Mary Astell

Quick Facts

• Lived: 1666-1731
• Place: Born in Newcastle upon Tyne; worked mainly in London
• Known for: Early feminist philosophy, women's education, rational self-government, and critique of marriage
• Main works: A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Some Reflections upon Marriage
• Other works: Letters Concerning the Love of God, The Christian Religion
• Traditions: Feminist Philosophy, Cartesian rationalism, Anglican Christian thought
• Basic stance: Women have the same rational kind of soul as men, so they should be educated as thinking moral agents.

The Big Question

If women are rational souls made for truth and virtue, why does society train them as if their main purpose is to please men, marry well, and stay dependent?

Astell's answer is blunt: the problem is not women's nature. The problem is bad education, bad custom, and social rewards that teach women to value beauty, praise, and status more than judgment and goodness.

In One Minute

Mary Astell was an English philosopher and one of the sharpest early feminist writers in the history of philosophy. Her basic claim was simple: women have rational souls, so women should be educated for truth, virtue, and self-government, not trained only for ornament, courtship, and obedience.

In A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, she argued for a women's educational community where women could study, pray, form serious friendships, and become morally independent. In Some Reflections upon Marriage, she attacked the unfairness of marriage as it worked in her society. If men praised liberty in politics, why did they accept domination at home?

Astell was not a modern liberal. She was a committed Anglican and a political conservative. She used religious duty and rationalist philosophy to argue that the common treatment of women was indefensible.

What They Taught

Astell taught that women are rational creatures made for truth, virtue, and love of God. If a woman has an immortal soul and a mind capable of knowing truth, then her life cannot be reduced to pleasing men, managing appearances, or surviving the marriage market.

Her argument uses a broadly Cartesian picture of the self. Like Rene Descartes, she treats the mind as the thinking part of the human being. A mind can understand ideas, compare them, judge whether they are true, and choose what to love. Since women do these things, women are not naturally inferior creatures moved only by passion and fashion.

When women seem frivolous or weak in reasoning, Astell blames training, not nature. A girl praised mostly for clothes, beauty, flirtation, and obedience will learn to care about those things. That does not prove she lacks reason. It proves that society has pointed her reason toward small rewards.

That is why education is the practical heart of her philosophy. In A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Astell imagines a Protestant educational retreat for women. There they could study religion, philosophy, and reasoning, order their thoughts, examine their motives, and become serious moral agents.

For Astell, education is soul training. A person becomes free by learning to govern herself by reason rather than by vanity, appetite, fear, or approval. Self-government means more than doing whatever you want. It means learning to ask: Is this true? Is this good? Am I choosing this because it is right, or because I want praise?

Her critique of marriage follows from the same view. Astell did not reject marriage as such. She saw it as a serious Christian institution. But she thought marriage in her society often trained women for dependence and men for petty tyranny. Women were urged to marry for survival or status, then told to submit even when husbands were foolish, selfish, or cruel.

This is where her political bite appears. Early modern men often praised liberty, consent, and resistance to arbitrary power. Astell asks why those principles stop at the front door. If arbitrary rule is bad in the state, why is it acceptable in the family?

Astell's Christian thought gives the project its religious shape. Reason is not the enemy of faith. Reason helps the soul turn toward God, truth, and goodness. Virtue means rightly ordered love: loving God above all, loving other people with genuine concern for their good, and refusing to let pride, lust, vanity, or fear rule the will.

Key Ideas With Examples

• Rational soul: Astell thinks a human being is not just a body with habits and appetites. A person has a thinking soul: a mind that can know, judge, choose, and love. Example: if a woman can weigh reasons in household management, friendship, faith, or reading, she is using the same rational power men claim for themselves.

• Clear thinking: Astell borrows from Cartesian method. Do not accept an idea just because custom repeats it. Break a problem into parts, notice what is clear, and withhold judgment when the evidence is confused. Example: "women are naturally vain" looks less clear once you ask how girls are raised.

• Custom: Custom means repeated social habit. Astell thinks custom can make injustice look natural. Example: if women are denied serious education for generations, people may mistake the results of exclusion for proof of natural inferiority.

• Self-government: This is the rule of reason over appetite and social pressure. A woman who refuses a fashionable but empty life is freer than a woman who chases every compliment. Astell's model of freedom is inner discipline, not mere permission.

• Education as reform: Astell wants women to have time, quiet, books, teachers, and friends who help them become wiser. Her proposed community is a place where women learn to think clearly and live well.

• Marriage and domination: Domination means one person is subject to another person's arbitrary will. Astell argues that marriage becomes corrupt when a wife is treated like property or a servant. A husband may have legal power, but legal power does not make foolishness wise or cruelty moral.

• Ordered love: Astell thinks love can be selfish or benevolent. Selfish love tries to possess or use another person. Benevolent love wants the other's good. Her ideal friendship among women is built on this second kind of love.

Major Works

• A Serious Proposal to the Ladies: Astell's most famous work. Part I proposes a women-only educational and religious community. Part II gives a method for improving the mind. The point is to give women the conditions they need to become clear thinkers and virtuous persons.

• Letters Concerning the Love of God: A published exchange with John Norris about love, God, and whether love should be directed to God alone. The letters show Astell as a serious metaphysical and theological thinker, not only a social critic.

• Some Reflections upon Marriage: A critique of marriage customs and women's dependence. Astell warns women not to enter marriage blindly, especially when marriage means legal and economic subordination. The work is famous for exposing the inconsistency between public talk about liberty and private acceptance of domestic rule.

• The Christian Religion, as Profess'd by a Daughter of the Church of England: A mature statement of Astell's Anglican moral theology. It defends Christian belief, discusses reason and duty, and criticizes positions she associates with John Locke.

Why It Matters

Astell matters because she makes women's subordination a philosophical problem. She asks what view of the soul, reason, education, freedom, and authority could justify the way women are treated. Her answer is that the usual justifications fail.

She also shows that feminism did not begin only from modern rights language. Astell's case grows from Christian duty, rationalist psychology, and moral self-discipline. She argues that if God made women rational, then keeping them ignorant is an offense against their purpose.

Her work also links private life to political theory. Marriage, education, courtship, and household authority shape whether a person can become rational, virtuous, and free. Later feminist philosophy keeps returning to problems Astell already named: unequal education, dependence in marriage, social training, and the gap between public ideals and private practice.

Proponents, Critics, and Opponents

Astell inherits important tools from Rene Descartes, especially the focus on the thinking self and disciplined reasoning. She does not simply repeat Descartes, but she uses Cartesian ideas to argue that women can know truth and govern themselves.

Her relation to John Locke is more critical. Astell attacks Whig ideas of liberty and resistance from a High Church Tory position. That means she opposed active rebellion against political rulers. But she also used the language of domination to embarrass men who defended liberty in politics while accepting near-absolute male rule in marriage.

Damaris Masham is an important contrast. Both cared about women's education and moral formation, but Masham was closer to Locke's philosophy, while Astell was more rationalist, Anglican, and anti-Lockean.

Some critics in Astell's time suspected her proposed women's community would look too much like a Catholic convent. Later writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft made broader rights-based arguments for women. Astell did not demand modern political equality, but she helped make women's education, marriage, and rational equality central philosophical topics.

Related Pages

• Rene Descartes
• John Locke
• Damaris Masham
• Mary Wollstonecraft
• Feminist Philosophy
• A Serious Proposal to the Ladies
• Some Reflections upon Marriage