Astell, Mary (1666–1731)

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Astell, Mary (1666–1731)

English writer of feminist, political, and religious works that addressed some of the most controversial issues of her time, including the education of women, the institution of marriage, and the role of God in everyday life. Name variations: Madonella. Pronunciation: as-TELL. Born Mary Astell on November 12, 1666, in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England; died in London on May 9, 1731, from breast cancer; daughter of Peter (a coal merchant) and Mary (Errington) Astell; no formal education, but was tutored for a few years by her father's older brother Ralph; never married; no children.

Probably had a conventional middle-class upbringing for girls of that period, though the death of her father when she was 12 left the financial stability of the family threatened; moved to London to live on her own (mid-1680s); came to attention of archbishop of Canterbury (1689); published first work (1694); active as a writer until 1709, when she helped to establish a school for girls and became headmistress; some of her works reissued (1722 and 1730).

Selected publications:

A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, For the Advancement of Their True and Greatest Interest (1694); Letters Concerning the Love of God (1695); A Serious Proposal To The Ladies, Part II, Wherein a Method is Offer'd for the Improvement of Their Minds (1697); Some Reflections upon Marriage (1700); Moderation Truly Stated (1704); A Fair Way with Dissenters and Their Patrons (1704); An Impartial Enquiry into the Late Causes of Rebellion and Civil War (1704); The Christian Religion as Profess'd by a Daughter of the Church (1705); Bart'lemy Fair: or, An Inquiry after Wit (1709).

Why educate women? This question, simple as it sounds, provoked many different answers in England throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. Mary Astell's response was unique: rather than force women to be slaves to morally corrupt men, educate women so that they can serve and love God. To her, the idea seemed absolutely reasonable, and her confidence in her vision never wavered. With one eye looking forward and the other looking back to a time when devotion to divine rule, whether by God or King, had been more fashionable, Mary Astell wrote a small but influential body of works that represent a curious mixture of conservative religious and political thought and feminist social policy. That her voice entered into significant debates taking place in England in the late 17th and early 18th centuries is a remarkable testament to her fortitude, good fortune, and faith. By the end of the 18th century, when the British feminist movement was ushered in by Mary Wollstonecraft and others, much of what they championed, although they did not acknowledge it per se, was built upon a foundation that Astell had helped create. More than anything, her contribution was that she regarded the development of women's minds as a serious moral and political issue.

The family of Astell would qualify as middle-class gentry. At the time of her birth, Newcastle-upon-Tyne was one of England's most important regional cities, at the center of the growing coal industry. The area presented many opportunities for its citizens to prosper, especially boys and grown men, who could take advantage of its schools, apprentice positions, and thriving markets. Peter Astell, like his father before him, was involved in the business of selling, weighing, delivering, and collecting revenues for Newcastle coal; both were members of the guild of the Hostmen, which controlled the coal market. Mary Astell's mother, also named Mary, was born into a moderately wealthy Catholic family from Newcastle, but her children were raised as devout Anglicans, which was by then the state religion of England. When Peter died in 1678, he left an estate worth over £500, which was enough to indicate his success in business, but his survivors, including his wife, two children, and an older unmarried sister, required some charity from the guild. The aunt must have had a significant role in Mary Astell's childhood; Astell's modern biographer, Ruth Perry , reports that the aunt died in 1684, and the mother died in 1695.

In addition to her father, two other male figures were of great importance in Astell's youth. One was her uncle Ralph, who served as her tutor. Her writings demonstrate that although he died when Mary was just 13 years old, he left his intellectual stamp on her. A graduate of Oxford University and a published poet, Ralph Astell had been influenced by the school of philosophy known as Cambridge Platonism and instructed his niece in its principal tenet, which was the use of one's reason to establish a relationship with God. Clearly Ralph Astell also taught his young charge literature, especially English poetry, for Abraham Cowley, who was one of his favorite poets, became the poet imitated by his niece in her adolescent writings. Ralph and Peter Astell had both been supporters of the royalist cause during the English Civil War, and Ralph's one extant publication is a 16-page poem that celebrates the restoration of the monarchy. Ralph Astell was trained to be an Anglican curate, but he seems to have been dismissed from his post because of a drinking problem. Another significant male figure in Astell's life, if only as a point of comparison, was her brother Peter, two years her junior. As a male, he could go to school and was eligible for an apprenticeship to a lawyer, and in this profession he was successful enough to pay off all the family debts before 1695. For Mary Astell, however, there was no school in Newcastle that admitted females, nor was there a respectable profession open to her that offered her economic independence; the destiny of most girls was confined to marriage. The writings of Mary Astell suggest that she yearned for the freedom and opportunities her brother had at his disposal.

