SOURCE: Hill, Bridget. Introduction to The First English Feminist: Reflections Upon Marriage and other writings by Mary Astell, edited by Bridget Hill, pp. 1-62. Aldershot, Hants: Gower/Maurice Temple Smith, 1986.

[In following excerpt, Hill provides an overview of Astell's life and works, focusing on A Serious Proposal to the Ladies and Some Reflections Upon Marriage.]

Today Mary Astell is better known in the U.S.A. than in her own country. Yet few works of social history on the period of her life fail to make some reference to her. Often she is labelled by the authors as an early—if not the first—English feminist. Such a claim is made on the basis of two of her works: A Serious Proposal, Part I and Reflections upon Marriage, her so-called ‘feminist’ writings.¹ In these two works she outlined her deeply pessimistic views of marriage and the bleak prospects for happiness that it offered. In her analysis the most biting sarcasm is reserved for the enemy—men. Her solution, or rather the only palliative she could see for women in this situation, was more education. She argued fiercely against the natural inferiority of women, maintaining that it was not to nature but to women's exclusion from the education enjoyed by men, that any inferiority was due.

At her best Mary Astell is very quotable. Her meaning is conveyed by the force of her words. She wrote in a highly combative, not to say bold, style. Her readers are immediately aware of the anger and passion behind her words—a passion that is sometimes barely contained.

If she had written nothing else besides these two works, Mary Astell would deserve far greater study than she has received so far. On the basis of these two works alone the powerful and independent intelligence of a remarkable woman is revealed. That both works ran to several editions in her lifetime suggests something of their popularity among her contemporaries.

Her reputation today continues to rest almost exclusively on these ‘feminist’ writings. With modern feminism in the process of discovering its roots this is not surprising. The search provides a powerful motivation behind all study of women's history, and a valid one. But in the case of Mary Astell such an approach leaves too much unexplained. If she is seen as the author of these two works alone, the historian's problem is simplified: Mary Astell can be neatly labelled as an early feminist expressing enlightened views on the education of women and wittily satirising the submissive role of women in marriage. Unfortunately such a view of her is inadequate. It distorts the real Mary Astell by ignoring her complexity, and by failing to see her contradictions and the paradoxes in her thinking. Whether or not she was a feminist, she was so many other things besides—a sincerely devout woman of high Anglican and Tory sympathies, a woman with sufficient familiarity with the scriptures and current theological debate to be equal to taking on some of the leading religious thinkers of her time. She was a passionate believer in the divine right of kings at a time when few were prepared to expound such an ‘old-fashioned’ doctrine. She joined swords with Daniel Defoe by savagely attacking dissenters at the time of the Occasional Conformity debate.² She was to attack Dr White Kennett's sermon on the fast of the martyrdom of Charles I because of its failure to analyse correctly the causes of the Civil War, and totally to absolve the King from any blame.³

Along with the great diversity of her writings and the seeming paradoxes they present, there is Mary Astell herself; one moment she addresses herself to ‘Persons of Quality’, and the next to the foundation of a charity school for the daughters of Chelsea pensioners. There is Mary Astell, the possessor of the sharpest of tongues, who could assassinate in words the characters of her enemies, and the writer of poetry on love and friendship. There is the malicious scorn she heaped on the heads of men and the unsparing admiration she expressed for her own sex.

It is this very complexity of her character, the conflicting and contradictory nature of her ideas, that makes her so intriguing and so worthy a subject of study.

In 1915 Florence Smith, a student at Columbia University, submitted a thesis for her Doctor of Philosophy degree. Its subject was Mary Astell. The thesis was approved and published by the University press in 1916,⁴ at which time little was known of Mary Astell, and indeed, very little interest was shown in either her or her work. Three articles on her had appeared in the 1890s—two of them, significantly, by women⁵—and later, in 1913, an article had portrayed her as one of a group of ‘English Femmes Savantes’ at the end of the seventeenth century.⁶ But, as far as we know, the publication of Florence Smith's thesis aroused little contemporary interest, and it seems to have lain dormant for some years until, in the 1960s, sufficient demand for access to the work prompted the publishers to reprint it.

Florence Smith's concern with Mary Astell's writings began with an interest in women's education in late seventeenth and early eighteenth century England. In the event, the research contained in her thesis went way beyond such initial and limited interest and probed not only Mary Astell's writings on education but those on marriage and the relations between the sexes. Its analysis of her political and religious writings revealed her very diverse interests and, indeed, the wide knowledge she brought to bear on the major religious and political controversies of her time. The thesis remains an essential starting-point for anyone concerned with Mary Astell's life and work.

Our knowledge of her life is still tantalisingly scant. There are long periods when we have no trace of her existence. Innumerable questions that might contribute to a greater understanding of her must remain unanswered. Most would-be biographers have gone back to the work of George Ballard for the bare facts.⁷ Unfortunately even these are often suspect, if not clearly in error. What is strange is that only 20 years after her death, although she was still read with interest and even enthusiasm, the facts about her life seem to have vanished nearly into obscurity. It was not that Ballard did not try. He wrote to all her surviving friends seeking information about her. Yet often he met with no success and, when this happened, he seems not to have been averse to relying on rumours. Since his writings, very little has been added to our knowledge of her. Other accounts of her life, particularly in the 50 or so years after Ballard, are nevertheless of interest for they do occasionally provide information about her not included by Ballard which suggests access to additional sources.⁸

EARLY LIFE

Mary Astell was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne on 12 November 1666. Her parents, Peter and Mary Astell, had been married the previous year. The marriage united the families of the Astells and Erringtons, both of which had earlier played an important role in the history of the town. The Erringtons, like the Astells, were a merchant family associated with the Hostmen's Company.

Mary was one of three children. William had died in infancy; Peter was to become a lawyer, remain in Newcastle all his life, and die in 1711. Their father was enrolled as an apprentice in the Company of Hostmen in 1653 when he was described as the son of ‘William Astell of Newcastle gentleman’.⁹ This would seem to identify a former under-sheriff of Newcastle, who was a noted Royalist and who died in 1658.¹⁰ Probably also in 1653, Peter Astell senior was made a Clerk of the Company, and continued to hold this position until his death.¹¹ In 1655 he was made responsible for the collection of duty on the export of all grindstones, whetstones, or rubstones—a privileged export right confined to members of the Hostmen. At the time, however, he was still serving his apprenticeship and was described as ‘servant unto Mr George Dawson, Alderman.’¹² Clearly the Company had some difficulty collecting the fines imposed on its members, for the next mention of Peter Astell was in 1661 when he was named as one of those empowered to ‘distreine the Goods’ of those who had broken the Company's regulations.¹³ He was only to become a member of the Company of Hostmen in 1674, just over four years before his death.¹⁴ In the register of St John's Church, Newcastle, his burial is recorded on 21 March 1678-79 as ‘Peter Astell Gent’.¹⁵

