Responding to Rousseau's Take on the Education Girls

               

Image Credit 

In philosopher and professor Shannon Dea's book Beyond the Binary Thinking About Sex and Gender, there is a chapter called "Difference and Equality" that explores the views of enlightenment thinker Jean-Jaques Rousseau surrounding the education of girls. Dea explains in this chapter that Rousseau argues "in every thing which does not regard the sex, woman is the same as man," but in things relating to sex, women are radically different from men" (Dea 150). Essentially, he espouses a worldview in which anything that is similar between men and women is a trait of all of humanity, but any difference between men and women that we perceive must originate from biological, sex related differences, rather than social or societally imposed differences.

Rousseau then goes on to make the particularly biodeterministic argument that "in the virtue of the reproductive role, women feel the consequences of their sex most of the time while men only feel their maleness from time to time" (Dea 151). This line REALLY stuck out to me because I have mixed feeling about it. In some respects I do think that women tend to have to think about the role that both their sex and their gender play in influencing their lives, both in respect to the so called "reproductive role" and in general (as of course not all women are capable or interested in reproduction). This, in my opinion can be related to the concept of male privilege, which is the idea that certain advantages and systems in society are conferred onto men solely on the basis of their sex. Male privilege, much like white privilege, possesses the feature that often those that hold the privilege are unaware that they have it in the first place. This is because for the privileged, the systems that are in place were built for them, and therefore any flaws in that system can be difficult to notice. This, therefore can explain why Rousseau observes that men only "feel their maleness from time to time" (151). If maleness is the "default" that society's systems are built for, men don't need to think very often about sex or their gender and how they influence their interactions with the world. I diverge from Rousseau in that Rousseau believes that these "reproductive roles" are innate, natural roles that are intrinsic to women, rather than "socialized differences" (150). I tend to be more sympathetic to the idea that these differences, or at very least the fact that women often have to think more about the consequences of their sex and gender as they navigate society than men do, are societally conditioned and not innate to humans as a biological species. For instance, Rousseau cites the issue of fidelity and faithfulness to one's husband as roles and duties that women ought to be taught to uphold for the sake of "the continued survival of the family, and indeed of the species" (151). He argues that this is the natural role of women because it is conducive with their biological nature. But, I find it ironic that the entire concept of marriage, and to some extent the familial unit as Rousseau understood it, is something that we, as humans, have socially constructed and created ourselves! So, essentially, if I am interpreting Rousseau correctly, he is advocating for imposing what I consider to be socially imposed roles onto women, citing inherent biological nature as justification for these roles, and in the process of doing so managing to uphold institutions that are socially constructed themselves, all for the sake of being true to our "biology"! This argument can be carried over to Rousseau's argument that "women lack the ability to support themselves and must therefore attach themselves to men who will provide for them" (152). This argument assumes that there is a fundamental biological difference that makes women unable to provide for themselves. But, in reality, countless women have in fact provide for themselves successfully without a man, regardless of their "biology". I would instead argue that in Rousseau's time, and to a lesser extent but still in some ways today, so many of the societally imposed systems that were/are in place made/make it more difficult for women to support themselves, rather than any innate biological difference. 

I would also argue that Rousseau's argument is inherently self defeating. He advocates for teaching young girls to behave in certain ways (namely to be "virtuous," "faithful to their husbands," "pleasing to men," "cultivating their beauty," "listening to men talk and laughing at their jokes," "creating a loving home," "subject to restraint," etc) (152). But, the very fact that Rousseau advocates for teaching these so called virtues to young girls implies that there is nothing remotely innate or biological about any of these traits. They are traits that must be conditioned, and even if Rousseau might argue that the conditioning of these traits might indirectly correspond to some aspect of female biology, he would need to provide much more evidence of precisely which traits, how, and why. Therefore, to answer the question of whether or not, in Rousseau’s time, it was genuinely in the interest of girls to be educated in the way he proposes, as well as today, I would argue no. Instead, I would argue that it would be much more in the interest of girls to deconstruct the systems in society that made/make it difficult for women to have these so called "virtues," such as self-sufficiency and ability to provide for oneself, that Rousseau claims are inherent to men.