10/4 Macaulay and Wakefield

An interesting similarity between Catharine Macaulays’ Letters on Education and Priscilla Wakefield’s Reflection on the Present Condition of the Female Sex is that both critique the contemporary system of women’s education as being one set up for failure even in achieving its purpose of educating women to be good wives for their husbands. In Letters there is a focus on the hypocrisy in educating women to be desirable towards men, by being beautiful and delicate, yet also espousing traditional Christian virtues which according to Macaulay “Vanity and its companion Envy, must taint, in their characters, every native and every acquired excellence”. What women are being taught to become “agreeable to a husband” is what females were often criticized and ridiculed for by modern writers in Macaulay’s time. Reflections critiques education as inadequate in maintaining a lasting marriage, the structure can be seen as self-defeating as it is meant to prepare women for marriage yet does not provide skills needed to maintain that union. For Wakefield female instruction is not sufficient to be only constructed around “the whole science of pleasing” as it is limited only obtaining the marriage but not equipping women the skills and knowledge needed in living as a wife and or mother.  It is also interesting to note that Wakefield echoes some of Wollstonecraft’s ideas of companionship marriage “…and to sum up all, the chosen friend of his bosom”.