Indeed, the poems of Astell's teenage years make clear her ambition, her creative energy, and her search for faith and identity. If she had not struggled as she did to create herself, no one could have invented her. As a writer, her voice was clear and unmistakable. Often angry and sarcastic, sometimes reflective, but always direct, her prose is different from that of every other woman writer of her time. She seems to have discovered her voice early. We can find it in her poetry, in which she somewhat defiantly represents her own struggles, especially those caused by her intellect and her femaleness. In "Solitude," a poem written in 1684, a few months before her 18th birthday, her opening stanza demonstrates that she does not hesitate to place herself in opposition to the social mores of the time.

Now I with gen'rous Cowley see,
This trifling World and I shall ne're agree.
Nature in business me no share affords,
And I no business find in empty words:
I dare not all the morning spend
To dress my body, and not lend
A minuit to my Soul, nor can think fit,
To sell the Jewel for the Cabinet.

Many of Astell's poems also show the importance of God and faith in her life. She clearly believed that if she loved God, God would not love her the less because she was a female. "No, to its native place my Soul aspires,/ And something more than Earth desires/ Heav'n only can its vast Ambition fill,/ And Heav'n alone must exercise my mind and quill."

While her poetry is not outstanding in a technical sense, it is well to remember how young she was when she wrote it, and applaud its sheer competency in terms of form and content. More than anything perhaps, Astell's poetry demonstrates her struggle at this stage of life to find a balance between her ambitions and her lack of opportunity, her need for companionship, and her disdain for both men and women who felt more comfortable in a social arena. Her poem "In Emulation of Mr. Cowley's Poem Call'd the Motto," written when she was 21, contains her best answer, described in the last three stanzas, to the problems created by her sense of self:

Nature permits not me the common way,
By serving Court, or State, to gain
That so much valu'd trifle, Fame;
Nor do I covet in Wit's Realm to sway:
But O ye bright illustrious few,
What shall I do to be like some of you?
Whom this misjudging World [does] underprize,
Yet are most dear in Heav'ns all-righteous eyes!

How shall I be a Peter or a Paul?
That to the Turk and Infidel,
I might the joyfull tydings tell,
And spare no labour to convert them all:
But ah my sex denies me this,
And Mary's Priviledge I cannot wish;

Yet hard I hear my dearest Saviour say,
They are more blessed who his Word obey.

Up then my sluggard Soul, Labour and Pray,
For if with Love enflam'd thou be,
Thy Jesus will be born in thee,
And by thy ardent Prayers thou canist[?] make way,
For their Conversion whom thou mayst not teach,
Yet by a good Example always Preach:
And tho' I want a Persecuting Fire,
I'll be at lest a Martyr in desire.

When she was about 20, Astell moved to London to live, a bold and unusual act for a young woman of her social class. She settled in the Chelsea area, then a semi-rural western suburb of London known for its tolerance of respectable single women on their own. Her first years in London must have been difficult, both emotionally and economically. Throughout the late 17th and 18th centuries, it was a common practice for authors to dedicate their works to prominent men and women in the hope that the honored figure would become their patron, or at least give them money, and when Astell presented a manuscript collection of her poems to William Sancroft, archbishop of Canterbury, she thanked him in the dedication for receiving the work of "a poor unknown, who hath no place to fly unto, and none that careth for her soul, when even my kinsfolk had failed, and my familiar friends had forgotten me." The fact that her work was not dedicated to an aristocratic or rich woman highly regarded in the London social scene suggests both that she clung steadfastly to the sentiments expressed in her poetry, and that since her arrival in London she had not yet been able to form the network of friendships with influential women she would have later in life. Astell must have hoped that Sancroft, as the leader of England's state religion, could offer her the recognition and protection of the Church that she devoutly believed in. Also there was the notion, always in Astell's mind, that her relationship with God was the most important one in her life, leading naturally to the conclusion that ideas such as the thoughts expressed in her poetry, given to her by God, should in turn be given to the chief representative of his church. Perry believes that Sancroft did respond positively to Astell, perhaps by arranging an introduction to Richard Wilkin, the publisher of religious books who brought all of her works into print.

