The first noteworthy female English historian, Macaulay was best known in her own time for her hugely influential 8 volume (1763-1783) scholarly history of England during the English Civil and the Restoration, The History of England from the accession of James I to that of the Brunswick line. Unusual for her time, Macaulay depended heavily on primary source-material. A staunch Republican, Macaulay supported deposing James I. However, considering Cromwell to be as depraved as the King he disposed, Macaulay did not support Cromwell. Her reputation as a staunch Republican was so well established that, in her 1785 "triumphal tour¹" of the new United States of America, she spent 10 days at Mount Vernon visiting George Washington. By the 1780s with the rebels in America on the verge of winning the war, at home in England, her Republican politics were falling out of favor. Consequently, she remained on the fringe of the Bluestockings: her politics were disapproved of but her achievements were admired.

      The work in which she most clearly expresses her feminist ideals is, Letters on Education, was written in 1790, two years before Mary Wollstonecraft's much better known work, A Vindication of the Rights of Women. Wollstonecraft admits to being profoundly influenced by Letters on Education. Macaulay considered almost anything and everything under the topic of education, but she emphasized 3 areas: kindness (especially to animals) and non-violence, moral precepts, and the education of women. Macaulay was much bolder than Wollstonecraft - Wollstonecraft wanted women to be educated so they would become good mothers (what would be known as Republican motherhood in the next century). Macaulay wanted women to use their education and talents and to win in a man's world, just like she had.

      Like her History, Letters is grounded in reason and logic. Macaulay believes that women's apparent deficiencies are due to their inferior education, not to their innate nature. She advocated the same education for boy and for girls, men and women. Here is an excerpt in which she talks about her ideal education for a child. I wonder what she would think of our modern school system.

". . . let us devote the first ten or twelve years of life to the strengthening of the corporal faculties, to the giving of useful habits, and to those attainments which can be acquired, without burthening [sic] the mind with ideas which it cannot well comprehend. The Latin grammar: geography taught in the easiest and pleasantest manner, such parts of physics as lie open to the attention of children; writing, arithmetic, and the French language, which may be made easy to learn buy having French domestics, are fully sufficient to fill up the time of childhood; and to exercise its growing faculties without the use of books, which I would seldom introduce, but with the view of amusement. These I would also confine to a very small number of chosen for the simplicity of the subject, and for the purpose of entertainment; with an exception however in favor of such easy Latin authors as are used in the first classes of the public schools, in order to exemplify, by actual reading, those rules of grammar which are every day committed to memory. If any one of my pupils should shew [sic] any marks of more than ordinary vigor of intellect, or an great impatience to enlarge his ideas, I would at the age of ten years enter him into a course of reading, which should commence with the most celebrated fables in the English, Latin, and French languages, at the age of twelve, and not before, his studies may be extended to a proper selection of Plutarch's Lives in the English translation, Addison's Spectators, Gutherie's Geographical Grammar, and Mentelle's Geographic Comparée, in the original: selected parts of these last books may be committed to memory; and Addison's Spectators ought to be written as exercises, and some passages parsed accurately in the manner in which a Latin or Greek lesson is usually analized [sic]. During this period, the English grammar ought to make part of the pupil's study, beginning with Ash's Introduction to Lowth, and then with Lowth's Introduction." [Letter XIV, Literary Education of Young Persons, p. 128]

      Macaulay continues :

      At age 14: Rollin's Ancient History (in French), English history, Livy's history in Latin, then further knowledge of Latin history by reading Dion, Cassius, Saliust, Tactitus in Latin and Ferguson and Gibbon in English, and The History of Modern Europe. (Letter XIV, p. 126-133)

      At age 15: Moral lectures (Cicero's Offices), Plutarch, Epictetus, and Seneca, Fenelon's Telemachus, Rollin's Belle Lettres, and the poets (Shakespeare, Addison's Cato, Stelle's Conscious Lovers, Milton, Pope), and in French Corneille, Racine, Moliere, Voltaire, in Latin the plays of Terence, epigrams of Martial, Virgil's Eneid and Georgics (Letter XIV, p. 126-133)

      At age 18: Plato (Diaolgues, only), Demosthenes, Homer, Euripides, and Sophocles in Greek; Caesar's Commentaries and Cicero's Orations in Latin; Harria and Monboddo on Language; and a course on logic and the initial reading of Aristotle (Letter XV, Literary Education Continued - Religion, Foreign Travel, Novels, p. 134 - 148)

      At age 19: Begin the study of politics (Harrington, Sydney, Locke, Hobbes), ancient mythology (Spence's Polymetis, Hesiod, Ovid, Blackwell, Baniere, Bryant), ancient metaphysics (Plato, Cudworth, and Monboddo) (Letter XV p. 134 - 148)

      And at age 20: Sacred writings and commentaries, ecclesiastical histories (Letter XV p. 134 - 148)

      But I digress. This biography is supposed to emphasize her feminist ideas. Throughout her work, she admits that a woman's virtue is measured against only one standard: chastity. "Society" expects that a woman can be a thief, a liar, a cheat, a coward, a deadbeat, or any other sort of scoundrel imaginable as long as she remains a virgin. Once she looses her virginity, she is marked for life as a debased woman.

