Introduction: The Female Wunderkind in the Eighteenth Century

In the eighteenth century, issues of gender aroused great interest, particularly in the field of education. Leading pedagogues of the era came to believe that girls and young women could perform wonders of learning, if only they were trained in the right way. A Wunderkind was being redefined as someone who exhibited a prodigious natural talent that had been decisively enhanced by a refined Enlightenment education. This cluster examines both the educational methods used to teach female wunderkinder and their fate as adults in the eighteenth century, given the obvious gaps between their great prospects for learning and the constraints of their gender. Many girls displayed extraordinary talents that their fathers presented to large audiences, but their own high hopes often ended in frustration and disappointment when they had to marry and live in provincial seclusion.

The eighteenth century, a progressive age that was obsessed with the prospects of learning and, accordingly, also filled with high hopes for newly devised educational methods, was very aptly styled by contemporaries as "our pedagogical century."¹ The questions of gender and the equality of women also gained new prominence in the discussion of enlightened educational principles, which is why, around 1800, prestigious schools for girls were established in many cities in both Europe and North America.² The foundational principles of an enlightened pedagogy were laid out at the threshold of the new epoch by John Locke in his 1693 Some Thoughts Concerning Education.³ This influential treatise was primarily designed for the instruction of the sons of the gentry, but, as Locke pointed out, many of its educational precepts were obviously applicable to gentlemen's daughters as well.⁴ Locke bragged that both boys and girls would learn "three times as much" when taught in the playful and stimulating fashion he proposed: all children could be very easily "cozen'd into … Knowledge" without perceiving it "to be any thing but a Sport."⁵ At times it seemed as if all talented children could perform wonders of learning, if only they were raised with the right kind of educational guidance.

The new educational methods propagated by Locke aroused great expectations. Child prodigies became the craze of the day. Throughout the eighteenth century, cases of wonderfully gifted children were reported and celebrated across Europe, prompting Jean-Jacques Rousseau to discuss the phenomenon of "ces petits prodiges" extensively in his famous educational treatise of 1762, Émile.⁶ It was in this context that, in eighteenth-century Germany, the word wunderkind [wonder child] was first introduced and used to refer to child prodigies.⁷ The term alluded, of course, to the premodern conception of a divinely blessed child working wonders in the Biblical sense, but it now meant something entirely new and different: a wunderkind was someone who exhibited a prodigious natural talent that had been decisively enhanced by a refined Enlightenment education. Even the most famous wunderkind of the age, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, performed musical miracles because his father, Leopold, had trained him during his early childhood according to the standards of Enlightenment pedagogy set by Locke and his German epigone, Johann Bernhard Basedow.⁸

Like a growing number of other eighteenth-century men who followed in the pedagogical footsteps of Locke, Basedow and Leopold Mozart were entirely convinced that not only could a highly talented boy turn out to be a prodigy, but a girl could be trained in the same way. And indeed Maria Anna Mozart was almost as accomplished a pianist as her younger brother, with whom she toured Europe while they were both still children. Emilie Basedow, the pedagogue's only daughter, was also presented by her father to large audiences as a "wonder" of learning, since she spoke several languages (including Latin) when she was only seven years old. In the wake of their astonishing successes, other female prodigies, both in Germany—like Dorothea Schlözer, the daughter of the Göttingen professor and historian August Ludwig Schlözer—and elsewhere in Europe, were promoted as wonders of their time.⁹ Yet, far too often, female prodigies' own high hopes ended in disappointment when they had to marry and conform to the demands of traditional gender stereotypes. Was their fate a sign of the remarkable ambivalence of the age of Enlightenment, a century that promoted the need for female learning and emancipation, even as it perpetuated gender gaps that could not be fully overcome?

This cluster features three brief essays examining the lives of several examples of the female wunderkind in eighteenth-century Spain, Italy, and Austria. Collectively, they ask—with Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, and Michel Foucault—how and why the very idea of a female prodigy could also be regarded as a deviation from Nature. In so doing, we hope to open up a larger discussion, charting out new and interesting directions for research on gender, sexuality, feminism, and education in the long eighteenth century.