Astell's first published work, in 1694, entitled A Serious Proposal To The Ladies, presents the same enthusiastic devotion to God expressed in her poetry, albeit in a way that is less self-conscious than socially conscious. One logical and yet radical decision was to address it specifically "to the Ladies." Readers might have been shocked, since authors of other 17th-century works advocating the education of women (and there were several) addressed their proposals to male readers. Indeed, Bathsua Makin , in An Essay to Revive the Antient Education of Gentle-women (1673), not only directed her remarks to her male readers but adopted a male persona for herself. "I am a Man my self, that would not suggest a thing prejudicial to our Sex." Female authors often used such a strategy in order to reassure their male audience that what they were proposing would not threaten the male prerogative, demonstrating their presumption that the majority of their readers would be men. Mary Astell, however, did not believe at all in playing to the male audience. In fact, she did nothing to hide the fact that a female was author of the work, announcing on the title page that it was written by a "Lover of her Sex." It might be said that through her use of the pronouns "we" and "us" she tried to appeal to the women directly by means of her femaleness, as well as to persuade or counsel them that they would be better Christians if they followed her lead: "Let us learn to pride our selves in something more excellent than the invention of a Fashion, and not entertain such a degrading thought of our own worth, as to imagine that our Souls were given us only for the service of our Bodies, and that the best we can make of these, is to attract the Eyes of Men." Although Astell published the work anonymously, her authorship was well known to London readers.

Astell's book was stylistically uncommon, also, in the informality of its language and its direct and insistent tone. In urging her female readers to read the entire book and to consider the seriousness of her proposal, she maintained, "This is a Matter infinitely more worthy your Debates, than what Colours are most agreeable, or what's the Dress become you best. Your Glass [mirror] will not do you half so much service as a serious reflection on your own Minds, which will discover Irregularities more worthy your Correction, and keep you from being either too much elated or depress'd by the Representations of the other."

The proposal she strongly advocated was the establishment of a female "Monastery, or if you will … we will call it a Religious Retirement," which would allow women "to attend the great business they came into the world about, the service of GOD and improvement of their own Minds, [where they] may find a convenient and blissful recess from the noise and hurry of the world." The suggestion aroused controversy partly because use of the word monastery invoked both an institution and an idea embraced by the Catholic Church, the "enemy" church to the Church of England. Astell offered a vague program of study in her book, which should have reassured the English Anglicans that such female academies would not be seedbeds of Catholic thought; it did not, however. The simple lifestyle the women would lead also worried the readership. In their minds, Astell's description paints the picture of nun-like women who dress simply, wear no make-up or perfume, eat no meat, and pass their time in study, prayer, listening to music, and teaching.

Astell believed that a female monastery could benefit English society as a whole as well as offer a respectable and useful refuge for those young women, particularly the daughters of the more wealthy families, who might not want to marry or might simply want the opportunity to develop their minds before marriage.

[H]ere Heiresses and Persons of Fortune may be kept secure from the rude attempts of designing Men; And she who has more Money than Discretion need not curse her Stars for being expos'd a prey to bold importunate and rapacious Vultures. She will not here be inveigled and impos'd on, will neither be bought nor sold, nor be forc'd to marry for her own quiet, when she has no inclination to it, but what the being tir'd out with a restless importunity occasions. Or if she be dispos'd to marry, here she may remain in safety till a convenient Match be offer'd by her Friends, and be freed from the danger of a dishonourable one.

In an age when the daughters of the rich were often victimized by marriages arranged by their parents for economic or political reasons, Astell's alternative would have given women a choice about their futures. The proposal must have been colored by Astell's own history, since such an option when she was a young woman in Newcastle would surely have led to a far different life.

Mary Astell's next book took the form of a correspondence, exchanged with the Reverend John Norris, who was author of a number of important books of philosophy and one of England's most important Cambridge Platonists, whose writings showed the influence of the contemporary French philosopher Nicolas Male-branche. Simply stated, Norris believed that only God could create the pleasures that human beings can experience, that truth is created by God, that human beings should love God, and that God should be the object of all knowledge. The central importance of God in his philosophy made Norris an attractive thinker to Astell, as she too believed that human beings should direct all their energies, intellectual and otherwise, toward God. Astell seems to have initiated the correspondence with Norris, but he arranged for the publication of their letters, partly because he was so surprised that a woman could engage him in such a lengthy and intellectually challenging exchange. His attitude is explained in the preface:

The Letters herelaid open to thy View are a late Correspondence between my self and a Gentlewoman, and to add to thy Wonder, a young Gentlewoman. Her Name I have not the Liberty to publish. For her Person, as her Modesty will not suffer me to say much of her, so the present Productions of her Pen make it utterly needless to say any thing, unless it be by way of Prevention to obviate a Diffidence in some who from the surprizing Excellency of these Writings may be tempted to question whether my Correspondent be really a Woman or no.

