ABSTRACT
The legacy of women's education in eighteenth-century England and America was ambivalent and strewn with ironies. Judith Sargent Murray and Mary Wollstonecraft had argued for radical change so that women might more closely realize their potential. But most reformers were less provocative, insisting, like Benjamin Rush, that a woman's education should accommodate the needs-not of the individual-but of the greater society. The goal of individual fulfillment, they believed, was secondary to the higher purpose of intelligent wifehood and motherhood.