The Hostmen had enjoyed a virtual monopoly of coal and grindstone shipments since early in the sixteenth century but, under Elizabeth I, the Company was incorporated and their exclusive privileges confirmed. Before the Civil War the Company had exercised a dominant role in Newcastle political and economic life. Indeed the hold of a small élite of the Company over the town increased as the century advanced. During the Civil War control of the Company passed to new hands, particularly those of the Dawsons, a leading Puritan family, one of whom—Henry Dawson—had been largely responsible for the creation in the late 1630's of an unofficial lectureship in his house. In fact little was changed in the Company as a result of the war, and after 1659 control passed from the radicals back to the moderates. On the whole members of the Company tended to share the political conservatism, and often the catholicism, of the gentry of the north.¹⁶

The Astell family, then, in the second half of the seventeenth century, would seem to have been people of some substance, of conservative, perhaps Royalist, sympathies. Yet in passing, it might be remarked that Peter Astell served his apprenticeship under George Dawson, one of the leading Puritan family mentioned earlier, whose members were purged from the Corporation in 1643 when the Earl of Newcastle occupied the town for the King, and that one of the same group of Puritans was Anthony Errington, a warden of the Merchant Adventurers who in 1633 had been of the Reform party opposed to the oligarchical hold of the inner ring of the Hostmen's Company.

The most interesting member of the Astell family, apart from Mary, is Ralph Astell. He was an MA and became curate of St Nicholas's church, Newcastle, in 1667. In 1660 he had demonstrated his loyalty to the Crown by publishing Vota Non Bella, an exceedingly bad poem expressing pro-monarchist principles. Of course it proves nothing. Many former Parliamentarians in the same circumstances had been all too anxious to establish their loyalty to the King. In this respect Ralph Astell is not remarkable. There is one brief reference to him in the Gateshead Church Records of 1675-76: ‘one pinte of sack when Mr. Astell preached, 1s.2d., six quarts of Wyne and sack for one Communion 6s.9d.’¹⁷ But it is to John Brand, the antiquarian, we owe the additional and significant piece of information, apparently drawn from Bishop Cosin's register, that in 1667 Ralph Astell was ‘suspended for bad behaviour’.¹⁸ He was to die two years later. Had his demonstration of pro-monarchical zeal been unconvincing? We do not know, but what makes him of interest is that, according to Ballard, he was ‘the uncle who was a clergyman’ responsible for giving Mary Astell a good education.¹⁹ Observing ‘her aptitude for learning’,²⁰ he is said to have instructed her in ‘philosophy, mathematics and logic’.²¹ He is also said to have taught her Latin and French. Yet later, in her correspondence with Henry Dodwell, the scholar and theologian, about his A Case in View Considered, (1705) in which the future relationship between non-jurors and the Church was reviewed, it emerged that ‘she did not understand Latin, as Mr Dodwell, from her quoting ancient authors, thought she had, but she told him she read them in the French and other Translations’.²²

Mary Pilkington emphasises her ‘acuteness of understanding’ as a child,²³ and George Ballard remarks on her having a ‘piercing wit, a solid judgement, and tenacious memory’.²⁴ Yet if Ralph Astell was in fact her teacher she must have been a remarkably precocious child as he died when she was only thirteen!

How her important teenage years were spent we do not know. It is possible that she continued her education under another tutor, or she may have been sent to school, or, for at least part of this time, she may have been employed in nursing her mother who was to die in October 1684. It was almost certainly her mother who is referred to in the Hostmen Company records as ‘old Mrs. Astell’ who was given a pension of £3 6s 8d per annum ‘during the Companies pleasure’ after the death of their clerk.²⁵

Mary was now eighteen and an orphan. Two years later, it is suggested, she left Newcastle for London. For a girl of twenty to set off for the metropolis, turning her back on her home and family, her friends and relations, seems extraordinary. It was certainly unusual. Was she alone? In her letter to Archbishop Sancroft, the non-juror, that prefaces the collection of poems she sent to him in 1689, she mentions how the Archbishop was ‘pleased to receive a poor unknown, who hath no place to fly unto’.²⁶ In her biographical sketch of Mary Astell, Mary Pilkington tells us that her move to London was ‘for the purpose of letting them [her own sex] benefit by the information she had gained’.²⁷

In those early years in London, of which we know so little, Mary Hays was later to suggest that Mary Astell ‘prosecuted her studies with diligence and success’. From her subsequent writings it seems certain she must have read widely in philosophy, politics, theology and history. The same writer also insists that in the period immediately following her arrival in London she devoted herself to scientific studies.²⁸

There is no evidence of the exact date of her arrival in London. If as has been suggested, she came to London in her twentieth year she would have arrived three years before her collection of poems was sent to Archbishop Sancroft in 1689. The prefatory letter to that collection implies she had been there a little time before she wrote. The evidence contained in the earlier letter of approach to Sancroft on her first arrival in London, when help and advice had been given her, poses some unanswerable questions. How had she come to know the Archbishop? Or, if she did not know him, and had no introduction to him, how very extraordinary it was for a young girl to decide to write to him! Even more extraordinary was her subsequently sending him two volumes of her poems! It is tantalising to speculate on the significance of the words she used to describe to him her departure from Newcastle and arrival in London ‘when even my kinsfolk had failed, and my familiar Friends had forgotten me’.²⁹

We do not know where she lived on her first arrival in London. For a considerable period of her London life she lived in Chelsea. One writer has argued that she settled there ‘to be near her friend and correspondent Bishop Atterbury’.³⁰ A nineteenth century account has her in a house ‘in Swan Walk, opposite the Physic Garden,’ from about 1715 to the time of her death in 1731.³¹ It seems probable, however, that she had lived in Chelsea ever since the 1690s. Her friendship with Lady Catherine Jones, the daughter of the Earl of Ranelagh, and her dedication to Lady Catherine of Letters Concerning the Love of God published in 1695, would suggest she was already a near neighbour to Ranelagh House where Lady Catherine lived at the time. A letter she wrote to Henry Dodwell in March 1706 was written from Chelsea.³² Ralph Thoresby went to visit a Chelsea friend in August, 1712, and on the way met ‘Mr. Croft, the minister who introduced me to the celebrated Mrs Astell’.³³

It was in those early years of her residence in London, when in her late 20s and 30s, that her major works were written. The period in which all but the last of her works appeared was relatively short—1694 to 1705. After this there was a gap of four years before her final work appeared.

