Cultivating Virtue

Catharine Macaulay and Mary Wollstonecraft on Civic Education

Bibliographic Data

ID11367641
AuthorsWendy Gunther-Canada (University of Alabama at Birmingham), Wendy Gunther‐canada (University of Alabama at Birmingham, corresponding author)
Year2003
Volume25
Issue3
Pages47-70
Publication date2003-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueWomen & Politics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0195-7732 • E-ISSN: 1540-9473
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1300/j014v25n03_03
OpenAlexW2318143547
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited10

This essay focuses on the influence of Catharine Macaulay's analysis of sexual difference in the Letters on Education(1790) on Mary Wollstonecraft's argument for the civic education of women in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman(1792). Macaulay attempts to cultivate the mind of her female reader, Hortensia, by devising a plan for domestic education based on a classical curriculum. Wollstonecraft modifies Macaulay's plan by advocating a national system of day schools in which children of both sexes and from all ranks of society would be taught lessons in civic virtue. A comparative examination of these texts reveals the impact that differences in the gender analyses of eighteenth-century England's most significant women writers had upon the historical discourse on civic education and the struggle for women's rights

Argument (complex analysis · Civic virtue · Curriculum · Pedagogy · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Virtue · Gender Studies · Historical and Literary Studies · Law · Religion, Gender, and Enlightenment · Rousseau and Enlightenment Thought

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