is his passionate argument for the principle which he believed had separated modern life from those of times long past: human beings were no longer “born” to their “place” in life and each individual is “free” to “use” her/his abilities to “achieve” what appears to her/him “the most desirable”; Mill argues that if somebody is born “black” or “white”, it doesn’t mean that she/he is “slave” or “master” anymore. Yet, as Mill claimed, there was an “isolated fact”, a “solitary breach”, a “discrepancy”, which was an “exception” to this principle: “women” were still born to their apparently natural inferior places and were prevented from following their abilities and desires (Mill 1869: 233, 243).
I didn’t see any indication for the indispensability of freedom for women to follow their tendencies in Wollstonecraft’s text. Although she believed that women must be “autonomous”, she presumed that “the ideal woman is less interested in fulfilling herself”. But Mill undermined such claim and instead suggested that the “fruits of a thousand years of experience” clearly showed that “individuals are better judges of their own abilities” and, since different men and women have different tendencies, they must have the freedom to “give … their nature free play” (Mill 1869: 234, 235).
Despite the fact that Mill Insisted on the vitality of “independency” and “having freedom to assure self-fulfillment” for women, he asserted that women still would be more willing to marry to become wives. Also he predicted that if marriage contract was an “equal” one, and if “separation on just terms” was available for couple, then women would stay at home after their marriage, rather than working “outdoors”. He didn’t mention the “nature of women” as the reason of such choices, but rather indicated that this is what would happen for any woman “in reality” (Mill 1869: 245).
Doubtlessly, that was beyond Wollstonecraft’s argument. Mill tried to put nature off the board, that is to say he didn’t argue for the natural interchangeability of the two concepts of woman and wife. But he actually introduced two other problematic concepts of consent and choice. He believed that women still would “choose” to become wives and they “attentively agree” to perform the ordinary functions of a mistress of a family to sacrifice their other interests until their families were grown (Mill 1869: 260). For him, today reasoning women are not naturally but are voluntarily wives of the future.
Yet, Mill didn’t question why women would choose to become wives, why they would be willing to stay at home, and why they voluntarily prefer to maintain the interests of social body at the cost of their individual failure. He didn’t question the political, cultural and social forces which affect women’s choices. It’s clear to me that Mill took the unequal status of men and women for granted. As long as the economical and social conditions of women and men are not equal, talking about voluntarily choices of women to be wives is meaningless.
It’s now about 150 years after Mill wrote his essay. One may expect that the recognition of voluntary tendencies of women to become wives is not acceptable anymore. But it seems to me that even now, in the beginning years of the 21st century, in some parts of the world, if not everywhere, politicians are still setting policies, members of the parliaments are giving speeches, people are making assumptions, social institutions are indoctrinating values, and families are educating their children, in a way implying that women are not even voluntarily but rather naturally wives. Not Mill, and even not Wollstonecraft, but this is Jean Jacques Rousseau, the founder of the social sexual contract, who is becoming alive again.
References:
Wollstonecraft, M. (1791) A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Boston: Printed by P. Edes.
Rousseau, J. J. (1783) Emilius and Sophi. London: Printed by H. Baldwin.
Mill, J. S. (1869) The Subjection of Women. London: Faust’s Statue
Mary Wollstonecraft, the English white middle-class writer of the 18th century, wrote her essay in 1792, just three years after the French Revolution. At that time, the exalting values of the Age of Enlightenment were spreading across Europe. That was the time of debates, contradictions and ambiguities Thinkers and philosophers of the time, including Jean Jacques Rousseau, were theorizing about different controversial concepts concerning human beings such as freedom, justice, reason, individuality and, more specifically, human nature.
Rousseau elaborated in his work Emile that nature of man and woman is not, and should not be constituted the same, “either in character or in temperament”. He strongly suggested that in order to stay in-line with nature and preserve the social order, men and women should not be educated in the same manner and women must preserve “emotionality” – a word in contrast to reasoning within the given context of the late 18th century – and they must “please and be useful to us (which he means men)” because “these are the duties of women at all times”. Marriage contract for Rousseau was a basis on which an ordered civil society could be constructed. Rousseau believed that if a woman wants to make a positive contribution to maintaining the social order, she must follow the indications of her “nature” and learn early in life how to play the role of an appropriate wife in her future family (Rousseau 1762). Through Rousseau’s eyes, women were naturally wives.