THE LONDON YEARS

When she was 27, Mary Astell embarked on a series of exchanges with John Norris (1657-1711), Rector of Bemerton, near Salisbury. Norris has been described as ‘the last offshoot from the school of Cambridge Platonists’,³⁴ a group that included Ralph Cudworth, father of Damaris Masham, Henry More, Benjamin Whichcote and John Smith. Norris had corresponded with Henry More in the early 1680s. By the time the correspondence between Norris and Mary Astell began, the school of Cambridge Platonists was already in decline. As a student of Malebranche, Norris adopted the French philosopher's belief that we ‘see all things in God’. God, he believed, should be the sole and not just the principal object of our love. ‘We should collect and concentrate’, he wrote, ‘all the rays of our love into this one point, and lean towards God with the whole weight of our soul.’³⁵

How she came to know Norris or whether she knew him apart from his writings we do not know, but their exchange of letters began in 1693. She raised with him the question of how, according to his theory, pain and sin could be explained. If Norris was right in seeing God as the source of all our sensations, then was God not to be seen as the author of pain as well as pleasure? And as the author of pain could He remain the object of our love or would He not rather become that of our aversion? Norris expressed some surprise that it was a woman who saw flaws in his argument, and hastened to argue his way out of the difficulty. God, he argued, was indeed the author of all our sensations, and therefore of pain as well as of pleasure. But, he went on, she had failed to distinguish between two kinds of good, that which arises from the pleasure we feel and that which is done to us by God. So pain is given us by God as the punishment for sin. It may lead us to fear Him but not to hate Him. She responded by arguing that just as there were different kinds of good, so were there different kinds of pain: physical pain given us for our good by God, and intellectual pain, or what she identified as sin, which could not originate in God. Norris denied such a distinction and insisted that all pain is caused by God. Pain, he agreed, was evil but becomes a relative good as it is a way of avoiding greater evil. But, he went on, if all pain originates in God, sin does not. The exchange went on to a discussion of the nature of divine love—a subject on which they found themselves more in agreement.

Today, although the discussion between them is of little but historic interest, the letters do have another interest for us. Mary Astell had expressed some difficulty in accepting Norris's idea of God as the sole object of her love. Later they were to discuss together the distinction between the love of God and the love of friends, but in Letter III what had earlier been only a suspicion becomes a certainty.³⁶ The whole tone of this letter is intensely personal. She desperately appeals for Norris's help to cure her ‘disorder’, a passionate friendship with another woman, confessing that she found it difficult ‘to love at all, without something of Desire’. She was convinced by Norris's teaching but ‘sensible Beauty does too often press upon my Heart, whilst Intelligible is disregarded’. Pathetically she attempts to depersonalise her dilemma by expressing her friendship for women in general but the pretence breaks down. She admits to ‘an agreeable Movement in my soul towards her I love’ and confesses to finding Norris's teaching ‘that we may seek Creatures for our good, but not love them as our good’ is ‘too nice for common Practice’.

If she had hoped for a remedy, or even advice, from Norris she must have been disappointed. His only suggestion was more meditation!³⁷ Had he understood what she was trying to tell him? Might he have understood but decided to ignore it? In view of his later insistence on publishing the exchange it seems likely that he failed to appreciate her implicit confession of a passionate love for a woman.

If there was any doubt as to the object of her desire, it is soon dispelled when one looks at the letters exchanged between Norris and Mary Astell on the proposed publication of the correspondence. There was considerable reluctance on her part and it was only on Norris's insistence that she finally agreed. When she did it was on condition that her name should not be mentioned, and that the work should be dedicated to a lady she would name to him. The lady was Lady Catherine Jones, daughter of the Earl of Ranelagh, Paymaster General of the Navy. Lady Catherine was prominent in court circles and entertained George I at Ranelagh Gardens in 1715, when Handel's Water Music was played with the composer conducting an orchestra of 50 from one of the city barges.³⁸ The friendship between the two women seems to have begun soon after Mary Astell's move to London. If, as seems possible, Mary Astell settled in Chelsea soon after her arrival in London, Lady Catherine Jones would have been her near neighbour. The friendship was close, even passionate, but not, it appears, always a happy one. ‘None ever loved more generously than I have done’, Mary Astell wrote, ‘yet perhaps never any met with more ungrateful Returns.’³⁹ Earlier she had written of friendship that:

No loss nor sickness causeth such a smart,
No racks nor tortures so severely rend.
As the unkindness of a darling Friend.

It is tempting to see Lady Catherine as the subject of this poem. Although Mary had always ‘propos'd the noblest end’ of friendship, God had denied it to her.

Thrice blessed be thy jealousie,
Which would not part
With one small corner of my heart,
But has engross'd it all to thee.(40)

Isn't this much the same concern she attempted to communicate later to John Norris? If it is indeed a reference to Lady Catherine Jones it may date Mary Astell's residence in Chelsea from the 1680s.

When her father died in 1711 leaving large debts outstanding from the time he was Paymaster General, Lady Catherine and her two sisters petitioned Parliament for the right to sell their estate in order to settle the debt. Finally the petition was granted. Lady Catherine moved from the grandeur of Ranelagh Gardens to Jews Row—also in Chelsea.

According to Thomas Birch, writing to George Ballard in 1749, Mary Astell ‘lived many years at Chelsea with Lady Catherine’, but when exactly he does not say, and there is no confirmation of this suggestion.⁴¹ Nevertheless Jews Row was very close to Mary Astell's house.

The dedication to Lady Catherine in Letters Concerning the Love of God is fulsome. She was, we read, of ‘unfeigned goodness’, ‘eminent virtue’, ‘of so much sweetness and modesty’ and ‘a compleat and finished person’. She provided the author with ‘a lively idea of Apostolical Piety’. When they prayed together Mary Astell could fancy herself ‘in the neighbourhood of Seraphic Flames’. Finally, Mary Astell admits she loved her ‘with the greatest tenderness’.

If Lady Catherine was Mary Astell's most intimate friend, she was by no means her only woman friend. Of those others of whom we are aware it is noticeable how many were titled ladies. Apart from Lady Catherine there was Lady Anne Coventry, Lady Elizabeth Hastings and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. The exceptions were Elizabeth Elstob, that remarkable scholar of Anglo-Saxon who was later to become George Ballard's correspondent when he was compiling his Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain, and for a time was Mary Astell's neighbour in Chelsea, and Katherine Atterbury, wife of Francis, Bishop of Rochester, a leading spokesman of the new High Church party.

Lady Elizabeth Hastings was the fourth daughter of Theophilus, 7th Earl of Huntingdon of Ledstone Hall, Yorkshire. She was an ardent churchgoer and a very devout woman. When, in 1705, she inherited the family estate and became extremely rich, she was determined that ‘a wise and religious use was made of it’. She was to prove a generous benefactress. By all accounts she was a remarkably beautiful woman and much sought after by ‘several of the nobility’⁴² although she chose to remain unmarried. Her great fortune may have provided the reason, for she made clear that she regarded any marriage for money as a sure recipe for unhappiness. With Mary Astell she shared an interest in the expansion of education for women, and was one of those named as the would-be benefactress of Mary Astell's scheme for a ‘religious retirement’. Later, in 1709, with Lady Catherine Jones and other women, she was responsible for the founding of a charity school for the daughters of the pensioners at the Chelsea Royal Hospital, in the planning of which Mary Astell was closely involved.

