TY - JOUR
AU - Heywood, Colin
AB - R e VI e WS OF BOO k S 293 Rousseau’s Daughters: Domesticity, Education, and Autonomy in France. By Jennifer J. Popiel. Durham, NH: University of New Hampshire Press. 2008. xii + 262 pp. $50.00. ISBN 978 1 58465 732 3. This book is, according to the publisher’s blurb, a ‘provocative assessment of how new ideas about motherhood and domesticity in pre-Revolutionary France helped women demand social and political equality later on’. Provocative is indeed the word, as Jennifer Popiel confronts head on commonly-held views on, say, the misogyny of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, or the dominant role of the school in the history of education. Somehow, she alleges, other historians of motherhood have managed to ‘miss’ her key points (p. 19); philosophers, historians, and educational theorists may ‘misunderstand’ the radical nature of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s educational philosophy (p. 30). She may find that they bite back! Still, this abrasively polemical approach gives spice to the writing, and the work is consistently thought-provoking. 294 R e VI e WS OF BOO k S The presiding figure over the whole work is Rousseau, with Popiel taking his ideas on education in Emile (1762) as her starting point. She poses the telling question of 
TI - Rousseau's Daughters: Domesticity, Education, and Autonomy in France. By Jennifer J. Popiel
JO - French History
DO - 10.1093/fh/crq016
DA - 2010-06-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/rousseau-s-daughters-domesticity-education-and-autonomy-in-france-by-3fUnH0Ky0l
SP - 293
EP - 294
VL - 24
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -