Women, Education, and Moral Psychology, 1400–1800

From the inception of women’s response to male philosophical misogyny, women have focused on issues connected with virtue and educability. Two factors lie behind this tendency. The first is that arguments for women’s subjection in marriage, and for their exclusion from positions of power, have traditionally emphasized women’s moral incapacity, duplicitousness, and lack of prudence. So women seeking to defend themselves from such charges have interrogated the concept of moral virtue and sought to show how women are capable of being virtuous agents. Second, as traditional educators of the young, women have historically recognized the importance of early education in providing good habits of mind and the right decision-making capacities for later in life. In this paper, we examine the convergence of these two topics—virtue and education—in women’s texts of the pre-enlightenment and enlightenment eras. We narrow our focus to those works by women and about women, while acknowledging that many similar ideas and arguments might be found in male writings of the period. We choose to highlight women’s ideas because we think that they provide an interesting pre-history to the development of women’s feminist arguments for political equality from the late eighteenth century onwards. This is a pre-history that emphasizes women’s moral equality, or the idea that women are morally on a par with men in so far as they possess all the necessary psychological traits to be considered moral agents, as well as the necessary psychology to be considered morally educable.