Innocence as Ignorance

Innocence, as conventionally understood, meant inexperience of the world, absence of strong passions, and a kind of managed naivety. It was praised in women as a sexual and moral virtue — proof of their untouched, manageable nature. Wollstonecraft refuses this framing entirely. True virtue, she insists, is not the absence of experience but the disciplined exercise of reason in the face of it. A sheltered creature that has never faced temptation is not virtuous — it is simply untested.

The circular logic Wollstonecraft exposes is devastating: women are kept ignorant in order to preserve their innocence; then their ignorance produces exactly the follies and caprices that men complain of; and then these follies are cited as evidence that women are unfit for education or rational life. The cage produces its own justification. Breaking this circle requires refusing its first premise: that innocence is a virtue worth preserving at the cost of understanding.

Wollstonecraft's central target in Chapter II is Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose Émile prescribes an education for women explicitly designed to make them pleasing rather than rational. Sophie, Émile's ideal companion, is to be kept soft, dependent, and emotionally responsive — everything that Wollstonecraft identifies as manufactured weakness. Against Rousseau, she argues that an education in pleasing is an education in corruption: the woman who is trained to be attractive cannot be expected to be good.

The argument is developed principally in Chapters II and V of the Vindication. Wollstonecraft's critique of Dr. Gregory and Fordyce in Chapter V extends the same analysis to the educational advice literature directed at women.