Once, during my undergraduate years at Columbia University, the intellectual historian Mark Lilla asked a room full of 20-year-olds a simple question: “Who wants to be a mother?” Eyes furtively scanned the room, and not a single hand was raised, save for mine. After our seminar, my peers offered a host of justifications for their distinct lack of broodiness, from the futility of motherhood to ecological responsibility, while a handful of them sheepishly admitted that they had been hesitant to express a scintilla of desire to raise children out of fear that they would not be taken seriously in an elite institution.
Five years later, I found myself rubbing elbows with traditionalists. There, the situation was reversed. To fit in, I trumpeted my disrelish for any career pursuits. I was reluctant to exude even the slightest germ of ambition. “I only went to an Ivy because I have a burning quest for knowledge. But really, I just want to be a writer secluded in the countryside and take care of an army of children.” I thought this response was catnip to my peers. Yet, much to my dismay, even valuing an elite education or pursuing a flexible career was insufficient. A woman’s education could only be for emergency reasons or aimed at fulfilling her devoir d’état.
Of course, not all Ivy League women are power-hungry, selfish, career-obsessed workaholics who jettison the desire to create a family altogether. Similarly, a life steeped in the professional or academic world is not anathema to all conservative, religious women. Nevertheless, as women today wrestle with the complications of familial and professional responsibilities, it seems that the bifurcation between reactionary tradwifery and modern careerism is starker than ever. It is high time that we reconsider two Enlightenment thinkers, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Mary Wollstonecraft, whose works especially merit close attention in the debauched post-’68 world.
Rousseau’s natural and moral Sophie
In Émile, a 1762 treatise on the subject of education, Rousseau holds that the social function of women is indispensable to the maintenance of order. Men manage and shape culture, while women are tasked with perpetuating it in accord with their biological design. This covers a great deal, from their in-built capacity to bear children to their natural drive to protect them once they are born and exposed to the elements. He argues that society will degenerate if the sexes become alienated from their respective roles, for they are too intrinsic to our nature to be cast aside without damning results.
The final chapter of Émile particularly casts a spotlight on Sophie, the female counterpart and wife of the title character and, more importantly, Rousseau’s ideal of the perfect woman. Sophie’s education, which serves as an archetype for all women, must suit the constitution of her sex to fill her place in the physical and moral order. Rousseau argues that men and women have the same organs, desires, and faculties, but they differ in “characteristics of sex,” which naturally results in different moral duties.
Rousseau underlines the intrinsic connection between the life of the home and the maintenance of society, making Sophie’s education particularly pivotal to preserving civilization. “Everything follows successively from this first depravity,” Rousseau claims, referring to women despising their primary duty. This also alludes to decadent tendencies to present motherhood as burdensome and home life as less lively, such that mothers no longer find meaning in fully caring for their own offspring and each individual is conditioned to think only for himself or herself. It seems all too familiar. In our very own liberal democracies, we have witnessed firsthand the dire consequences of an increasingly egocentric and spiritually destitute West. Many women are no longer encouraged to value the family unit, and even consider traits such as tenderness undesirable or too ‘feminine,’ which are just a few symptoms of the moral disintegration of a once enlightened world—just as Rousseau presaged.
Rousseau further links this denaturing to causes of depopulation, arguing that if women see motherhood as cumbersome, “the means to deliver themselves from it completely is soon found.” And if they no longer see the intrinsic value in rearing children, they may also not see any difference between, as Rousseau puts it, “a child nursed with her mother’s milk or that of another.” Ultimately, women will find themselves less attached. They may as well just become “mothers of alien children on whose behalf nature tells them nothing.” He further posits that this regrettable decline in broodiness inevitably leads to “a change of inhabitants that will not be great” and he goes so far as to augur the impending fate of the West on the grounds that an indifference to children will inevitably make a desert of the future.
Rousseau’s claim arguably carries political implications. To understand these further, we can draw parallels between Rousseau’s ideal mother and the nation state. Indeed, many modern-day populists and nativists constantly affirm that nations must prioritize their citizens before foreigners, just as mothers do with their own offspring. If we are no longer attached to our own in either the familial unit or on the national level, there will inevitably be salient changes both socially and demographically.