Perhaps the most remarkable of her woman friends was Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762). Twenty years the younger, she was very far from conforming to the model of pious devotion that characterised many of Mary Astell's other close friends. She was however, a highly intelligent and gifted woman, and Mary Astell ‘triumphed in Lady Mary's talents as proofs of … the mental equality of the sexes, if not the superiority of women to men’.⁴³ She possessed one quality that Mary Astell particularly admired—a powerful independent spirit that rejected convention and custom—and also possessed the will to be her own person answerable to none. How the two women became acquainted we can only surmise. Possibly it was through their mutual friend and acquaintance, Lady Ranelagh, mother of Lady Catherine Jones, or through Lady Mary's aunt, Lady Cheyne who also lived in Chelsea. What is certain is that a copy of the first edition of A Serious Proposal was given to Lady Mary with an inscription in Mary Astell's hand (this copy is now in the British Library). This might suggest they were already friends in the 1690s when Lady Mary was still a child. Much later Lady Mary was to write to her daughter of how, at the age of 15, her desire had been ‘to found an English monastery for ladies’, and that had she then been ‘mistress of an independent fortune’, she would have carried out the project and ‘elected myself lady abbess’.⁴⁴ This suggests that she took Mary Astell's proposal seriously.

In 1724 Lady Mary forwarded to Mary Astell the manuscript copy of her Embassy Letters. After reading them Mary Astell was enthusiastic for their publication but the author insisted that they were not to be published during her lifetime. Yet in the copy she returned to Lady Mary, Mary Astell had inscribed a Preface which reflects ‘that fond partiality which old people of ardent tempers sometime entertain for a rising genius in their own line’.⁴⁵

It is through this friendship with Lady Mary that we have one of the most illuminating—and authentic—comments on Mary Astell. It comes from Lady Louisa Stuart, Lady Mary's grand-daughter, who included some introductory anecdotes when the Letters and Works of her grandmother were finally published. From her we learn that Mary Astell was ‘a very pious, exemplary woman, and a profound scholar’. But far from the ‘fair and elegant prefacer’ described by the first editor of the letters, she was ‘in outward form … rather ill-favoured and forbidding’ and, as her readers all too readily can believe, ‘of a humour to have repulsed the compliment roughly, had it been paid her while she lived’.⁴⁶ Such a description of her appearance is borne out by Mary Astell's own view of herself as ‘one to whom Nature has not been over liberal’.⁴⁷

In this humorous and gently teasing comment on Mary Astell, there is also a genuine admiration. ‘Whatever were her foibles and prejudices’, Lady Louisa writes, ‘her piety was genuine, fervent, and humble’.⁴⁸

Since most of their lives were spent with those of their own sex it is not surprising that friendship between women assumed such importance. In many cases women saw far more of their female friends than they did of their husbands, or other men. Katherine Phillips, the ‘matchless Orinda’ had earlier remarked how ‘men exclude women from friendship's vast capacity’.⁴⁹ For unmarried women friendship assumed an even greater importance, and this was certainly true for Mary Astell. ‘Having by Nature a strong Propensity to friendly Love’, she wrote, she was ‘loath to abandon all Thoughts of Friendship’.⁵⁰ She considered that ‘one considerable cause of the degeneracy’ of her age was ‘the little true Friendship that is to be found in it’.⁵¹ She thought one of the main advantages of her ‘Religious Retirement’ was ‘the opportunity of contracting the purest and noblest friendship’.⁵²

When presenting her Collection of Poems to Archbishop Sancroft in 1689 Mary Astell had written that it was ‘not without pain and reluctancy that I break from my beloved obscurity’.⁵³ Many of her biographers have presented her as a woman of great modesty. Ballard, for example, insists she was ‘extremely fond of obscurity, which she courted and doted on beyond all earthly blessings; and was as ambitious to slide gently through the world, without so much as being seen or taken notice of, as others are to bustle and make a figure in it’.⁵⁴ This apparent lack of ambition is supported by her resistance to Norris's attempts to persuade her to publish the Letters Concerning the Love of God, and her final agreement only on condition that Norris should ‘make no mention of my Name, no not so much as the initial Letters’.⁵⁵ When the Letters were published they were described as ‘between the Author of The Proposal to the Ladies and Mr. John Norris’. In fact A Serious Proposal to the Ladies had appeared not under her name but as ‘By a Lover of her Sex’. Nevertheless, there never seemed much doubt about her authorship and many freely acknowledged her authorship even though her name was never revealed. Indeed, she was ascribed authorship of two pamphlets that are clearly not hers at all; the anonymous An Essay in Defence of the Female Sex of 1696 and The Case of Moderation and Occasional Communion of 1705.⁵⁶

In all her writings, but most particularly in her poetry, ambition is a recurring theme. In the poem, ‘In Emulation of Mr Cowley’, written in her early 20s, she wrote:

What shall I do? not to be Rich or Great
Not to be courted and admir'd,
With Beauty blest, or Wit inspir'd,
Alas! these merit not my care and sweat,
These cannot my Ambition please.

If it was not for ‘Fame's trumpet having, so short a breath’ all would surely pursue ambition:

Who wou'd not then, with all their might
Study and strive to get themselves a name?(57)

Ambition then seems to have been something of a preoccupation with her. Yet the ambition she craved had nothing to do with personal fame or fortune. What she wanted was to make a mark in the world, and to make it as a woman. Her Reflections upon Marriage was first published anonymously in 1700, and only the third edition revealed, not her name, but her sex. So while she seemed reluctant to divulge her name as author, she was not so reluctant to reveal the author's sex. In her A Serious Proposal to the Ladies she called on women to ‘exalt and establish’ their ‘Fame’.⁵⁸ But the ‘fame’ she wanted for them was the recognition of women's ability and achievement wherever they were revealed. It was this concern that led her to praise so wholeheartedly Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Letters—‘pleas'd that a Woman Triumphs!’.⁵⁹

Mary Astell remained unmarried as did so many of the outstanding women of the period—Elizabeth Elstob, Jane Barker who admitted to ‘a secret disgust against matrimony’, Celia Fiennes, Anne Killigrew, Bathsua Makin among others. The attitude of late seventeenth and early eighteenth century society to such women reflected the absence of what had formerly been one of the two alternatives open to unmarried daughters—to marry or to go into a nunnery. Lawrence Stone has estimated that the percentage of recorded daughters of the gentry reaching the age of 50 who had never married rose from 10 per cent in the sixteenth century to nearly 25 per cent between 1675 and 1799.⁶⁰ The problem for the propertied class of what to do with unmarried daughters became acute. Unequipped both socially and economically to earn their own living they were increasingly resented as a burden on their family or relatives.

