Rousseau's Daughters: Domesticity, Education, and Autonomy in Modern France (review)

In this provocative study, Popiel focuses upon the connection between Jean-Jacques Rousseau, educational reform, and domesticity in France between 1762 and 1833. For the past two decades, Rousseau scholarship has been seriously revised, thanks to the work of such prominent feminist scholars as Landes and Pateman.¹ Critics have argued that Rousseau's misogynistic ideas helped to create a repressive "sexual contract" and the gendered division between public and private life. By contrast, Popiel reads Rousseau through the eyes of his immediate contemporaries to understand why men and, more intriguingly, women themselves found Rousseau so compelling, his misogyny notwithstanding. To understand this dynamic, she focuses upon Rousseau's influential educational treatise Émile (1762), tracing how it informed educational practice until the Guizot laws of 1833 (which ordered that every commune establish a public primary school). Popiel draws upon an array of printed sources, ranging from domestic treatises to ABC primers, and uses objects from material culture, including clothing and toys, in innovative ways.

According to Popiel, Rousseau's Émile revolutionized ideas about nurturing childhood, self-control, and gender differentiation, forcing readers to consider the family as a special place for social change. Going beyond John Locke, Rousseau insisted that children were inherently good and rational, once parents had removed them from society and entrusted them to a loving mother. Rousseau identified a kind of universal, prerational stage in children, in which proper education could mold moral sensibility and harness a child's primal virtue. Children should develop freely and experience life in independent (if not democratic) terms. However, this liberated childhood required new clothes, new toys, new books—and new mothers. Mothers had to assume a new social role, as they were key for transforming society. They had to make sure that their children became moral and socially useful grown-ups. By dedicating themselves to their children, women could find domesticity to be empowering, because it gave them a meaningful social role and instilled in them a strong sense of purpose and values. This identification cannot be dismissed simply as a false consciousness through which women rationalized away patriarchal submission. Rather, women saw themselves as having been entrusted with society's most precious resource, children.

In this discourse, contemporaries clearly distinguished between private education and public instruction. For them, the private education that preceded formal schooling was concerned with forming a moral being, rather than imparting social graces or specialized knowledge (Rousseau famously doubted the value of both). Young persons had to learn to balance self-control and liberal freedom so that they could become free and independent in public life. Reformers believed that women could use maternal love to teach young people that personal qualities, not hierarchy or birth, determined individual worth.

Significantly, Popiel traces Rousseauvian ideas about domestic education into the French Revolution, Restoration, and July Monarchy. In drafting instructional reforms, lawmakers and pedagogues assumed that mothers had already provided their children a solid moral foundation. These beliefs appeared in the renowned proposals from Talleyrand and Condorcet, the laws associated with Joseph Lakanal and Pierre Daunou as adopted after the Reign of Terror, and subsequent Restoration efforts to reform public and religious instruction. Political sympathies notwithstanding, post-Revolutionary reformers emphasized moral autonomy and believed that early domestic education could best attain this goal.

Popiel has written an impressive, important book. She offers a fascinating and provocative analysis of Rousseau's influence on educational thought and practice and on women's understanding of these new domestic roles. She further demonstrates that scholars must consider the role of child rearing and domestic education in the broader history of education. This book is essential for scholars working on the history of Enlightenment education, gender studies, and modern French culture.