ABSTRACT
In denouncing modern culture in the First Discourse of 1751, Rousseau makes surprisingly few comments on women. In one extended footnote (1D 21/15) he talks neutrally of ‘the advance of women’ [l’ascendant des femmes].2 With no apparent sarcasm, he advocates giving ‘a better…education to that half of the human race which governs the other’, holding that ‘men will always be what is pleasing to women’. He continues, apparently seriously, to say that ‘Plato’s reflections’ [on equal education for women of the Guardian class in Republic V] ‘deserve to be better developed by a writer worthy of following such a master’. Since Plato’s view of women’s education was so unusual in the ancient world, we can only assume that Rousseau was making a feminist statement in approving of it, even while refusing to expound it personally himself. In the last of the Replies to Objections to the First Discourse, he advocates strictly separate lives for men and women, a theme to which he would return repeatedly later: ‘Man and woman are made to love each other and unite. But beyond that legitimate union, all commerce of love between them is a dreadful source of disorders in society and morals’ (1D 75Fn/113Fn). But separation does not in itself entail inequality, and at this stage in his writing Rousseau is advocating the former, not the latter.
