Page 151 - DPOL201_WESTERN_POLITICAL_THOUGHT_ENGLISH

Unit 8: Jean Jacques Rousseau

in this sense were dependent on women, who controlled them through their gentleness, their Notes
kindness and their tears to get what they wanted. As long as men were dependent on women for
love, women would get what they wanted. The sole protection men had was to repress women’s
sexuality and their own passionate selves:
He (Rousseau) was one of the most powerful critics of the notion of original sin, and
insisted on the natural goodness of man, especially his sexual desire—if sexism means
insistence on essential differentiation of function between men and women both
naturally and socially, then Rousseau was indeed a sexist. If on the other hand it
means treating women as objects and subordinating them, he certainly was not a
sexist. Rather he was concerned with enhancing the power of women over ... . It is the
related-ness, the harmonious relatedness of men and women, which he takes as the
model and foundation of all human relatedness.
Rousseau, like Aristotle, regarded the family as the first form of society, though the relationships
within a family needed a different kind of regulation from the ones within the state. The relationship
between the father and children was based on love and the superior physical strength of the
father. Paternal authority was established by nature as long as the children needed protection. The
father needed the ultimate and sole control over his wife’s sexual independence in order to assert
his control over the children. Rousseau reinforced the “renewed eighteenth century emphasis on
female chastity and monogamy”. He recommended the Athenian model where women confined
themselves to the private space of the home, enjoying the status of a wife, mother and householder,
and wrote:
When Greek women married, they disappeared from public life; within the four walls
of their home they devoted themselves to the care of their household and family. This
is the mode of life prescribed for women alike by nature and reason.
Paradoxical as it may seem at first glance, Rousseau did not accept patriarchal households where
the husband/father was the absolute person with total authority over his wife and children. He
believed in the ideal of a compassionate marriage where the wife was a companion to her husband.
It was for this reason that a woman had to be educated up to a point of making her agreeable to
her husband and intelligent to her children, but not beyond that. A free, equal, rational and
independent being with a mind was beyond his conception. Many of these arguments were critically
analyzed and rejected by Wollstonecraft in her A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792).
It was suggested that Rousseau did not consider women as inferior, but accorded them a subordinate
position for the sake of the family which he held very dear. However, there was no denying the
fact that Rousseau, who had been the first to highlight the effects of inequalities and questioned
many of the inherited assumptions, reiterated many of the male prejudices without critically
dissecting them. He also failed to articulate an equal status for women in the family and home.
However, he glorified women as mothers and wives, roles most women performed.
There were a few greater enemies of sexual equality than Jean-Jacques Rousseau, yet he was
revered and adored by women everywhere .... Rousseau might have told women (gracefully) that
they were weak and stupid, but he also told them that they were beautiful, that they were the
moral ally of humanity and that they are utterly necessary for men’s happiness .... The secret of
Rousseau’s success was he glorified and aggrandized women in the only career open to them that
of wife and mother—and he promised them in return love, respect and happiness. It might have
been a more subtle form of belittlement and new justification for exploitation disguised as
sentimentalism but it set the tone for much of the nineteenth century (Proctor 1990: 179).
Though Rousseau was inspired by Plato, he did not share Plato’s belief in sexual equality and
giving women a share in the political process.

LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY 145