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

In this book Jennifer Popiel challenges scholarship that maintains that the French Revolution excluded women from politics and public life by designating them to an exclusively domestic function. She does this on the basis of evidence from a variety of sources including philosophical treatises, popular advice manuals and fashion publications, children's literature, and political speeches and legislation from 1762 through 1834. Popiel maintains that from the late Enlightenment through the Restoration women acquired a new role as maternal educators of young children in the home that provided them with autonomy and public influence since it was valued as the foundational preparation of children for citizenship.

The starting point for this argument is Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Émile, Or On Education (1762), and one of the strengths of this book is Popiel's interpretation of Émile as crediting women with the civic virtue of self-control. Popiel confesses that originally she "despised" (1) Rousseau's work for generating a conservative view of women as naturally inferior to men and relegating them to the home. However, in Rousseau's Daughters she reads Émile as radical because it advocated social transformation through the home and family. While Émile constructed distinctive gender identities through the characters of Émile and Sophie, it suggested that both women and men would participate in social change through the cultivation of self-control. According to Popiel self-control was key to forming autonomous individuals able to transform society because it rendered them independent of society, capable of discerning truth from falsehood and self-sufficient materially and mentally. In this reading the character of Sophie was equal if not superior to that of Émile because she guided the family – her husband and children – through her understanding and model of self-control. Popiel contends that while Rousseau's immediate contemporaries recognized the social radicalism of his treatise on education, his more lasting contribution was in introducing new attitudes toward children and women.

Popiel argues persuasively that a new belief in the natural innocence of children and the importance of teaching them self-control manifested itself in freer, less confining clothing for children, along with greater gender distinctions. Several images in the book show swaddled infants and corseted children from around 1700, while illustrations from the early nineteenth century reveal active boys wearing pants and girls dressed in pantaloons or in clothes like their mothers'. Popiel asserts that for early-nineteenth-century literate French people, freeing the body was a prerequisite to freeing the mind of a child. Paradoxically, this freedom allowed children to learn self-control and prepared them for their equally civic but very distinctive roles in life – some form of public activity for men and motherhood for women.

Advice manuals for mothers proliferated after the French Revolution, counseling them to use their nurturing and loving qualities to teach small children self-control. Popiel maintains that this importance accorded to mothers as first educators of young children empowered women, granting them authority in the home and an important civic function. In this section Popiel occasionally strays beyond her stated purpose of writing "cultural and intellectual history" (3-4), and suggests that the prescriptive literature translated into social practice, as in the following statement: "Women controlled their families and commanded respect not only because of their authority over early education but equally because only they influenced the family's physical and emotional well-being and freely chose to embrace the duty of shaping society by exerting self-control" (105). Prescriptive literature that celebrates mothers does not necessarily empower women. More acknowledgment of the legal authority husbands and fathers could and did exercise, and the economic and educational disadvantages of women during this time would help.

An important chapter on children's literature from the late eighteenth century through the 1820s identifies three categories of works that progressively developed children's intellectual and moral capacities: alphabet primers, fables, and didactic stories. While the alphabet primers were intended to...