The Role of Women’s Education in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile

This paper examines Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s novel Emile (1763), which provided an ideal system of women’s education in France and Europe. Shortly after its publication, Emile was banned partly because of its political and religious contents and partly due to its controversial ideas on women and their status in male-dominated societies. This paper questions Rousseau’s philosophy of the perfect educational system intended to form a blueprint for envisioning a better future for both men and women. I contend that ‘the ideal’ women’s education, as the book describes it, fails to place the female anywhere other than being a wife or a mother, creating a gender-biased ideal society where intellectual endeavors, particularly for women, are considered trivial or even inappropriate. As the research proceeds, it shows how the female protagonist’s right to education underlines another agenda to fulfill her duties toward the male character, regarding women’s intellectual aspirations as inconsistent with conventional social norms.