The Essential Writings of Rousseau by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Author:Jean-Jacques Rousseau [Rousseau, Jean-Jacques]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-679-64539-9
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2013-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

FROM BOOK V

[…]

Always justify the tasks you set for young girls, but keep giving them tasks. Idleness and disobedience are the two most dangerous faults for them, and the hardest to cure once contracted. Girls should be attentive and diligent. But that is not all; they ought to be kept in check from an early age. This misfortune, if they consider it one, is inherent in their sex, and they will never escape it except to suffer even more cruelly. Their whole life they will have to submit to the strictest and most enduring restraints, those of decorum. They must be trained early in this, so they can master their whims with ease, submitting themselves to the will of others. If they are eager to work, one must sometimes force them to do nothing. Extravagance, frivolity, and caprice are faults that are quick to develop from a first taste of corruption. To avert these faults, above all teach them restraint. In our senseless mores, the life of a decent woman is a constant struggle against herself. But it is only fair that womankind should bear the share of the evils they have caused mankind.

Prevent girls from becoming bored with their tasks and keen on their amusements, which always happens in vulgar methods of education where, as Fénelon says, all the boredom is on one side and all pleasure on the other.172 Boredom with their tasks can be avoided if the rules laid down are followed, unless the girl dislikes those whose care she is under. A little girl who loves her mother or governess will work all day at her side without being bored. The chatter alone will make up for the constraint. But if she finds the person who is overseeing her unbearable, she will perceive everything she does under that person’s charge as distasteful. It is unlikely that girls will turn out well if they do not enjoy their mother’s company more than anyone else’s; but to judge their real feelings you must observe them and not simply trust what they say, for they are flatterers and learn at an early age to dissimulate. They should not be told to love their mothers, either, as affection cannot be the result of duty; here constraint is out of place. Attachment, care, and habit alone can make a daughter love her mother, if the mother does not do anything to incur her hatred. Even the constraint under which the mother keeps her child, if it is judicious, will increase rather than diminish a daughter’s affection: as dependence is a natural state for women, girls feel themselves made for obedience.

For the same reason that girls have or ought to have little freedom, they will carry to excess the freedom they are allowed. Extreme in everything, they abandon themselves to their games with even more enthusiasm than boys do. This is one of the difficulties that I have just mentioned. Such enthusiasm must be kept in check, for it is the cause

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