SOURCE: “Catharine Macaulay's Letters on Education: Odd but Equal,” in Hypatia, Vol. 13, No. 1, Winter, 1998, pp. 118-37.

In the following essay, Gardener argues that Macaulay's Letters on Education should not be dismissed as a loose collection of the author's views on a wide range of subjects, but instead should be seen as a single, sustained argument for the perfection of society through, among other things, the equal education of women, an idea which greatly influenced the British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft.

Catharine Macaulay's work Letters on Education published just five years before A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, is an acknowledged influence on Mary Wollstonecraft; indeed Wollstonecraft herself states that when she first thought of writing the Vindication, she “anticipated Mrs. Macaulay's approbation” (Wollstonecraft 1982, 207).¹ It seems to be generally accepted by commentators on Wollstonecraft that Macaulay's ideas on equal education and her critique of Rousseau's theory of sex-complementarity are...