Mary Wollstonecraft on education

Abstract

A keen and vital concern with education, especially the education of girls and women, runs throughout Mary Wollstonecraft's writing and remains a dominant theme to the abrupt end of her career. The title of her first book, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters , speaks for itself; her single most important work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman , begins as a plea for the equal education of women and includes an ambitious and farsighted proposal for a national schools system. Both of her novels, Mary and the unfinished Maria , centrally address the self-education of their heroines while seeking to fill a pedagogical role in relation to their female readers. More directly, Wollstonecraft produced a book for children ( Original Stories ) in the innovative, progressive mode of the day, edited an innovative reader specifically designed for the use of girls, and frequently commented on children's books and educational treatises for the Analytical Review . Among the projects left unfinished at her death were a treatise on the “Management of Infants,” barely begun, and a primer, provisionally entitled “Lessons,” that, if completed, might have changed the early history of the British children's book. Education was critically important to Wollstonecraft both as a liberal reformer and as a radical theorist and proponent of women’s rights. A broad spectrum of reformist writers and activists – from conservatives wishing to shore up the status quo to “Jacobins” wishing to overturn it – saw education as a, if not the, key locus for promoting social stability or engineering social revolution.