Letters on Education, with Observations on Religious and Metaphysical Subjects

Introduction

Macaulay published the “Letters on Education, with Observations on Religious and Metaphysical Subjects” in London in 1790, a year before her death, as letters to a fictional correspondent, Hortensia. She proposed that girls and boys be educated together and taught the same subjects, since the differences of character between the sexes are produced by education and circumstance – one letter is headed “No characteristic difference in sex”. Against Rousseau’s “Emile”, which educates Sophie to please men, she held that virtue is the same for both sexes; education should make learning pleasant, avoid frightening children and foster independent reason. The later letters turn to religious and metaphysical questions and restate her rationalist ethics. Mary Wollstonecraft reviewed the book in the Analytical Review in November 1790 and took up its argument in “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman” (1792).

Connections

Criticizes

• Emile, or On Education1762 · Jean-Jacques Rousseau

More works by Catharine Macaulay

• 1763The History of England from the Accession of James I to that of the Brunswick Line
• 1790Observations on the Reflections of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, on the Revolution in France