      Many contemporary feminists equate sexual freedom with equality. For Macaulay, chastity freely chosen by a woman was a means of becoming empowered. Only a few of our contemporary feminists have tackled this topic the topic of chastity and celibacy as a possible positive concept for women. Unfortunately, most contemporary feminists have couched sexual matters in terms of sleeping with the enemy, the joys of same-sex sex, rape and date rape, the sexual dysfunction of women/men/relationships that don't emphasize sex, and the harm of pornography. Only a few have noted the personal empowerment that women gain by choosing to redirect the emotional energy used to prop up a sex partner's self-image toward oneself. Macaulay talks about the advantages of chastity for a woman. After discussing the games women play to hide the fact that they are no longer virgins after having an unfortunate romantic fling, and, after demonstrating the obvious failure of traditional methods to imbue women with the idea that chastity is a virtue, Macaulay writes,

". . . beside, as I intend to breed my pupils up to act a rational part in the world, and not to fill up a niche in the seraglio of a sultan, I shall certainly give them leave to use their reason in all matters which concern their duty and happiness, and shall spare no pains in the cultivation of this only sure guide to virtue. I shall inform them of the great utility of chastity and continence; that the one preserves the body in health and vigor, and the other, the purity and independence of the mind, without which it is impossible to possess virtue or happiness. I shall intimate; that the great difference now beheld in the external consequences which follow the deviations from chastity in the two sexes, did in all probability arise from women having been considered as the mere property of the men; and, on this account had no right to dispose of their own persons: that policy adopted this difference, when the plea of property had been given up; and it was still preserved in society from the unruly licentiousness of the men, who, finding no obstacles in the delicacy of the other sex, continue to set at defiance both divine and moral law, and by mutual support and general opinion to use their natural freedom with impunity. I shall observe, that this state of things renders the situation of females, in their individual capacity very precarious; for the strength which Nature has given to the passion of love, in order to serve her purposes, has made it the most ungovernable propensity of any which attends us. The snares, therefore, that are continually laid for women, by persons who run no risk in compassing their seduction, exposes them to continual danger; whilst the implacability of their own sex, who fear to give up any advantages which a superior prudence, or even its appearance, give them, renders one false step an irretrievable misfortune. That, for these reasons, coquetry in women is as dangerous as it is dishonorable. That a coquette commonly finds her own perdition, in the very flames which she raises to consume others; and that if any thing can excuse the baseness of female seduction, it is the baits which are flung out by women to entangle the affections, and excite the passions of men.

      I know not what you may think of my method, Hortensia, which I must acknowledge to carry the stamp of singularity; but for my part, I am sanguine enough to expect to turn out of my hands a careless, modest beauty, grave, manly, noble, full of strength and majesty; and carrying about her an aegis sufficiently powerful to defend her against the sharpest arrow that ever was shot from Cupid's bow. A woman, whose virtue will not be of the kind to wrankle into an inveterate malignity against her own sex for faults which she even encourages in the men, but who, understanding the principles of true religion and morality, will regard chastity and truth as indispensable qualities in virtuous characters of either sex; whose justice will incline her to extend her benevolence to the frailties of the fair as circumstances invite, and to manifest her resentment against the underminers of female happiness; in short, a woman who will not take a male rake either for a husband or a friend. And let me tell you, Hortensia, if women had as much regard for virtue of chastity as in some cases they pretend to have, a reformation would long since have taken place in the world; but whilst they continue to cherish immodesty in the men, their bitter persecution of their own sex will not save them from the imputation of those concealed propensities with which they are accused by Pope, and other severe satirists on the sex. " (Letter XXIV, Flattery, Chastity, and Male Rakes, pp. 220-222)

Footnotes:

      1. Letters on Education, Introduction, pages unnumbered but I counted page 7

References:

      Catherine Macaulay, Letters on Education, 1790, [Oxford and New York: Woodstock Books, 1994]

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