Therefore, nurturing mothers are important for their ripple effect: first, they produce and maintain stable societies; second, they help to preserve civilization in the long run. After all, how can any body politic, regardless of time and space, produce the good son, the good husband, and the good father who—according to Rousseau—make up “the good citizen,” if not molded by good-natured women? He further states that if a father loves his children, he should also respect their mother.
A healthy domestic life, Rousseau claims, is the best insurance against bad morals. To that end, if we make family life more attractive again and encourage mothers to take up their natural duty, we will see changes in principles and values. It then follows that the state will be able to sustain itself over generations and will no longer rely on a “change of inhabitants” of biblical proportions. Since Rousseau’s other texts, such as the Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, underscore the moral degeneracy and the amour propre that society brings, domestic life seems to be an antidote. Sophie’s education becomes especially crucial to the political stability Rousseau desires, and—I would argue—for the post-1968 world, one in which we see the now licentious West struggling to find its soul.
What then is Sophie, or any woman, good for? Rousseau’s answer is predicated on the fact that women reproduce. But should they only be relegated as precisian homemakers who are subservient to their husbands? A poor reading of Émile would arraign Rousseau for classifying women as intrinsically passive. Although he does describe women in this way, those who care little for such simplistic broadsides could defend his view as part of a larger project of preserving civilization—imperfect as it is—for both men and women. After all, if women were to embrace a life of maximal autonomy and self-determination—or, as they are today, heavily conditioned only to live in such an untrammeled fashion—costly conflicts would arise in the family unit and in society at large.
But it also bears pointing out that Rousseau’s Les Solitaires questions the very legitimacy of his philosophy of the sexes. Rousseau’s prime models, Émile and Sophie, adhere to his educational blueprint for men and women: Sophie is docile, coquettish, and compliant, while Émile is groomed into civil society. However, after immersing himself in the morally degenerate city, Émile learns that another man has sullied his bed and that Sophie is pregnant. Despite fulfilling all Rousseauian educational requirements, other factors beyond their control have led to the shattering of the image of Rousseau’s ideal woman, at the very least calling into question the practical feasibility of his treatise.
However, even though Sophie’s infidelity exposes a germ of ineffectiveness in Rousseau’s domestic education, I would still make the case that Sophie was still successful insofar as Rousseau’s political vision of civilizational preservation was left intact. While order and harmony proved fragile in the face of change, they nonetheless brought children into the home, perpetuating mankind. Would this have taken place if Sophie evolved into the ‘strong,’ independent, and reasoning woman against which Rousseau warns? When it comes to alternatives, Mary Wollstonecraft’s position is a good point of comparison, birthing the panoply of ideals that her careerist disciples in the modern world espouse.
Wollstonecraft’s Woman Made in the Image of God
Like Rousseau, Wollstonecraft argues that in the absence of educated women, society will fall into ruin, especially because mothers are the primary educators of children. Both Rousseau and Wollstonecraft are interested in moral growth and share the same desire for the betterment of society, but this is where their similarities end. Wollstonecraft proposes an education system that affords the same opportunities to both sexes, so that they can exercise their reason. She suggests that the moral cultivation to which Rousseau aspires can only occur when women, as well as men, are first and foremost reasonable.
Wollstonecraft impugns the system that had been in place since antiquity—a natural system where, according to Rousseau, in the interests of social stability, “the man should be strong and active and the woman should be weak and passive.” Rousseau sees the physical and mental subservience of women as necessary for natural order and good morals, while Wollstonecraft upbraids this as the very outlook that spells social dissolution. She asserts that, through Rousseau’s model, women are made artificial and weak, such that they inevitably become crippled and useless.
It is on this basis that Wollstonecraft argues for the importance of reason for both men and women. More importantly, unlike the modern and perhaps even the non-theistic connotations of ‘reason,’ Wollstonecraft specifically underlines that women are rational creatures made in God’s image. Reason is neither promoted as a means to subjugate men nor to advance one’s socio-economic status. Wollstonecraft instead argues that, along with their male counterparts, women have souls and that it is through reason that they can live more virtuously. There are, therefore, moral and spiritual implications here, which are seemingly bereft in the post-’68 world.
