Catharine Macaulay and Mary Wollstonecraft are linked by intellectual and political bonds; for both, education is a philosophical and political preoccupation in its own right, and also interacts with philosophical questions of morality, social power, theology, truth and human action. Macaulay's philosophical and political engagements with Hobbes, Burke and with 18th-century deism lend a particular cast to her theory of education, and influenced Wollstonecraft who shares a good deal of Macaulay's critical reading of Locke and Rousseau on education. They both focus in particular on the relationships between authority, social power and gender that structure Rousseau's pedagogy. Their method of criticism, as well as their developed evaluations of equality and friendship, are notably significant for later feminist and social theory, although their position on truth and rationality in connection with theology is not. For later social theorists the "social constructivism" and politicisation of social and cultural relationships, that is a central thread of Wollstonecraft's analysis, is a lasting legacy. (Contains 12 notes.)