There are 13 letters in all, with the last two serving as a review of the correspondence. All were written between September 1693 and September 1694, which makes the work contemporaneous with Astell's A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, but the boldness of A Serious Proposal is not evident in this correspondence. In the first letter, we see a more reflective and less accusatory author, although the assertion of her female self is still very pronounced:

Though some morose Gentlemen wou'd perhaps remit me to the Distaff or the Kitchin, or at least to the Glass and the needle, the proper Employments as they fancy of a Woman's Life; yet expecting better things from the more Equitable and Ingenious Mr. Norris, who is not so narrow-Soul'd as to confine Learning to his own Sex, or to envy it in ours, I presume to beg his Attention a little to the Impertinencies of a Woman's Pen.

While Astell clearly regards Norris as the teacher in their relationship, this did not prevent her from offering a slight corrective to his belief that God creates all the pleasures human beings can feel. She even extends Norris' argument a bit further, saying that God must also be the creator of pain, and that humans should thank God for pain and learn the lesson that must be the reason for it. The volume presents an honest and rigorous intellectual exchange in which the correspondents agree far more than they amend or disagree.

In 1697, Astell offered a second part to her earlier A Serious Proposal. Titled A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Part II: Wherein a Method is Offer'd for the Improvement of their Minds, it reveals the author's frustration that her earlier proposal had not yet been put into practice.

It is not enough to wish and to would it, or t'afford a faint Encomium upon what you pretend is beyond your Power; Imitation is the heartiest Praise you can give, and is a Debt whose Justice requires to be paid to every worthy Action. What Sentiments were fit to be rais'd in you to day ought to remain to morrow, and the best Commendation you can bestow on a Book is immediately to put it in Practice…. If you approve, Why don't you follow? And if you Wish, Why shou'd you not Endeavour?

This work, much longer than its predecessor, is divided into four sections. In them, she discusses the relationship between ignorance and vice and knowledge and purity; how women might cleanse themselves of some of their bad qualities; how a (female) mind should be developed and put to use; and how a woman should govern her will and her passions. The prose is as lively as the earlier part, although it loses some of its rhetorical flair as Astell works to explain the principles and theories of her proposal in greater detail.

What is most clearly expressed in this part is the essentially religious (as opposed to purely feminist) vision that guided Astell's thinking and being. It was her hope that her proposals would promote a lifestyle for women that would give them a chance for equality before and with God more than it did equality with men in a political or social sense.

For it is to little purpose to Think well and speak well, unless we Live well, this is our Great Affair and truest Excellency, the other are no further to be regarded than as they may assist us in this. She who does not draw this Inference from her Studies has Thought in vain, her notions are Erroneous and Mistaken. And all her Eloquence is but an empty noise, who employs it in any other design than in gaining Proselytes to Heaven.

A Serious Proposal touched a chord in late 17th-century English society and became Astell's most popular work, published in five editions by 1701. The work that followed it, Some Reflections upon Marriage (1700), was similarly controversial. Prompted by the social debate then raging about the life history of the recently deceased Hortense Mancini , duchess of Mazarin, Astell and other London literary figures used the unorthodox marriage of the French noblewoman as a point of departure for discussions of legal and moral authority within the institution of marriage. At the center of the controversy was the fact that the duchess, as a young woman, had abandoned her husband, the duke of Mazarin, because of his religious fanaticism, sexual perversions, jealousy, and a tendency to spend her considerable family fortune. When she was ordered by a French court to return to her husband and submit to his authority, she escaped to England. Charles II, king of England, who knew the duchess from the days of his own exile in Paris, awarded her a large pension, which allowed her to lead a fast-paced, eccentric, and debauched life that rivaled the conduct of some of the most famous male courtiers of the time.

While Astell's conservative outlook could not allow her to agree with those who said the duchess had a right to leave her marriage, she wrote in sympathy of the duchess' plight.

