ABSTRACT
Women’s education was fiercely debated in the eighteenth century and the importance of education as an ideological apparatus is evident throughout the texts included here. Arguments about whether, and how, women should be educated are always part of wider political debates, and in terms of sexual politics they raise the fundamental question of difference itself. Education was the issue on which feminists began to challenge assumptions about women’s natural inferiority, offering telling critiques of the conduct-book construction of femininity. The obvious inadequacies of women’s education were for them a means of proving the circularity of the conservative view. According to that view, a limited curriculum was justified by a female ‘nature’ which, the feminists pointed out, the curriculum had itself created. As Mary Astell put it in 1696, ‘the Incapacity, if there be any, is acquired not natural’ (see 5.1). But the differences between ‘radical’ and ‘conservative’ educational theories are far from clear-cut, as the passages here and in Section 5 demonstrate. (For a full sense of the debate, the two sections should be read together.) The conservative texts all stress the need to give women a serious, if limited, education in keeping with their providential role as rulers of the domestic economy. The radical potential in this image of female power is developed by advocates of more innovative models of female education, but even in the most progressive texts, such models are in constant negotiation with the dominant ideology of feminine propriety and with other, in some cases contradictory, political allegiances.
