Cultivating Virtue

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.