Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787) by Mary Wollstonecraft (Annotated and Retold)

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Young ladies are expected to choose their mode of silence carefully and to non-verbally communicate the specific reasons for their silence. There are good reasons for doing so: So for example, Hester Chapone writes in Many are of opinion that a very young woman can hardly be too silent and reserved in company […]. But, […] silence should only be enjoined, when it would be forward and impertinent to talk.

So it is a possibility that Chapone just pretends to oppose received opinions to increase the value of her own advice. It is the opinion of some, that girls should never speak before company, when their parents are present; and parents there are, so deficient in understanding, as to make this a rule. How then shall those girls learn to acquit themselves properly in their absence?

And he does give pedagogical reasons for his opinion. He does not just claim to state eternal truths or remind his readers of traditional wisdom. So obviously female taciturnity is not consistently depicted as an eternal ideal in conduct books. It is sometimes presented on the contrary as a controversial issue and as subject to fashion changes.

Thoughts on the Education of Daughters - Wikisource, the free online library

Writing in , Thomas Gisbourne criticizes the view that girls must be silent in the presence of their parents explicitly as old-fashioned and outdated: Even in times not very distant from those in which we live, it was the custom for girls, when arrived at such an age, as to be fully capable of bearing a part in general conversation, to be condemned to almost perpetual silence in the presence of their parents.

He questions the value of the traditional demonstration of filial subordination by silence, but not because he worries that what looks like submission might in some cases mask — or even nonverbally express — rebellious thoughts. Are Gisbourne, Fordyce and Chapone right in pointing out that customs are changing, that there is no longer a consensus in favour of female silence?

Female silence is a staple topic of conduct books, but usually not treated in great detail. Because of that it is not always possible to exactly compare the advice given in different books. Still, female silence seems to be a topic which allows for more diverse opinions than are usually to be found in this notoriously repetitive genre. This diversity of opinion is evidence for historically changing educational practices: So it seems only logical, that, as I have shown, conduct books also prefer young women to be quiet rather than eloquently communicative in conversation.

Or, if taciturnity is interpreted not so much as a physical act of self-restraint but rather as the frugal use of language, it may, as Peter Burke has suggested, also be linked to protestant ideals of economy. So, if conduct book authors recommend silence to young women, they might in fact wish young women to use words just as conscientiously and parsimoniously as they should their pin-money, to prepare them for their future role as frugal housewives.

It is possible that this change was part of the more general shift in the perception of total silence noted by Claudia Benthien. Thus the eighteenth-century conduct book ideal of female silence, may have also changed subtly as it was reformulated in a growing number of texts throughout the century. At any rate, the treatment of female silence plainly shows that eighteenth-century conduct books for young women of the middling sort, as a body of texts, do not present an entirely uniform model of femininity — although they are often read this way in the research literature.

One reason for the popularity of conduct books for young ladies may well have been precisely the need for advice on controversial topics such as female silence. When first attending a private ball and being asked to dance by a stranger, Lord Orville, Evelina feels so frightened by the novelty of the situation that her marked failure to join in the conversation leaves her dancing partner in confused wonder. Her detailed description of the episode in a letter home accentuates her repeated but futile attempts to overcome her extreme bashfulness: He seemed very desirous of entering into conversion with me; but I was seized with such a panic, that I could hardly speak a word […] I made no answer, but hung my head, like a fool, and looked on my fan […] I had not the presence of mind to say a single word […] I […] listened to him in silent embarrassment […] I was unable to go further than a monosyllable.

Burney I Letter XI: Unlike Evelina she is familiar with female conduct rules 17 as well as with basic ballroom etiquette. Yet she deliberately employs a mode of silence not adequate to place, case and interlocutor, intending to communicate her dislike based, as it will turn out, on misinformation: Darcy, does not readily decode the contemptuous message she wishes her silence to convey — Elizabeth proceeds to talk about their failure to talk: Her attempt to ironically draw attention to her own exemplary efforts at suitably light conversation, and to his failure to support her in these, does not have the desired effect of irritating Mr.

He rather appears to enjoy the unusual situation of meta-communicatively reflecting on the due proportion of speech to silence in the ballroom while actually dancing. No longer taciturn, he enquires after the importance she attaches to conduct rules for real life: One must speak a little, you know.

Donnell Rubay

By the end of the dancing scene, Elizabeth finally succeeds in quarrelling with her partner. But before that, she has used female silence both in the literal sense and as a subject for conversation to provoke and attack, has proceeded to meta-communicatively reflect her own conduct with regard to silence, casually show off her knowledge of behavioural rules concerning silence, while at the same time breaking them and moreover appearing — unintentionally — attractively witty to her partner, in spite of announcing her intention to restrict herself to small talk platitudes.

Besides their general appreciation of prudent reticence they consider silence as particularly suitable for, if not natural to inexperienced young women and recommend silent listening as a learning strategy. Silence is presented as a versatile means of communication, suitable to demonstrate exemplary femininity, hide personal shortcomings, trigger specific desirable responses, criticize or attack. Well-bred participants of polite conversation are expected to know how to send and correctly decode such non-verbal messages. There is disagreement among authors on just how silent young women should be and this question is explicitly linked to cultural change.

Representations of female silence in the novel show the difficulties with the encoding and decoding of messages which could arise when female silence was treated as a means of non-verbal communication as well as the creative uses to which the silence rules could be put by young women. Conduct Literature for Women: Letters to a Young Lady: Cadell, Junior, and W. Authorized King James Version. Addressed to a Young Lady. Female Education in the Age of Enlightenment. Lives of Eminent Philosophers. With an English translation by R. The Third Edition, Corrected In a Letter to Miss Pennington.

