ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the expectations of philosophical content produced by the epistolary form of Catharine Macaulay’s work Letters on Education. In “Catharine Macaulay’s Letters on Education: An Early Feminist Polemic,” Florence Boos offers a detailed account of the aspects of Macaulay’s Letters that reappear in Wollstonecraft, and are thus presumably the results of Macaulay’s influence. Macaulay states in the preface to Letters on Education that an understanding of the mind is necessary for the moral improvement of human beings, for without such an understanding we shall not be able to formulate a principled, uniform system of education that can produce moral excellence. If crime and vice are effects of environment and education, Macaulay argues, then careful and correct education and parenting are vital. Macaulay is concerned equally with the management of infants and the education of princes. Macaulay is in fact offering a sustained and consistent argument for the equality of women, albeit of a rather idiosyncratic kind.
