Free How to Create the Perfect Wife by Wendy Moore Page B

with sex the woman is man,” he declares. “She has the same organs, the same needs, the same faculties.” Indeed his own preference for intelligent and forthright women to whom he could kneel in happy subservience suggests he regarded women as superior beings. But in the fictional world that Émile and Sophie inhabit, women are created only to please men. No matter that they might be just as clever and capable as boys, girls must be shaped from infancy to fulfill their subservient role.
    So while Rousseau outlines the most radical and progressive education for young Émile, he proposes the most banal and regressive education for Sophie—even by the standards of his most reactionary critics. Instead of being encouraged to run free and indulge her curiosity like Émile, little Sophie plays passively indoors with her dolls, for, according to Rousseau, “the time will come when she will be her own doll.” Instead of learning through discovery, Sophie is taught to draw, sew, count and—at a later stage even than Émile—to read, since “almost all little girls learn to read and write with repugnance.”
    But the most important lesson that girls must learn as they grow up is to submit their will entirely to male figures of authority. Sophie must therefore get used to performing whatever pointless chore her tutor might suggest and then break off in the middle whenever he instructs her to do a different task. “From this habitual constraint comes the docility that women need all their lives,” Rousseau explains, since once Sophie is married “she ought to learn early to endure even injustice and to bear a husband’s wrongs without complaining.”
    Not surprisingly, Rousseau’s antiquated ideas about women met with fierce opposition from some of the leading women of his day. The poet and socialite Frances Greville praised Émile, a friend reported, “but she and several others don’t like what he says of women, nor his notions about them.” Mary Wollstonecraft would later condemn Rousseau’s ideas in her pioneering manifesto A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792. Girlswere conditioned to play with dolls—it was nurture not nature—Wollstonecraft would insist: “As for Rousseau’s remarks . . . that they have naturally, that is from birth, independent of education, a fondness for dolls, dressing, and talking—they are so puerile as not to merit a serious refutation. . . . Girls and boys, in short, would play harmlessly together, if the distinction of sex was not inculcated long before nature makes any difference.” Tellingly, most parents who were inspired to educate their daughters according to Rousseau’s ideas chose to emulate the education of Émile rather than Sophie. But for Day, it all made perfect sense.
    As Day pored over Rousseau’s words, suddenly everything became clear. With his contempt for luxury and fashion, his infatuation with peasant life, his preference for washing in streams and his fondness for roaming the countryside on foot, Day realized that he was the incarnation of Émile. And now that he was about to turn twenty, the age that Émile discovers his Sophie, the time was right for him to meet his ideal woman to share his planned life of isolated misery. Raising his eyes from the pages, his gaze alighted on Margaret. All she needed was a little instruction to fulfill the desired role. Margaret, of course, had quite other ideas.
    As the unlikely romance lurched from comedy to melodrama over the ensuing months, Day bared his feelings in a long letter to John Bicknell. “I have been disappointed in a Manner to a feeling Heart the most dreadful,” he wailed when Margaret called the whole thing off in September. He had been deceived because “I loved an imaginary Being,” he wrote with uncustomary insight. In his trough of despair he even considered remaining a bachelor for life since, he noted, he could father children out of wedlock—“& their Illegitimacy will have no Effect