Subjects
Female Education in the Age of Enlightenment
Introduced by Janet Todd
978 1 85196 274 7: 234x156mm: £495.00/$875.00
Availability: Japan: Kinokuniya
The education and training of women for their presumed role in life were of constant interest to the eighteenth century, which produced a spate of advice books and manuals describing the construction of the ideal woman.
Men and women took part in the education debate that culminated in the 1790s with Wollstonecraft, More and Edgeworth, but positions and arguments were laid down before by such men as Rousseau, Fordyce and Gregory and by women such as Macaulay, Chapone and many others. The debate continued on into the late 1790s and early nineteenth century, when many of the positions were reasserted by such writers as Gisborne and West.
James Fordyce and John Gregory were two of Wollstonecraft's principal targets in The Vindication of the Rights of Woman and are representative of male writers on female conduct. Catherine Macaulay, whose work proved so valuable to Wollstonecraft, posed a major challenge to the male tradition of constructed femininity in her rational, thoughtful Letters on Female Education.
Hester Chapone's Letters on the Improvement of the Mind constitutes a subtle, eminently readable, sometimes desperate attempt to assert women's educational rights from within the conventions of the conduct book tradition. Thomas Gisborne and Jane West together illustrate how the post-revolutionary caution and religious revival of the Romantic era diluted the reform of women's education and reasserted the importance of female conduct along conservative lines.
Contents
Volume 1
James Fordyce, Sermons for Young Women (1766); John Gregory, A Father's Legacy to His Daughters (1774)
Volume 2
Hester Chapone, Letters on the Improvement of the Mind (1773); Thomas Gisborne, An Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex (1797)
Volume 3
Catherine Macaulay, Letters on Education (1790)
Volume 4
Jane West, Letters to a Young Lady, Vol. I (1811)
Volume 5
Jane West, Letters to a Young Lady, Vol.II (1811)
Volume 6
Jane West, Letters to a Young Lady, Vol.III (1811)
Reviews
‘Female Education provides an indispensable set of core readings which, when supplemented by the relevant work of Wollstonecraft, Hannah More and Maria Edgeworth, will provide students and scholars with everything they need to begin exploring this crucial episode in feminist studies and British cultural history.
- Alan Richardson, Boston College, Massachusetts