It is equally important to note that Wollstonecraft does not wish to dissolve the family unit. In fact, reason is imperative to augment a woman’s marital and maternal responsibilities. She stresses the necessity for women to pursue reason as a means to higher ends, notably virtue and wisdom, that should manifest themselves in all aspects of daily life. Perhaps Wollstonecraft’s alternative would have obviated Sophie’s infidelity: had Sophie been groomed as Wollstonecraft’s reasonable—and therefore virtuous and wise—woman, able to temper her hotter passions with the cooling balm of reason, she would not have been such a slave to her desires and fallen prey to the temptations of infidelity.
Indeed, the problem of Rousseau is that he propounds a female education that focuses on pleasing men, which makes it incomplete. As Wollestonecraft writes, “the chaste wife and serious mother should only consider her power to please as the polish of her virtues.” The shortcoming of the contest between reactionary tradwifery and modern careerism that plagues so much of modern discourse is that it fails to take into account the ways in which two different types of educational models can seamlessly work in tandem. While Rousseau and Wollstonecraft agree that women are physically weaker than men, Rousseau proposes social conditions to make them even weaker, albeit not physically so. Wollstonecraft’s text, on the other hand, is rife with criticism of what she considers to be female enslavement. She holds that the subordinate place accorded to women in the family unit and society at large reduces the prospects for women to develop their faculty of reason, and therefore, cultivate a healthy and virtuous soul. She impugns the traditional norms of female ‘education’ for obsessing over false refinement and neglecting any “endeavor to acquire masculine qualities”—by which she means the virtues proper to a rational being.
Reason, after all, is required to control untutored emotions. It is a necessary means for both men and women to become the well-rounded, noble, and high-principled individuals they should strive to be. As Wollstonecraft puts it, “Let the dignified pursuit of virtue and knowledge raise the mind above those emotions which rather embitter than sweeten the cup of life, when they are not restrained within due bounds.” What Rousseau lionizes as the “natural” qualities of women—passivity and docility—Wollstonecraft condemns as monumentally subpar. Nonetheless, both Rousseau and Wollstonecraft agree that female tenderness, ordered towards maintaining the union of the whole family, is of cardinal importance. The difference is that, for Wollstonecraft, women should be honored as rational beings, too. As such, they must be encouraged not only to perform the nurturing functions proper to their nature, but also educated to inculcate the right principles in their offspring and to moderate their own passions. They should raise sons and daughters who do not and never will “forget their mother’s example.”
So while Rousseau is right to extol qualities traditionally believed to be possessed by women, brushing aside reason, wisdom, and virtue altogether can lead to the irrational decisions to which the modern Sophie falls prey. In the case of Wollstonecraft (and her contemporary feminist disciples), there is a failure to recognize that some women—despite being afforded a host of opportunities in modern liberal democracies—do find unadulterated contentment in domestication. If Wollstonecraft wishes to present women with equal chances, it must come with unfettered agency. Nonetheless, Wollstonecraft is by and large right in advocating reason for both men and women.
A New Antidote to Modern Womanhood
The past fifty years have seen declining birth rates throughout the West, and today many young women malign motherhood altogether. In France, President Emmanuel Macron recently drew the ire of many feminists when he called for a “demographic rearmament” to fight infertility. Similarly, Pope Francis expressed his concerns about Europe’s “demographic winter.” However anecdotal, it was equally striking for me to come across numerous women who judge that motherhood and professional life are mutually exclusive— a point of view that I encountered both at an Ivy League school and in some traditionalist Catholic circles. The marriage of Rousseau and Wollstonecraft can perhaps be something of an antidote.
