ABSTRACT
This chapter studies Mary Wollstonecraft’s educational works with attention to her critical concept of monarchist miseducation and the normative concept of republican coeducation that she proposed as its remedy. Primarily put forward in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), this theorizing developed from and beyond her earlier self-educative studies while employed as governess, school teacher, and popular educational writer. Coeducation has suffered theoretical neglect as a taken-for-granted common public practice founded on a thin, misleading concept scarcely studied (Rich 1979). Jane Roland Martin introduced educators to Wollstonecraft by philosophically interpreting and critiquing her ideal of the educated woman in comparison and contrast with four other such significant ideals (1985), but educational studies of Wollstonecraft remain rare. Following bibliographic survey of Wollstonecraft’s prolific, genre-diverse educational writings, then not readily available to Martin, Laird explains how Wollstonecraft understood the Divine Right of Kings as an educational principle, which disclosed a contradiction between monarchism and education per se, and its hidden curriculum in sexual character, which constructed a fallacious sexual ontology, an oppressive sexual economy, and a contradictory sexual ethic. Responding critically and imaginatively to that concept of monarchist miseducation conducted by parents, tutors, and governesses and by sex-segregated schools, Wollstonecraft theorized the learning aims of republican coeducation, whose learning should take place both in day-schools and at home: ontological learning that should confound the sex distinction without tyrannizing sexual expression; political-economic learning that should develop capable civic and professional commitments to equality and responsible independence; and ethical learning that should develop friendship and mutuality between sexes. Wollstonecraft’s concept of republican coeducation is incomplete, a theory of its aims without fully formulated means—an issue taken up by the tradition of thought on coeducation that Wollstonecraft’s theorizing founded. The chapter closes with a summary of her major contributions to educational studies.
