 In speaking of the education of girls, Macaulay asserts, “my pride and my prejudices lead me to regard my sex in a higher light than as the mere objects of sense” (Macaulay 1790, 62). Indeed, she believes that both sexes ought to aspire to virtue, which, since it involves understanding and acting on moral principles discernible by reason, is the same for both sexes. In order to justify the egalitarian educational program that she proposes, she argues against Rousseau that there are no characteristic differences between the sexes, that most of what is observed is the result of education, and, turning Pope’s words around, that “A perfect man is a woman formed after a courser mold” (Macaulay 1790, 204). Against Rousseau’s attempt to make a single moral person out of the union of the two sexes, she asserts that it outdoes, for contradiction and absurdity, “every metaphysical riddle that was ever formed in the schools” (Macaulay 1790, 206).