Rousseau Motherhood

Mothers need education like babies need milk

Men incorrectly view women as naturally weak and therefore only capable of serving the male citizens, “being the greatest charm of society”, and not needing any masculine qualities like education or physical strength (Rousseau, 262). Women are ill taught by men to believe these social stigmas assigned to them, which are obedience, chastity to the family, and subservience to men, their family, and society. This view of motherhood is thought to benefit the men, where as women will be their pleasing servants as wives, their children’s tutor after motherhood, and their chaste civil companion. But to this view, which Rousseau wrote a chauvinistic book about, Wollstonecraft wrote an objective book against.
An uneducated girl who is not properly education is “polluted for ever” and violates “the duty of respecting herself” (165). If a women can not respect herself, she will not function to the best of her abilities and therefore she will not respect society and customs like the sanctity of marriage, therefore men have more to fear in the chastity of a uneducated women than in an equally educated counterpart.
Wollstonecraft tells society that should they educate women they would be educating women into become better mothers, citizens, and wives. Wollstonecraft asked that the “enlightened nation try to bring [women}] back to nature, and their duty; and allow them to share the advantaged of education and government with man, see whether they will become better, as they grow wiser and become free” (208-209). She argues that women cannot be further injured in this test because man does not have the power to “render [women] more insignificant than they are at present”, since women have already been so debased and degraded