Mary Astell's proposal for a ‘Religious Retirement’ recognised the particular problem facing spinsters in a society where ‘all women are understood either married or to be married’.⁶¹ If women were not to marry, the best alternative was something resembling a nunnery, a place of at least temporary withdrawal from the world. Given the powerful pressure on them to marry, few women could view spinsterhood as other than abject failure. ‘Taught to think Marriage her only Preferment’,⁶² Mary Astell wrote, a woman never considered ‘that she should have a higher Design than to get her a Husband.’⁶³ Many ‘quite terrified with the dreadful Name of Old Maid’, sought refuge in ‘some dishonourable Match … to the disgrace of her Family and her own irreparable Ruin.’⁶⁴

Given more education, Mary Astell believed that there were women who having considered ‘the Good and Evil of a Married State’⁶⁵ would decide to reject it. Seeing the role wives were expected to play, some might well conclude it was ‘not good for a woman to marry.’⁶⁶ Part of her intention in Reflections was to suggest spinsterhood as a real alternative to marriage, and one which might give women, or at least upper-class women, a degree of independence. Earlier in the century Thomas Middleton's Roaring Girl had observed that only by remaining chaste could she retain her independence. ‘I have no humour to marry;’ she said, ‘I love to lie a' both sides a' the bed myself: and again, a' the other side, a wife, you know, ought to be obedient, but I fear I am too headstrong to obey; therefore I'll ne'er go about it … I have the head now of myself, and I am man enough for a woman: marriage is but a chopping and changing, where a maiden loses one head, and has a worse i' the place.’⁶⁷

After talking of how the responsibility in the family for educating children, ‘a most necessary Employment, perhaps the chief of those who have any’, fell on the mother and therefore how important her education was, Mary Astell hastened to reassure those without children. Knowledge, she told them, ‘would not lie dead upon their hands’ for ‘the whole World is a single Lady's Family, her opportunities of doing good are not lessen'd but encreas'd by her being unconfin'd.’⁶⁸ It was a generous phrase in keeping with the generosity of her sympathy with women who remained unmarried.

For women like herself, lacking beauty and fortune, Mary Astell saw spinsterhood as offering a unique liberty:

O how uneasy shou'd I be,
If tied to Custom and formalitie,
Those necessary evils of the Great,
Which bind their hands and manacle their feet,
Nor Beauty, Parts, nor Portion are expose
My most beloved Liberty to lose.(69)

It was a revolutionary idea. Not all women were capable of supporting themselves, and even fewer could earn a living through writing. But where they were financially independent, spinsterhood offered the possibility of self-fulfilment. Such women, with Mary Astell, could thank heaven that:

… my time is all my own,
I when I please can be alone;
Nor Company, Nor Courtship steal away
That treasure they can ne're repay.(70)

Those women who could view spinsterhood with equanimity were few. The same scorn with which spinsterhood was regarded was transferred to any woman aspiring to learning. ‘A Learned Woman’, as Bathsua Makin observed, ‘is thought to be a Comet that bodes Mischief whenever it appears’.⁷¹ Just as the spinster was seen as unnatural and a freak, so was the ‘learned lady’ regarded as betraying unwomanly and masculine characteristics. If you were a woman of learning it might be better to conceal the fact! Indeed this was precisely the advice Lady Mary Wortley Montagu gave her granddaughter, for as she put it ‘the parade of it can only serve to draw on her the envy, and consequently the most inveterate hatred’.⁷²

Many women of intelligence, even the strongest and most confident, were inhibited from revealing their real abilities by the scorn for learning. Those women who wrote were reluctant to reveal their authorship of books. The first time that Susan Centlivre's play, The Platonic Lady, was performed in 1706, it ran for only four days. In the edition of the following year was a dedication ‘to the generous encouragers of female ingenuity’ of whom she hoped to find sufficient ‘to protect her against the carping malice of the vulgar world, who think it a proof of their sense to dislike everything that is writ by women.’⁷³ Even Katherine Philips, the ‘matchless Orinda’, admitted that sometimes she thought the writing of poetry was ‘a diversion so unfit for the sex to which I belong that I am about to resolve against it for ever.’⁷⁴ In the Epistle prefacing the Duchess of Newcastle's Philosophical and Physical Opinions in 1663, the Duke pinpointed the reasons for the doubt cast on her authorship since ‘no lady could understand so many hard words.’ ‘Here's the crime’, he wrote, ‘a Lady writes them, and to intrench so much on the male prerogative is not to be forgiven.’⁷⁵

Mary Astell was very conscious of the way in which anything from a female author was regarded. In John Norris's preface, To the Reader, in Letters Concerning the Love of God, he acknowledged that after reading Mary Astell there might be ‘a diffidence in some who from the excellency of these writings may be tempted to question whether my correspondent be a woman or not’.⁷⁶ In her first letter to Norris Mary Astell presumed ‘to beg his attention a little to the impertinencies of a Woman's pen’.⁷⁷

‘Learned ladies’ were the subject of numerous satires and Mary Astell's notion of a ‘Religious Retirement’ did not escape attention. In The Tatler Swift referred to her as ‘a profess'd Platonne, the most unaccountable Creature of her Sex’. She was described as having ‘run over Norris, and Moor, and Milton, and the whole Set of Intellectual Triflers’. She was cast in the role of Madonella, the head of a Protestant nunnery where, in association with her friend Lady Elizabeth Hastings and others described as ‘this Order of Platonick Ladies’,⁷⁸ she led a staff consisting of Elizabeth Elstob and Mary de la Rivière Manley—a wonderfully ill-assorted pair!⁷⁹ Mary Astell's ‘Religious Retirement’ was described as a ‘College for Young Damsels; where instead of Scissors, Needles, and Samplers; Pens, Compasses, Quadrants, Books, Manuscripts, Greek, Latin, and Hebrew are to take up the whole Time’. Manley was to give the inmates ‘at least a superficial Tincture of the Ancient and Modern Amazonian Tacticks’!⁸⁰

In the plays of the period the ‘learned lady’ was a stock subject for satire. Perhaps the most sympathetic of such learned ladies—and the one closest to Mary Astell—was Valeria in Susan Centlivre's The Bassett Table, first performed in 1705. Valeria, ‘that little She-Philosopher’ as she is called by Ensign Lovely, her doting admirer, is preoccupied with natural philosophy and is at present mad about dissecting insects. One of the other female characters refers to learning as ‘ridiculous indeed for Women; Philosophy suits our Sex, as Jack Boots would do’. ‘Custom’, replies Valeria, ‘would bring them as much in Fashion as Furbeloes, and Practice would make us as valiant as e'er a Hero of them all: the Resolution is in the Mind—Nothing can enslave that.’ What most suggests that Susan Centlivre was thinking of Mary Astell is the mocking suggestion that Valeria might found ‘a College for the Study of Philosophy, where none but Women should be admitted …’ The response from Valeria was worthy of Mary Astell. ‘What you make jest of’, she retorts, ‘I'd execute, were Fortune in my Power.’ When Ensign Lovely fears the advances a Captain Hearty is making to her, Valeria reassures him: ‘If he was a Whale, he might give you pain, for I should long to dissect him; but as he is a Man, you have no reason to fear him!’⁸¹

Whenever in history women had achieved anything remarkable, Mary Astell pointed out, men tended to dismiss it claiming ‘that women acted above their sex. By which we must suppose they wou'd have their Readers understand, that they were not Women who did those Great Actions, but that they were Men in Petticoats!’⁸²