To be yok'd for Life to a disagreeable Person and Temper; to have Folly and Ignorance tyrannize over Wit and Sense; to be contradicted in every thing one does or says, and bore down not by Reason but Authority; to be denied one's most innocent desires, for no other cause but the Will and Pleasure of an absolute Lord and Master, whose Follies a Woman with all her Prudence cannot hide, and whose Commands she cannot but despise at the same time she obeys them; is a misery none can have a just Idea of, but those who have felt it…. But Madam Mazarin is dead, may her Faults die with her; may there be no more occasion given for the like Adventures, or if there is, may the Ladies be more Wise than Good than to take it!

Astell saw the problem as one relating to the moral weakness of human beings rather than the institution of marriage itself. For Astell, the ideal of marriage was created by God, and therefore beyond reproach or human correction; but marriage as it existed in her society was not a representation of God's vision so much as a manifestation of how frail human beings could misuse and abuse the power and the practices of the institution.

Although women were not blameless, Astell found the greatest fault with men because they were the ones who gave a higher priority to financial concerns than to the potential for friendship between spouses:

But if Marriage be such a blessed State, how comes it, may you say, that there are so few happy Marriages? Now in answer to this, it is not to be wonder'd that so few succeed, we should rather be surpriz'd to find so many do, considering how imprudently Men engage, the Motives they act by, and the very strange Conduct they observe throughout. For pray, what do Men propose to themselves in Marriage? What Qualifications do they look after in a Spouse? What will she bring is the first enquiry? How many Acres? Or how much ready Coin?

In Astell's mind, friendship should be the "chief inducement" to the choice of spouse because "we can never grow weary of our Friends; the longer we have had them the more they are endear'd to us." For her time period, Astell's view was idealistic and somewhat unrealistic, especially in regard to upper-middle-class and aristocratic marriages. But friendship between spouses gained in social value throughout the century as many who entered into the institution began to write about it.

For Astell, her views of governance and obedience within marriage mirrored her views on how society at large should be governed and who should rule. As a monarchist, Astell greatly distrusted the Whig political party and others who were advancing an argument and legislative program in Parliament that would strip away the power of the monarch in favor of power held by the Parliament. In the preface to the third edition of Some Reflections, published in 1706, she expresses her belief that many members of Parliament were corruptible men who embraced society's generally low opinion of women. In her mind, such men were not fit husbands nor fit rulers.

For if arbitrary power is evil in it self, and an improper method of governing rational and free agents, it ought not to be practis'd any where; nor is it less, but rather more mischievous in families than in kingdoms, by how much 10,000 tyrants are worse than one. What though a husband can't deprive a wife of life without being responsible to the law, he may, however, do what is much more grievous to a generous mind, render life miserable, for which she has no redress…. If all men are born free, how is it that all women are born slaves? As they must be, if the being subjected to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary will of men, be the perfect condition of slavery?

For Astell, the only hope for the institution of marriage and the society at large was for those involved to correct the flawed practices that had been established by frail, fearful, and mistaken human beings who had fallen away from leading lifestyles inspired and directed by God.

In England at the start of the 18th century, political battles were waged with more ferocity than domestic ones, and religious battles often turned political. One of the most troubling and divisive issues of the time was whether non-Anglicans could go to an Anglican service once a year, declare "occasional conformity" with the state religion, and thus be qualified for government service and eligible for local and national elective offices. Tories were strongly against "occasional conformity," which they thought threatened the primacy of the Church of England and the power of the monarch as head of the Anglican religion.

In 1704, the Parliament had before it three bills that would prevent occasional conformity, and before each vote, first in the House of Commons and then in the House of Lords, many pamphlets were published advocating the Whig or the Tory position. The Tory party was strong in the House of Commons, which would vote for the bills, but the Whig party controlled the House of Lords, where the vote was against them. That year, Astell entered into the public debate, writing three pamphlets: Moderation Truly Stated, A Fair Way with Dissenters and Their Patrons, and An Impartial Enquiry into the Causes of Rebellion and Civil War. According to Ruth Perry, "Her strongly held opinions were convincing when delivered with the conversational informality possible in the pamphlet. Her sense of historical parallels, her moralizing, and her penchant for philosophical formulation worked well together and gave animation and variety to her reflections." All three pamphlets were regarded well enough for opposing writers to attack in response.

