ABSTRACT
Mary Wollstonecraft wrote that she was ‘half in love’ with Rousseau, but only half in love, and a slashing attack on Rousseau’s argument about the education of girls stands at the heart of her Vindication of the Rights of Woman. This chapter explores her engagement with Rousseau, outlining his presence in her intellectual life throughout the final, crucial decade of her life. In particular, it highlights the Enlightenment debate about providence involving Rousseau and Voltaire, as both responded to the 1755 Lisbon disaster in light of Leibniz’s theodicy, showing how the way in which Wollstonecraft worked through the problem of evil led her to very different views to those of Rousseau. Although the building blocks of their respective accounts of human development had common elements, such as perfectibility and the imagination, they came to understand the relationship between divine providence, human action, and the passage of time in quite different ways. Rousseau held that God had made the best world that He could, and that it was up to human beings not to wreck it; Wollstonecraft saw history as the process through which humans put their divinely-given attributes of freedom, reason, perfectibility, and imagination to work, thereby making a passage from savagery towards a perfected social state. With these theological, anthropological, and moral-psychological disagreements in place, the chapter then turns to Rousseau’s account of the education of Sophie in his novel Emile in order to indicate why Wollstonecraft reacted with such vehement hostility to what he had to say.