Of her later life we know little. Yet from the mere fragments of information that exist we learn something of the austerity and self-discipline of her character. According to one account ‘ascetic habits and physical suffering’ prevented her writing after 1710, ‘and she gave herself up to devotion.’⁸³ Mary Pilkington related how although ‘mild and merciful’ to the faults of others, ‘to errors committed by herself she was much more severe; and when guilty of those slight imperfections to which the most virtuous are liable, she wou'd punish them with an abstinence scarcely to be endured’.⁸⁴ ‘Abstinence’, she is said to have insisted, ‘was the best physic.’⁸⁵ Every Sunday, regardless of the weather, she would walk from her home in Chelsea to St Martin's Church to hear her favourite preacher. Ultimately she was to die of cancer. For some years, we are told, she concealed the disease from her friends and when finally she sought the advice of a surgeon it was too late. Her breast was removed, an operation she endured ‘with a degree of fortitude which astonished the surgeon … and in spite of all arguments could not be persuaded to suffer her person to be held.’⁸⁶ That few of her friends knew of her condition is confirmed by Lady Louisa Stuart who describes a meeting between her grandmother and Mary a few weeks before she died. After ‘a serious discussion of some religious subject, very eagerly pursued on Mrs. Astell's side’, there occurred a pause and she confided to Lady Mary that she was dying. Then to demonstrate her friendship with Lady Mary she went on: ‘if departed spirits be permitted to revisit those whom they have loved on earth, remember I make you a solemn promise that mine shall appear to you and confirm the truth of all I have been saying.’⁸⁷

Of Mary's last few days we have the account sent in a letter from Lady Elizabeth Hastings to Bishop Wilson ten days after her death on 9th May 1731. She wrote how ‘she was five days actually a-dying, Lady Catherine Jones was with her two days before her death; she then begged to see no more of her old acquaintance and friends, having done with the world and made her peace with God’.⁸⁸

THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

The society at which Mary Astell directed her work on the education of women, the nature of the marriage contract and the submissive role women were expected to play as wives, was that of the 1690s and early 1700s. Looking back to the developments over the century exactly how, for better or worse, had the position of women changed? It is a complex question and one not easily answered.⁸⁹

In a variety of ways the Civil War years and Interregnum had undermined traditional ideas of the family, marriage and women's role of obedience and submission to men. For women of both sides, and of all classes, the war had often meant the absence of husbands and the need for wives to take increased responsibilities in running the farm, the trade, or simply in coping with the day-to-day business of looking after the house, the children and servants, and tending the garden or smallholding that was the extent of their landed property. Such new responsibilities had led to an increased independence among many women. Some Royalist wives had even had experience of litigation in the attempt to get their husbands and their property released.

For many women the period had meant unprecedented involvement in political activity and, at least temporarily, the rejection of the notion that politics were men's business. In the petitioning of Parliament of the 1640s and 1650s women are now known to have played a significant role. Women petitioned for peace, against the evil effects of the decline of trade, against Bishops and the Laudian innovations, and for the release of their husbands from prison. They rioted against enclosures and took a leading role in political demonstrations of all kinds. There were many women Levellers—not least the wife of John Lilburne—and many petitioned Parliament for the release of the Leveller leaders in 1649. By their actions women seemed to be laying claim to the Leveller belief that men and women were born free and equal, and demonstrating their ability to speak and act for themselves—quite independently of their husbands.

The period of the Civil War and Interregnum had seen the breakdown of Church courts and the relaxation of supervision over the morals of men and women. Coupled with a greater social and physical mobility it resulted in much greater sexual freedom for women.

However, it was above all the contribution made by the sects—Baptists and, more particularly, Quakers and Ranters—which did most to undermine the patriarchal view of the family and the women's traditional role within it. Women apparently occupied a numerically dominant position within the sects. In many, the belief in self-government meant women played an increasing part in their organisation and management.

In the sects' insistence on individual conscience and the direct relationship between the believer and God, the role of the educated ministry and the authority of the Church was diminished. Above all it was the belief in the spiritual equality of men and women that contributed most to the part women played within the sects. The belief that women had equal souls with men had been emphasised earlier by Richard Bolton, but it was underlined by Samuel Torshell in 1645 when he wrote ‘The soul knows no difference of sex’. Some sects—the Baptists and, more particularly, the Quakers—taking such claims to their logical conclusion, allowed women to preach. As Fox was to ask: ‘May not the spirit of Christ speak in the female as well as in the male?’⁹⁰ Even more than preach, women prophesied. The horror of the outcry against such preaching and prophesying women makes clear that some critics saw clearly the threat to the traditional role of women such activities represented.

If preaching and prophesying enabled women to achieve a self-expression hitherto denied them, new ideas (some of them expressed by women themselves) on marriage, the injustices of a commercial marriage market, and on divorce encouraged them in practices which weakened the marriage bond, tended to erode the role of the husband as spiritual and temporal head of the household, questioned the unequal education given to women and their whole role of submission and obedience to their husbands.

The idea of the spiritual equality of the sexes and the supreme importance of individual conscience freed women from spiritual dependence on their husbands. When it came to a question of loyalty to a husband or loyalty to religious conviction it was the latter that won out. Thus Mrs Chidley asked in 1641 ‘what authority [the] unbelieving husband hath over the conscience of his believing wife; it is true he hath authority over her in bodily and civil respects, but not to be a lord over her conscience.’⁹¹ From the claim to religious independence for women it was but a short step to that of political and social independence. It was not just the unity of the Church that was threatened but the unity of the family.

So the 1640s and 1650s might seem to represent a great step in the emancipation of women; a permanent break with the past. But such a view of the influences at work in this period overlooks the extent and strength of the opposition which derived not just from Anglicans and Presbyterians but from the sects, or rather the male sectaries, themselves. They were usually all too anxious to make and maintain the distinction between the liberty of women to believe and worship as their consciences dictated, and the traditional role of obedience that women owed their husbands and fathers. And there were many who were not at all sure just how far women's liberty of conscience should be taken. With the Restoration and the sects' move towards less political objectives developed the trend towards more clearly defined institutional frameworks and a more traditional and conservative approach.

Of course there were other long-term tendencies that worked in the same direction—towards a return in emphasis to the traditional role of women. In the first place, the seventeenth century sees the beginning of a development that was to accelerate in the next century—the gradual decline in the economic opportunities for women, and even, as in the case of midwifery, brewing and printing, the exclusion of women from fields where hitherto they had been prominent. In agriculture farmers' wives who had enjoyed a role that was admittedly not one of equality, but at least approached an economic partnership with their husbands, were for reasons of choice as well as of developments in agriculture withdrawing from labour.

Another factor which mitigated against women was the changing sex ratio. Evidence suggests that although the sex ratio was lowest in towns, particularly London, the problem created by a surplus of women extended to many rural as well as urban areas. As Moll Flanders was to comment: ‘The market is against our sex just now, the men play the game all into their own hands.’⁹²

The advances in capitalist organisation in industry and agriculture seen in this century ensured the victory by its close of economic individualism over traditional and communal arrangements. So it was that the importance of the family and household declines with the increasing importance of the individual. At first sight this might seem to suggest the decline within the family of the authority of the father, the traditional head of the household. But the victory of individualism was a victory for property, and wives by their very legal definition were propertyless so that all the Puritan emphasis on the virtues of thrift, industry and discipline tended towards the reinforcement not the weakening of the authority of husband and father.

