page_title: Thoughts on the Education of Daughters
section_title: Pedagogical theory
hierarchical_section_title: Thoughts on the Education of Daughters / Pedagogical theory
caption_attribution_description: Portrait of John Locke, by Sir Godfrey Kneller. Source of Entry: Collection of Sir Robert Walpole, Houghton Hall, 1779.
context_page_description: Thoughts on the education of daughters: with reflections on female conduct, in the more important duties of life is the first published work of the British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. Published in 1787 by her friend Joseph Johnson, Thoughts is a conduct book that offers advice on female education to the emerging British middle class. Although dominated by considerations of morality and etiquette, the text also contains basic child-rearing instructions, such as how to care for an infant.
  An early version of the modern self-help book, the 18th-century British conduct book drew on many literary traditions, such as advice manuals and religious narratives. There was an explosion in the number of conduct books published during the second half of the 18th century, and Wollstonecraft took advantage of this burgeoning market when she published Thoughts. However, the book was only moderately successful: it was favourably reviewed, but only by one journal and it was reprinted only once. Although it was excerpted in popular contemporary magazines, it was not republished until the rise of feminist literary criticism in the 1970s.
context_section_description: By the end of her life, Wollstonecraft had been involved in almost every arena of education: she had been a governess, a teacher, a children's writer, and a pedagogical theorist. Most of her works deal with education in some way. For example, her two novels are bildungsromane (novels of education); she translated educational works such as Christian Gotthilf Salzmann's Elements of Morality; she wrote a children's book, Original Stories from Real Life (1788); and her Vindication of the Rights of Woman is largely an argument for the value of female education. As is evidenced by this broad range of genres, "education" for Wollstonecraft and her contemporaries included much more than scholastic training; it encompassed everything that went into forming a person's character, from infant swaddling to childhood curricular choices to adolescent leisure activities.
  Wollstonecraft and other political radicals during the last quarter of the 18th century focused their reform efforts on education because they believed that if people were educated correctly, Britain would experience a moral and political revolution. Religious Dissenters, especially, embraced this view; Wollstonecraft's philosophy in Thoughts and elsewhere closely resembles that of the Dissenters she met while teaching in Newington Green, such as the theologian, educator, and scientist Joseph Priestley and the minister Richard Price. Dissenters "were most concerned with molding children into people of good moral character and habits". However, political conservatives, who also believed that childhood was the crucial time for the formation of a person's character, used their own educational works to deflect rebellion by promoting theories of compliance. Liberals and conservatives alike subscribed to Lockean and Hartleian associationist psychology: that is, they believed that a person's sense of self was built up through a set of associations made between things in the external world and ideas in the mind. Both Locke and Hartley had argued that the associations formed in childhood were nearly irreversible and must thus be formed with care. Locke famously advised parents to keep their children away from servants, as they would only tell children frightening stories that would foster a fear of the dark.
  Wollstonecraft was significantly influenced by Locke's Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) (her title alludes to it) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile (1762), the two most important pedagogical treatises of the 18th century. Thoughts follows in the Lockean tradition with its emphasis on a parent-directed domestic education, a distrust of servants, a banning of superstitious and irrational stories (e.g. fairy tales), and an advocacy of clear rules. Wollstonecraft breaks from Locke, however, in her emphasis on piety and her insistence that the child has "innate" feelings that guide her towards virtue, ideas likely drawn from Rousseau.
caption: John Locke, author of Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), painted by Godfrey Kneller in 1697
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