Rousseau and Feminist Revision

Jean-Jacques Rousseau did not favor equal rights for women. He expressed his views openly in a number of texts, but most fully in Emile: “Always justify the burdens you impose upon girls but impose them anyway. . . . They must be thwarted from an early age. . . . They must be exercised to constraint, so that it costs them nothing to stifle all their fantasies to submit them to the will of others.”

That many women, from the eighteenth century to the present, have reacted indignantly to Rousseau’s injunctions to keep women “closed up in their houses,” where they “must receive the decisions of fathers and husbands like that of the church,” seems understandable enough. But as Mary Trouile, in Sexual Politics in the Enlightenment (1997), Lydia Lange in Feminist Interpretation of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (2002), Joan Landes in Women and the Public Sphere (1988), and others have shown, the admiration, even gratitude, many other women have expressed toward Rousseau is no less thought provoking, beginning with the publication of Emile. In her study entitled Rousseau’s Daughters, Jennifer Popiel reports how, after her initial dismay at Rousseau’s apparent antagonism toward women, she too experienced the appeal of his prose: “Rousseau’s writing drew me in with its simplicity and strength,” she said, and “eventually I found myself sympathizing with—and even befriending—him” (2). For Lesley Walker, while acknowledging that to some he is “the very embodiment of misogyny,” she has come to the realization that “reading with Rousseau encourages us to read and view more works by women” (94).

In these two carefully crafted studies, both Popiel and Walker undertake to reevaluate Rousseau’s oeuvre and its paradoxical influence up to the present day, emphasizing what they view as his positive contribution to women’s lives and to the larger society. Popiel discusses the current distrust of Rousseau among many feminist critics, based on his incendiary misogynistic statements, but calls attention to another aspect of his legacy: his emphasis on developing individualism to help revitalize family life. In her view, Rousseau’s promotion of domesticity functioned in such a way that while women were increasingly barred from participating in the public sphere, in the years following Rousseau’s writings, they were elevated to a new position of importance in the home. Popiel traces the predominant theories of education prior to Rousseau, which emphasized the importance of early intellectual development in accord with the theories of John Locke, and describes Rousseau’s innovative insistence on the centrality of physical freedom and self-control for the child. She discusses in detail swaddling, as it was practiced, apparently throughout European society, up until the later decades of the eighteenth century: “Until well after 1700, French parents routinely shipped their newborn boys and girls off to be nursed by complete strangers, who wrapped the babies in rags and hung them on hooks on the wall so that the nurses could go about their daily work without the burden of their charges.” By the nineteenth century a revolution in child rearing had taken place, according to Popiel, and “Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s work drove this shift in perception” (5).

Popiel describes how young people’s clothing evolved in tandem with child-rearing practices, freeing young bodies from the rigid garments of the past just as maternal breast-feeding liberated them from the hook upon which swaddled children were hung. The valorization of the mother within the domestic sphere brought salutary change to a hidebound society while at the same time the public arena was closing ever more dramatically to women. The rationale for both phenomena was eloquently set forth by Rousseau.

Popiel places great importance on the concept of “self-control,” which she finds to be central to Rousseau’s teachings for both genders. Yet he famously warned fathers and husbands in Emile that the female sex...