It was this that above all led to that ‘crisis in marriage which bore particularly hard upon the feminine part of the population’.⁹³ It was not just that there seems to have been an increasing emphasis on mercenary motives for marriage but that, in conditions where it was becoming more difficult and far more expensive, to find a husband, the importance of marriage for women actually increased. This crisis existed long before the 1690s but, when in 1695 effective censorship ended, the pent-up frustrations of many women, not just Mary Astell, were released. In a way it was a defensive action. It was to fail and nearly a century was to pass before the effort was renewed.

After 1660 there was a concerted attempt to re-establish social order which involved efforts to reimpose the traditional role of women and children in relation to their husbands and fathers. It seems certain that at the Restoration, as Keith Thomas has suggested, ‘the more radical views on the family went underground’.⁹⁴

Look, for instance, at The Ladies Calling which appeared in 1673. At one time it was thought to be the work of Lady Pakington, a Royalist, but it is now recognised to be the work of Richard Allestree, a Royalist clergyman and author of that other best seller, The Whole Duty of Man (1658). It ran to eight editions before 1700, indicative of its influence. In it Allestree, while recognising the equality of women's souls with those of men, makes clear ‘that in respect of their intellects they are below men’.⁹⁵ He stresses the importance in women of a ‘will duly submissive to lawful Superiors’ for the contrary was ‘the spring and original of infinite confusions, a grand incendiary which sets Kingdoms, Churches, Families in combustion’.⁹⁶ It was the duty of wives to obey their husbands not because of their vow to do so but ‘from an original of much older date, it being the mulct that was laid upon the Woman's disobedience to God, that she (and all deriv'd from her) should be subject to the Husband; so that the contending for superiority is an attempt to reverse the Fundamental Law, which is almost as ancient as the World’.⁹⁷

He saw the leading feminine virtue as that of modesty which ‘restrains all excessive talkativeness’. Almost the worst sin in women was that of boldness. And lest any should recall the women preachers of the Interregnum, and seek to emulate them, he reminds his readers that St Paul ‘expressly enjoins women to keep silence in the church’.⁹⁸

Two years later Hannah Woolley restated the role of women in marriage. ‘Undoubtedly the Husband’, she wrote, ‘hath power over the Wife and the Wife ought to be subject to the Husband in all things.’⁹⁹

Yet attempts to put the clock back in family relations, as in politics, encountered serious obstacles. If some employment opportunities had now been denied women, others had emerged which provided women with new forms of self-expression. The advent of actresses, for example, opened the way into a new and important profession. Indeed, it is not too fanciful to see a continuity between the female preachers and prophetesses of the 1640s and 1650s and the post-Restoration actresses. Acting represented a similar break with the notion that women should be kept out of public life and that their place was in the privacy of the home. The arrival of women on the stage was an encouragement to the emergence of women playwrights. Together they contributed to the new focus on women and women's dilemma both in and out of marriage which is the subject of a great deal of Restoration theatre.

One of the things that distinguishes the post-Restoration period as far as women are concerned was the changed nature of the means by which articulate women expressed themselves. Women, admittedly mainly upper-class women, moved from a more private expression of their thoughts in spiritual diaries, letters and poetry, to a more public expression. Women playwrights opened the way for women novelists. Remarkably Aphra Behn combined both skills. But in other areas, where the existence of current debate ensured all contributions were in the public eye, women, if still only a few, now made their entry.

Religion was one area in which women had, for a long time, been more free to express themselves than in other fields, although one needs to acknowledge that there were still men who thought it was more important that women should keep to the religion in which they had been reared, or should adopt that of their husbands, than that they should be able to defend their faith. So Halifax, in his Advice to a Daughter, suggested the reason for a woman keeping to the faith in which she had been brought up ‘is somewhat stronger for your sex than it will perhaps be allowed to be for ours; in respect that the voluminous inquiries into the truth, by reading, are less expected from you’.¹⁰⁰ Nevertheless religion and religious controversy had provided one area in which intelligent women could use their minds. Mary Astell was by no means alone among educated upper-class women in her knowledge of the Bible and her grasp of contemporary theological debate. Women of the sects had demonstrated their ability to play a major part in religious life and thought, and while the debt was seldom acknowledged, many upper-class women must have been aware of the precedents set.

It was not new to the post-Restoration period for women to express their views on education, particularly education for their own sex, but now far more women entered into the debate. Here again, Mary Astell in her A Serious Proposal, Part I, was not alone in expressing views on the inadequacy of educational provision for women and ideas for some solution to the problem. The same is true of works on such diverse subjects as cookery and midwifery.

Women artists that emerge in the period, with the notable exception of Mary Beale, are usually amateurs. They had no training. But, as Myra Reynolds suggests, the real incentive behind their painting—and there were many such amateur painters among women—was the ‘inner demand for some form of self-expression’. It was this that made them welcome any ‘opportunity for the free play of their own individuality’.¹⁰¹

Accompanying the venturing into print of many women play-wrights, novelists and poets, there would seem to have been a marked increase in women readers. Of course female literacy everywhere lagged far behind that of men, but over the century as a whole there is evidence that, at least among the middle ranks of women, increased leisure led to a greater interest in literature. This tendency was greatest in towns, and above all in London. If the ability of women to read was related to their ability to sign their names, it would appear that the former increased sharply in London towards the end of the century and particularly in the 1690s, constituting ‘an educational revolution … among late Stuart and early Hanoverian women’.¹⁰² One writer has talked of an ‘advancing army of women readers’ in this period.¹⁰³ Certainly the rise of a feminine readership would seem to be supported by the emergence of periodicals and newspapers specifically directed at a female audience. So, for example, the Athenian Gazette, later the Athenian Mercury, was started in 1690, with an eye on the woman reader.

The England of the post-Restoration period was very different from that of the 1640s but if the position of women had changed it was not solely on the debit side. One thing is certain. The memory of that earlier period was still fresh in men's and women's minds. Even for those like Mary Astell, who thoroughly disapproved of much of what had been done, said or written earlier, the awareness of the developments at that time remained and, whether consciously or not, influenced her thinking and that of other female contemporaries.

A SERIOUS PROPOSAL

The first of Mary Astell's published works was A Serious Proposal to the Ladies for the Advancement of their True and Greatest Interest which appeared in 1694.¹⁰⁴ By 1701 it had run to four editions, which suggests something of its reception. Indeed, it was read even if its ideas were unacceptable. Three years after its appearance a second part followed. There seems no evidence that this was contemplated at the time of the publication of Part I which stands on its own. Part I contains all the details of her ‘proposal’ and the reasons which prompted her to make it.

