How to Create the Perfect Wife by Wendy Moore Page B

not encased in swaddling bands; and he is tutored by his father rather than hired teachers—although Rousseau accepted that a trusted friend could be substituted since fathers might find themselves rather too busy to become full-time tutors. As a boy—and Rousseau’s program was aimed exclusively at boys—Émile grows up in the countryside in the manner of a peasant. He is nurtured lovingly, never scolded and allowed to roam free, but at the same time he is trained to withstand hardships like hunger, cold and fatigue, allowed to fall and hurt himself and taught to fear nothing.
    Growing up happy and carefree, despite his bumps and bruises, Émile learns through his mistakes and from his tutor’s patient responses to his inevitable questions. There should be no verbal lessons, no attempts to impose ideas through reason and emphatically no books, says Rousseau, insisting: “I hate books.” Émile only learns to read when he finds it necessary to do so—and not before the age of twelve. Instead he works out the orbit of the earth by watching the sun rise and set and understands the position of the stars by getting lost in the woods. He grasps geography by making maps of where he lives and physics by playing with magnets. In his teens, Émile learns a useful trade, as an apprentice carpenter, and travels, in order to see the world’s vices for himself. Religion should play no part in a child’s education, Rousseau says, so Émile should simply be free to adopt whichever religion he chooses based on his own reasoning when he reaches eighteen. Finally, at the age of twenty, Émile is ready to enter society and—crucially—to find a partner to share his worldview. So Émile begins a search for a simple, artless, country maid whom he can educate to suit her allotted role.
    Although Émile was not the first parenting manual, it has probably proved the most influential. Nobody before—or perhaps since—had gone so far in placing the child at the center of education or advocating a “learningby doing” approach designed to suit a child’s natural development. Rousseau had kickstarted a debate between huggers and hard-liners, between carrot and stick, which would ricochet down the centuries. His ideas would change not just educational practice but basic ideas about childhood fundamentally and forever.
    Although religious zealots—inflamed by the book’s rejection of religious teaching—persecuted Rousseau, many more welcomed his visionary ideas on child care and education with feverish intensity. In nurseries across Europe, mothers embraced breast-feeding, fathers abandoned the birch rod and infants sprung free of their swaddling bands like slaves breaking free from their chains. Some parents even determined to follow Rousseau’s child-rearing regime to the letter.
    The Prince and Princess of Wurtemberg decided to bring up their baby daughter, Sophie, who was born in 1763, precisely according to the plan outlined for Émile—despite her being a girl. The couple and the author exchanged nearly fifty letters over fine points such as teething. At four months little Sophie was bathed each morning in an ice-cold fountain then left outside naked for much of the day. Although it was then October, her parents boasted that baby Sophie rarely cried. In fact she was probably too weak from cold to cry. Ultimately her toughening regime would prove little use; Sophie died at the age of eleven. Another enthusiast, a Swiss banker named Guillaume-François Roussel, banished his five young daughters to live in the woods, barely clothed, to scavenge for nuts and berries. Eager to pay homage to his idol, the banker visited Rousseau during his mountain exile, but Rousseau was so aghast that he packed Roussel home immediately to end the girls’ plight.
    When Émile was published in English in late 1762, the book attracted even more admirers. Having already adopted Locke’s progressive views on education, many upper-class parents in