ABSTRACT
Motherhood was a powerful force in the eighteenth-century discourse on female education. In a culture in which the formal schooling of girls was rather limited, much of their education took place in a domestic context in which female adults played a preeminent role. It was no coincidence that Fenelon opened his influential treatise De l'education des filles with a comment on maternal inadequacy more than 70 years before Jean-Jacques Rousseau's appeal to mothers to care for their children in Emile, ou de l'education. Mothers were promoted as the best-suited partners of their daughters, those most likely to transmit directly to them the knowledge of social norms and the moral principles indispensable to their social integration. The critique of maternal shortcomings was all the more remarkable when it stemmed from a mother, as was the case in Lambert's Avis. To present a devoted mother likely to inspire others was also Epinay's modus operandi.