Thoughts on the Education of Daughters: Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. Conduct Books for Girls in Enlightenment France. Brayman Hackel , Heidi. Women Readers in a Patriarchal State. Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. The Crisis of Courtesy: Studies in the Conduct-Book in Britain, Soziogenetische und psychogenetische Untersuchungen.

Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787) by Mary Wollstonecraft (Annotated and Retold)

Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Wissenschaft Hayes , Kevin J. U of Tennessee P, Zur Pragmatik von Ratgeberliteratur in alltagskultureller Perspektive.

Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus

Pleasure and Conduct Literature. Roy Porter and Mary Mulvey Roberts. Houndsmill, Basingstoke, Hampshire, London: Frauenrollen und der englische Roman um Meyer Spacks , Patricia. Concealing the Eighteenth-Century Self. U of Chicago P, Manners, Morals and Class in England Newton , Sarah E.

The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: The Age of Conduct and Courtesy: Diss U Freiburg Rumbo , Rebecca E. Pamela and Conduct Books for Servants. U of Southern California, Conduct books integrated the styles and rhetorics of earlier genres, such as devotional writings, marriage manuals, recipe books, and works on household economy. They offered their readers a description of most often the ideal woman while at the same time handing out practical advice.

Thus, not only did they dictate morality, but they also guided readers' choice of dress and outlined "proper" etiquette. Conduct books have traditionally been viewed by scholars as an integral factor in the creation of a bourgeois sense of self. Women were encouraged to be chaste, pious, submissive, modest, selfless, graceful, pure, delicate, compliant, reticent, and polite. More recently, a few scholars have argued that conduct books should be differentiated more carefully and that some of them—such as Wollstonecraft's Thoughts —transformed traditional female advice manuals into "proto-feminist tracts".

Yet at the same time, the text challenges this portrait of the "proper lady" by introducing strains of religious Dissent that promote equality of the soul. 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. This view of the conduct book, and of Thoughts in particular, questions the earlier interpretation of the genre as a mere tool of ideological indoctrination, an interpretation that grew out of criticism influenced by theorists such as Michel Foucault.

By the end of her life, Wollstonecraft had been involved in almost every arena of education: Most of her works deal with education in some way. For example, her two novels are bildungsromane novels of education ; she translated educational works such as Christian Gotthilf Salzmann's Elements of Morality ; she wrote a children's book, Original Stories from Real Life ; and her Vindication of the Rights of Woman is largely an argument for the value of female education.

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. Wollstonecraft and other political radicals during the last quarter of the 18th century focused their reform efforts on education because they believed that if people were educated correctly, Britain would experience a moral and political revolution.

Religious Dissenters , especially, embraced this view; Wollstonecraft's philosophy in Thoughts and elsewhere closely resembles that of the Dissenters she met while teaching in Newington Green, such as the theologian, educator, and scientist Joseph Priestley and the minister Richard Price. Dissenters "were most concerned with molding children into people of good moral character and habits".

Liberals and conservatives alike subscribed to Lockean and Hartleian associationist psychology: Both Locke and Hartley had argued that the associations formed in childhood were nearly irreversible and must thus be formed with care. Wollstonecraft was significantly influenced by Locke's Some Thoughts Concerning Education her title alludes to it and Jean-Jacques Rousseau 's Emile , 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. Wollstonecraft breaks from Locke, however, in her emphasis on piety and her insistence that the child has "innate" feelings that guide her towards virtue, ideas likely drawn from Rousseau. Thoughts advocates several educational goals for women: Wollstonecraft assumes that the "daughters" in her book will one day become mothers and teachers.

She does not propose that women abandon these traditional roles, because she believes that women can most effectively improve society as pedagogues. Such wives, she contends, perform no useful role in society and, indeed, contribute to its immorality. Wollstonecraft and others criticized the traditional "accomplishment"-based education traditionally offered women; they argued that this kind of education, which emphasized the acquisition of skills such as drawing and dancing, was useless and decadent.

Wollstonecraft argues that women should have all of the intellectual and moral training given to men, though she does not provide women with a place to use these new skills beyond the home. Wollstonecraft's feminist critics charged that the masculine role for women that she envisioned—one designed for the public sphere but which women could not perform in the public sphere—left women without a specific social position.

They saw it as ultimately confining and limiting—as offering women more in the way of education without a real way to use it. Wollstonecraft's most passionate writing in Thoughts focuses on the lack of career opportunities for women, a theme that would dominate her later novel Maria: It is impossible to enumerate the many hours of anguish such a person must spend. Above the servants, yet considered by them as a spy, and ever reminded of her inferiority when in conversation with the superiors.

A governess to young ladies is equally disagreeable. How cutting is the contempt she meets with! Although Wollstonecraft's comments on female education hint at some of her more radical arguments in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman , the religious tone of the text—also found in her first novel, Mary: A Fiction —is generally viewed by scholars as conservative. 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.

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". Thoughts was only moderately successful: The English Review noticed Thoughts favourably:.

These thoughts are employed on various important situations and incidents in the ordinary life of females, and are, in general, dictated with great judgment. We should therefore recommend these Thoughts as worthy the attention of those who are more immediately concerned in the education of young ladies. However, no other journal reviewed the book and Thoughts was not reprinted until the late 20th century, when there was a resurgence of interest in Wollstonecraft among feminist literary critics.

Alan Richardson, a scholar of 18th-century education, points out that if Wollstonecraft had not written A Vindication of the Rights of Men and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman , it is unlikely that Thoughts would have been considered progressive or even worthy of notice.

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