ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the expectations of the philosophical content produced by the epistolary form of Catharine Macaulay's work Letters on Education. Indeed at the risk of belaboring the point, it gives a lengthy overview of modern commentaries on Macaulay's work, analyzing and, at times, speculating about the assumptions that drive their interpretations. The chapter discusses that a proper interpretation of Macaulay's work is important, not simply because of the way that she offers a sustained, self-contained argument for the equality of women based on her ethicoreligious system, but also because this argument predates Mary Wollstonecraft's polemical argument for female equality in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. It examines a work whose form is integral to an understanding of the philosophical content. This examination allows the reader to see the way that the ideals of the dominant model of moral philosophy get played out in the rejection of the work as "philosophical".