Many Anglicans, Astell included, considered those who pledged occasional conformity to be hypocrites, although Astell described them as "moderates." In Moderation Truly Stated, she wrote: "To be Moderate in Religion is the same thing as to be Lukewarm, which God so much abhors, that he has threatened to spew such out of his Mouth." Suspicious of those who could be false in matters pertaining to God and religion, she had a dreadful fear of the havoc they could wreak in government. In An Impartial Enquiry into the Causes of Rebellion and Civil War, she wrote in her usual blunt style:

Few govern themselves by Reason, and they who transgress its Laws, will always find somewhat or other to be uneasie at, and consequently will ever desire, and as far as they can endeavour, to change their Circumstances. But since there are more Fools in the World than Wise Men, and … Riches and Power are what Men covet, supposing these can procure them all they wish; Hopes to gain more, or at least to secure what one has, will always be a handle by which Human Nature may be mov'd, and carry'd about as the cunning Manager pleases. And therefore of Necessity in all Civil Wars and Commotions, there must be some Knaves at the head of a great many Fools.

In the next year, after the Tories had lost the battle over occasional conformity and were badly split within their own ranks, Mary Astell published The Christian Religion, As Profess'd by a Daughter of the Church of England, a long work that asserts her own confidence in her faith, her church, and herself in bold terms: "I am a Christian then, and a member of the Church of England, not because I was Born in England, and Educated by Conforming Parents, but because I have, according to the best of my Understanding, and with some application and industry, examin'd the Doctrine and Precepts of Christianity, the Reasons and Authority on which it is built." Excluding the long table of contents and the index, this document is 418 pages long. The prose is direct and easy to understand, and the five sections return to many of the themes, like friendship and the development of reason, addressed in her earlier works.

By this time, English readers had good reason to know who Mary Astell was. Popular authors like Daniel Defoe, Richard Steele, and Joseph Addison attacked and satirized her in some of their works, and her own publisher made sure to keep all of her books in print and available to the public. The printer Richard Wilkin published a second edition of her Letters Concerning God in 1705, after a second edition of Some Reflections Upon Marriage had appeared in 1703, and a fourth edition of A Serious Proposal in Two Parts in 1704.

Astell published only one more original work in her lifetime, Bart'lemy Fair: or, An Inquiry After Wit (1709). It was written in response to an anonymously published work, A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm, which compared the religiously faithful French Huguenots—and, by implication, others who were also fervently loyal to their faith—with people who experience bouts of insanity. Thus, the Letter calls religious faith into question by likening it to a mere explosion of emotions, in contrast to Astell's belief that reason should be at the center of one's faith. Although Astell did not know it, the author of A Letter was Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third earl of Shaftesbury, one of England's most influential noble-philosophers. His later work of 1711, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, advanced an essentially optimistic view that man's innate goodness, or at least the goodness of the upper-class males, would lead society to greater glory. This, too, would have been rejected by Astell, who was especially suspicious of rich and powerful men.

Soon after the appearance of Bart'lemy Fair, Astell's writing came to an end, after she became immersed in the work of establishing a charity school for the daughters of pensioners (retired servicemen, generally) of the Royal Hospital in Chelsea, where she was headmistress for the next several years. Helping Astell, particularly with financial support, were a number of her upper-class female friends. Little is known about her life after Astell retired from the school. Judging from the letters she wrote, she suffered from bouts of sickness, read as much as she could, attended church faithfully, and socialized. She died in 1731 from spreading breast cancer.

It is ironic that Mary Astell is remembered and honored more by feminist scholars today than by the women of her own era. As Perry says, "She was forgotten almost immediately, with a rapidity which is surprising, even granted her own frequent observation that history tended to record the exploits of men and to ignore those of women." Perhaps this was so because she uttered the truth as she saw it so plainly and so simply. Moreover, the challenges in her writings were to the women of her time rather than the men. Although she wanted to "rescue my Sex," the majority of them were not yet ready to listen to her.

sources:

Astell, Mary. The Christian Religion, As Profess'd by a Daughter of the Church of England. London, 1705.

——. The First English Feminist: Reflections upon Marriage and other Writings by Mary Astell. Ed. with an intro. by Bridget Hill. NY: St. Martin's Press, 1986.

——. Letters Concerning the Love of God. London, 1695.

——. A Serious Proposal to the Ladies. 4th Edition. 1701. Reprint. NY: Source Book Press, 1970.

Makin, Bathsua. An Essay to Revive the Antient Education of Gentlewomen. London, 1673 (reprint, Los Angeles: The Augustan Reprint Society, 1980).

Perry, Ruth. The Celebrated Mary Astell: An Early English Feminist. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.