If the study is done well, it is that which is done impartially. The topic of this article, the perfect woman, written by a man, can give a ready answer to those who have prejudices; without the due analysis required by it. Reading both authors now, it is easy to bash Rousseau with sexism and brand Wollstonecraft with feminism. But this was not my task, in fact I examined them both with an impartial eye, to the best of my ability. I therefore hope that the same is reciprocated by my reader, and receives my interpretations and criticisms with the same impartial mind. To begin, therefore, my argument, I assert that, although Rousseau and Wollstonecraft have disparate opinions on the best education for women, the alleged disagreement over their model of the perfect woman is specious; their concept of the human species and its purpose are truly in conflict. It is imperative to outline this mode of education considered by everyone to be the best for raising a woman. Since Wollstonecraft criticizes much of Rousseau's work, I will begin with his model. “Everything is good just as it comes from the hands of the author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man", is the first line of book I of Rousseau's Emile or On Education (161). Emile is not a book for a social system of education, but specifically for the "tender and far-sighted mother, who [is] capable of keeping the nascent shrub out of the way and preserving it from the impact of human opinions" (162). . The mother is therefore advised to "observe nature and follow the path that it traces for her" in the education of her children, the same nature that Rousseau adopted to educate the imaginary Emile and Sophie: man and woman; the future husband and wife. So, in raising the perfect woman, the future... in the center of the card... or a role as a mother and wife in both), but in their description of humanity. The charge of sexism on Rousseau and the badge of feminism on Wollstonecraft make their arguments slippery, as if Rousseau wrote because she was sexist and Wollstonecraft because she was a feminist, which is certainly not true. The work presented here by the authors has questioned the status of man and woman in relation to their conception of what he should be, what his purpose is and what his true species is. With the answer to these questions one concludes the inhumanity of humanity in society, the other the inhumanity of humanity in its natural and barbaric state. The one goes from society, to the comforts and direction of nature; the other away from nature, towards the reason and virtue of society. The argument presented may still be elusive and the work in vain, but perhaps the point has not been missed.
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