Wollstonecraft dedicated the fifth chapter of her essay, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, to criticizing Rousseau’s assumptions of the nature of men and women, in particular Rousseau’s claim about the natural incapability of women in reasoning. She regarded reasoning as “the simple power of improvement … of discerning the truth” and more notably as an “emanation of divinity” which “connects the creature with the Creator” and “distinguishes human beings from animals” (Wollstonecraft 1793: 111, 134, 154). Having said that, she entertained that since men and women are both “creatures” of God and since God doesn’t discriminate between its creatures, so “nature of men and women are of the same kind” and “the nature of reason must be the same in all” (Wollstonecraft 1793: 111).
Unlike Rousseau, who prescribed two different modes of education for women and men because of their presumed different nature, Wollstonecraft argued for an identical education and blamed men for preventing women from having a proper education, which had resulted in the ostensible natural defect of the latter. She questioned the idea advocated by Rousseau that the “emotional” habits of girls are their nature, but rather claimed that “their (girls’) minds are corrupted” and “weakened” because of the improper education they receive (Wollstonecraft 1793: 180). Since men and women have the same intellectual abilities, Wollstonecraft strongly argued that women should be educated “rationally” in order to give them the opportunity to contribute to society.
But what I see problematic in Wollstonecraft’s argument is that for her the ultimate goal of identical education was to make “virtuous” and, at the same time, “reasonable” women (wives) who can be better “companions” to their husbands, which looks contradictory. How can an identical education lead women just to this boundary of being a virtuous wife and lead men to be the active subjects of the public life? Wollstonecraft was actually trying to make non-object wives. She argued then that should men want happiness and more “faithful wives”, it would be an intelligible decision of them to “snap the chains” of women (wives) in order to provide them the same education (Wollstonecraft 1793: VI, 201, 342).
This slippage in meaning/word usage between women and wives is found many times through the pages of her essay. For instance, where she wrote about the effects of improper education on girls’ behavior, she stated that “… females [and young girls] … are made women of when they are children”, and by women she meant wives, who lack “reasoning”, and whose minds are “weakened” because of their inappropriate education (Wollstonecraft 1793: 262, 319).
I believe that such slippage occurs for two basic reasons. First, at the time in which Wollstonecraft was writing, the mainstream and dominant trend of thought was to transform the disordered nature into an ordered one. The aim was to hold nature as the foundation of a robust civil society. In the eyes of late 18th century thinkers, conjugal rights within the marriage contract were crucial to preserve the stability of social order which claimed to survive on the basis of an ordered nature. Wollstonecraft didn’t distance herself from this dominant discourse. Even for her, women’s main role was identified to be educating the future free men of the realm of public, that is to say republic, within family structure.
Second, the way she looked at the concept of virtue and its relation to human nature actually shaped her argument. Wollstonecraft argued that all human beings are equal in nature and they all have the same ability of reasoning, which distinguishes them from animals. She then praised virtues as the “offspring of reason” which means everybody, either man or woman, must stay virtuous in the society. As I found through the pages of her book, she once respected marriage as the “foundation of almost any social virtue” (Wollstonecraft 1793: 155,181). So for her, as I clarified, reasoning women of today are naturally virtuous and better wives of future.
Wollstonecraft, if she can talk from her grave now, may not agree with my interpretation. She criticized Rousseau unequivocally and tried to show that what looks like s nature is just a convention. She didn’t follow exactly the same footsteps of Rousseau, but as I see she actually finished in quite a similar destination. It seems as if just two new terms of reasoning and virtuous were added to Rousseau’s claim of the natural status of women as wives in society.
Although Wollstonecraft’s argument doesn’t seem revolutionary for a twenty-first- century reader, it affected some of the thinkers after her time, including John Stewart Mill, an influential liberal anti-slavery thinker of the 19th century. Mill, under the influence of his companion Harriet Taylor, wrote one of the earliest essays on women’s liberation, The Subjection of Women in 1869, more than seventy years after Wollstonecraft’s essay.