At least for the next few decades, Rousseau is a prophet with whom the modern-day woman needs to engage, order and civilisation being substantially more at stake now than they were in 1762. They must understand that Rousseau is neither dismissing women as unthinking creatures nor mandating women to be unreasonable. Instead, the question of Sophie’s role is a contest between reasoned expedience and rational utility. If our ultimate goal is to maintain a social organization in keeping with nature, then aspects of human nature do have to be sexually divided. Women are the only ones who can produce children, and it is in fulfilling their maternal role that civilization gets preserved in the long run. Regardless of their respective capacities, fulfilling even a morsel of this domestic duty goes a long way. It is high time that we restore this biological exception to the honored pedestal once reserved for it.
The modern-day Sophie is educated insofar as her private domestic sphere converges with Émile’s political education and prevents prospective social disruption. Rousseau is right to fear the complete breakdown of rigid sexual differences as its moral destruction will engender even greater social instability, as we have witnessed in the Western world since the long ’60s. If women apply even a modicum of Sophie’s education, a basis for civic life and natural preservation remains intact. However, they must equally heed Wollstonecraft’s advice on moderating strong emotions, as these can spell the destruction of the nuclear unit. The question then becomes how the modern-day Sophie can infuse Wollstonecraftian elements of reason, not only within the rectilinear walls of her office floor, but also into her domestic life to obviate infidelity and preserve marriage, family, and the civilisation they serve. The competitive and atomistic spirit that suffuses our liberal societies today puts immense pressure on women and men alike, primarily as individuals. We tend to forget that we can only have efficacious motherhood when both parents harmoniously work in tandem.
While I have mostly cast light on the binary that plagues women in the present social climate, it is worth mentioning that men have also become susceptible to categorizing women into either ‘wife material’ or potential one-night stand ‘conquests.’ Many have been influenced by lecherous, misogynistic firebrands such as Andrew Tate, who sit cheek by jowl with other red-pillers and appeal to disenchanted men who ultimately develop a ‘Madonna-Whore’ complex, whereby women are simplistically classified as either upright, unadulterated, and nurturing or wanton, manipulative, and depraved. Women, in turn, also compartmentalize themselves, either as the post-modern careerist who engages in lewd behavior and immediate self-gratification to signal her perceived emancipation, or the prig tradwife with bluenose standards who preaches that women should not participate in the labor market and simply slot into the role of docile homemaker.
Not one gender is to blame for this trap; it has become a never-ending vicious cycle, resulting in both men and women blaming the other camp and even distancing themselves from one another. Women then systematically attribute themselves to either category and further parade their self-appointed identities through social media. In this day and age, we are even afforded more choice and unbridled agency than our ancestors were in the 18th century, yet an urgent question looms: how have we become subject to such reductive, binary thinking? Now more than ever, it is vital to interweave the diagnoses and correctives of key Enlightenment thinkers, rather than cheapen the very definitions of marriage, motherhood, and civilization.
The beauty in Rousseau’s and Wollstonecraft’s treatises is that they highlight the role of both parties in forming the moral character of the next generation. However trite, there is a kernel of truth in the adage that it takes a village to raise a child. At the apex of the digital age, it should even be less cumbersome to square the tension of integrating the professional and domestic spheres. We should, therefore, seek resources for this endeavor, both material and human, rather than put the immense weight and blame on our already fragile selves.
Finally, if there is a nugget of truth that modern liberal democracies can heed from Rousseau it is that the child who is raised well is one who “best knows how to bear the goods and the ills of his life.” His ideal man and woman are not unduly affected by the pressures of their social milieu, but constantly learn from their respective experiences. This naturally necessitates learning through trial and error. As Rousseau puts it, “If he makes a mistake, let him do so; do not correct his errors … If he never made mistakes, he would not learn so well.” Six female panelists recently recounted their respective trials and tribulations in aptly assimilating work and family life. From not having their own script to dropping out of doctorate programmes, from failed marriages to roads not taken, they allowed themselves to author their experiences through difficult choices and even unforeseen circumstances. And yet, they ultimately did not fall victim to pigeonholing themselves as ‘tradwives’ or ‘feminists’ or to offering their mea culpa for not being one type of woman or another.
Like Rousseau’s Émile and Sophie, let us allow men and women also to be like children: let us gracefully allow ourselves to fall a hundred times a day, so that we will learn how to get up sooner.
