Happy Families

This chapter looks at the role of parents and schools in children’s education with a particular emphasis on the domination that adults inevitably exert on children. The first section explores the way adults may exercise tyranny over children and whether sharing the responsibility of care may help mitigate this. In the second section, we look at how teaching children how to use their own reason – while it does not mean domination plays no part in the adult–child relationship – can mitigate its effects by shortening it. The third section looks at how gendering parental roles makes parenting harder and less effective, and that Wollstonecraft’s anti-essentialist views are reflected are very much part of her discussion of motherhood. Finally, I ask why Wollstonecraft could not simply have modeled her account of parenting onto the first parts of Rousseau’s Emile, and I argue that this would have amounted to a very ineffective pink-washing of Rousseau’s essentially sexist views.