Like Wollstonecraft, Mill believed that reason distinguishes human beings from animals. Hence, every person, man or woman, naturally has the capacity of reasoning. He also joined Wollstonecraft in holding inappropriate education and “forced repression” responsible for the “apparent” natural inferior status of women in society, by which women were brought up in the belief that their ideal character is “submission” and “yielding to the control of others” (Mill 1869: 232).
Yet, Mill, unlike Wollstonecraft, asserted that the “nature” of two sexes is not known to anyone because “they (two sexes) have only been seen in their present relation to one another” so anything which is now called the nature of women is an “artificial” thing (Mill 1869: 236). Rejecting the perceptions associated with nature of women, Mill believed in the importance of education in building women’s characters. Nevertheless the goal of education was quite different for him. In the eyes of Mill, since the “natural” vocation of a “reasoning woman” was not that of “virtuous wives”, the aim of education should not be based upon such a false claim either (Mill 1869: 244).
But what mainly distinguishes Mill’s work from that of Wollstonecraft, and what distinguishes Mill from many of the thinkers of his time, is his passionate argument for the principle which he believed had separated modern life from those of times long past: human beings were no longer “born” to their “place” in life and each individual is “free” to “use” her/his abilities to “achieve” what appears to her/him “the most desirable”; Mill argues that if somebody is born “black” or “white”, it doesn’t mean that she/he is “slave” or “master” anymore. Yet, as Mill claimed, there was an “isolated fact”, a “solitary breach”, a “discrepancy”, which was an “exception” to this principle: “women” were still born to their apparently natural inferior places and were prevented from following their abilities and desires (Mill 1869: 233, 243).
I didn’t see any indication for the indispensability of freedom for women to follow their tendencies in Wollstonecraft’s text. Although she believed that women must be “autonomous”, she presumed that “the ideal woman is less interested in fulfilling herself”. But Mill undermined such claim and instead suggested that the “fruits of a thousand years of experience” clearly showed that “individuals are better judges of their own abilities” and, since different men and women have different tendencies, they must have the freedom to “give … their nature free play” (Mill 1869: 234, 235).
Despite the fact that Mill Insisted on the vitality of “independency” and “having freedom to assure self-fulfillment” for women, he asserted that women still would be more willing to marry to become wives. Also he predicted that if marriage contract was an “equal” one, and if “separation on just terms” was available for couple, then women would stay at home after their marriage, rather than working “outdoors”. He didn’t mention the “nature of women” as the reason of such choices, but rather indicated that this is what would happen for any woman “in reality” (Mill 1869: 245).
Doubtlessly, that was beyond Wollstonecraft’s argument. Mill tried to put nature off the board, that is to say he didn’t argue for the natural interchangeability of the two concepts of woman and wife. But he actually introduced two other problematic concepts of consent and choice. He believed that women still would “choose” to become wives and they “attentively agree” to perform the ordinary functions of a mistress of a family to sacrifice their other interests until their families were grown (Mill 1869: 260). For him, today reasoning women are not naturally but are voluntarily wives of the future.
Yet, Mill didn’t question why women would choose to become wives, why they would be willing to stay at home, and why they voluntarily prefer to maintain the interests of social body at the cost of their individual failure. He didn’t question the political, cultural and social forces which affect women’s choices. It’s clear to me that Mill took the unequal status of men and women for granted. As long as the economical and social conditions of women and men are not equal, talking about voluntarily choices of women to be wives is meaningless.
It’s now about 150 years after Mill wrote his essay. One may expect that the recognition of voluntary tendencies of women to become wives is not acceptable anymore. But it seems to me that even now, in the beginning years of the 21st century, in some parts of the world, if not everywhere, politicians are still setting policies, members of the parliaments are giving speeches, people are making assumptions, social institutions are indoctrinating values, and families are educating their children, in a way implying that women are not even voluntarily but rather naturally wives. Not Mill, and even not Wollstonecraft, but this is Jean Jacques Rousseau, the founder of the social sexual contract, who is becoming alive again.
References:
Wollstonecraft, M. (1791) A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Boston: Printed by P. Edes.
Rousseau, J. J. (1783) Emilius and Sophi. London: Printed by H. Baldwin.
Mill, J. S. (1869) The Subjection of Women. London: Faust’s Statue