Her scheme was a simple one—the creation of a ‘Religious Retirement’ (p. 150) where women could, temporarily, withdraw from the world. But it was to be not only a place of retreat but one where women could be equipped to re-enter society and become useful members of it. She constantly emphasised this ‘double aspect’ of her female ‘monastery’ and, as she explains to women, the employment of its inmates was to be not only ‘to magnify God, to love one another’, but ‘to communicate that useful knowledge, which by due improvement of your time in Study and Contemplation you will obtain’ (p. 151).

Her use of the word ‘Monastery’ was unfortunate for it immediately conjured up those Catholic institutions which, in her own words, ‘tho' innocent in themselves, have been abused by superstitious practices’ (p. 150) and it did little to recommend her proposal. In fact she made clear the distinction between her ‘Religious Retirement’ and a nunnery. In her scheme ‘piety shall not be roughly impos'd, but wisely insinuated’, nor were there to be ‘Vows or irrevocable Obligations, not so much as the fear of Reproach to keep our Ladies here any longer than they desire’ (p. 158). In answer to those who saw her proposal as a rejection of this world, she stressed that it was to be but ‘a convenient and blissful recess from the noise and hurry of the world’ (p. 150). There was no inherent contradiction, in her view, between a contemplative and active life. The temporary removal from the world would not hinder women ‘from bettering and improving it’ when they returned. Indeed, she saw her ‘Retirement’ as ‘a Seminary to stock the kingdom with pious and prudent Ladies’ (p. 152) who would be an example to the rest of their sex.

If religion was seen as ‘its … main design’ with the performance of daily devotions and the regular observance of Sundays, holy days and fasts, ‘one great end of this Institution,’ she wrote, ‘shall be to expel that cloud of Ignorance which Custom has involv'd us in, to furnish our minds with a stock of solid and useful Knowledge’ (p. 152). Of what exactly that knowledge should consist we are left uncertain, but the importance of discussion and the exchange of ideas is suggested by her mention of ‘instructive discourses’ and ‘ingenious conversation’. The emphasis was to be on the need to train minds rather than on the acquisition of knowledge. Languages were of value—not in themselves—but because they gave access to ‘useful Authors’ (p. 153). The aim of the education women received must be, in a phrase reminiscent of Bacon, not ‘in learning words but things’ (p. 152). It was better to read and thoroughly understand a few well-chosen and good books than to thumb through a vast number and the understanding of French which so many ladies included among their accomplishments could be put to good use by discovering the French philosophers, Descartes and Malebranche, and the works of Madame Dacier and Scudéry, rather than reading those ‘idle Novels and Romances’ (p. 155). Among the ‘harmless and ingenious Diversions’ (p. 157) positively encouraged for the inmates of her seminary, music was particularly emphasised.

Women in her ‘Religious Retirement’ when not engaged in religious devotions were to be ‘employ'd in innocent, charitable, and useful Business: either in study in learning themselves or instructing others’ for, as Mary Astell stresses, ‘it is design'd that part of their Employment be the Education of those of their own Sex’ (p. 156). It is true that, at least in this work, she confined her concern about education to the upper classes. She envisaged her seminary sending back into the world a body of women trained to take over responsibility for the education of the children of ‘Persons of Quality’ (p. 165), and, when their finances permitted, to extend their responsibility to the education of daughters of gentlemen ‘who are fallen into decay’ so that they might be ‘put in a comfortable way of subsisting’ (p. 166) and, she adds significantly, despite their lack of dowry, made more marriageable.

Her proposed institution was to be run under a strict discipline but one imposed by ‘friendly Admonitions, not magisterial Reproofs’ (p. 158). The standards of accommodation, dress and diet were to be determined by those who subscribed to the scheme, but its author was in no doubt that their choice would be guided by ‘what Nature not Luxury requires’ (p. 157). There were to be no ‘superfluities’: the time to be spent by the inmates on their toilet, on sleeping and eating was to be ‘no more than necessity requires’ (p. 157). Tuition would be undertaken by ‘persons of irreproachable Lives, of a consummate Prudence, sincere Piety and unaffected Gravity’ (p. 158). The suggested annual fee was £500 to £600, a sum few but ‘Persons of Quality’ would have been able to afford.

According to George Ballard, a bishop intervened to prevent a prominent lady giving £10,000 towards the realisation of Mary Astell's scheme.¹⁰⁵ The lady concerned is thought to have been Princess Anne of Denmark which might help to explain why the second part of A Serious Proposal published in 1697 was dedicated to her and not, as was the first part, to ladies in general! The name of Lady Elizabeth Hastings was also put forward as the possible unknown benefactress, but there is some doubt whether the two were yet acquainted at this time. A letter dated 13 July 1738 from Elizabeth Elstob, the Anglo-Saxon scholar, to George Ballard after he had requested information about the name of the lady concerned produced no further evidence. Elizabeth Elstob had never ‘heard Mrs. Astell mention the Good Lady's name’, but the bishop who intervened to discourage the lady from donating such a sum was revealed by Mary Astell to be Bishop Burnet¹⁰⁶ who disliked what he saw as the Catholic overtones of her proposal. However, in view of this attitude, it seems curious that he was later to write in favour of ‘something like Monasteries without Vows’ where young women could acquire ‘a due Measure of Knowledge and a serious Sense of Religion.’¹⁰⁷

The idea of a place of ‘Religious Retirement’ to which women could withdraw and where they could continue their education was not new and can be traced from the time of Henry VIII's suppression of nunneries up to the second half of the eighteenth century. It is now generally agreed that nunneries had provided a solution to the gentry's problem of disposing of their unmarriageable daughters, and Milton was not alone in seeing them as ‘a convenient stowage for their withered daughters’. But nunneries were more than that. Possibly under financial pressure in the years immediately before the Reformation, they appear increasingly to have opened their doors to paying pupils not merely of the well-to-do but from tradesmen and even yeomen. Given the state of girls' boarding schools at the time, it seems likely that the education they provided was quite as good as if not better than that they would have received either at home or at such schools. Certainly from the 1530s onwards there are cases of Protestants lamenting the passing of nunneries as useful places of education for women. In the mid-sixteenth century, for example, Thomas Becon begged that there be ‘some consideration of this matter had among the rulers of the Christian Commonweal that the young maids might be Godly brought up.’¹⁰⁸ Later, John Aubrey, Thomas Fuller and Richard Allestree among others were to express the same regret.

In the first half of the seventeenth century, Lettice, Lady Falkland, harboured the notion of a ‘place for the education of young gentlewomen and for the retirement of widows … in several parts of the kingdom’ but she had been discouraged from pursuing the idea by ‘those evil times’.¹⁰⁹ The community at Little Gidding formed by Nicholas Ferrar and his nieces, had been a practical—and private—example of something similar to what later Mary Astell had in mind. As A Serious Proposal was being written, Mary and Anne Kemys at Naish Court in Glamorganshire were at the centre of a kind of Anglican sisterhood.

Perhaps the most interesting of the proposals that precede Mary Astell's was that put forward by Clement Barksdale—an intriguing character who consistently demonstrated his unfashionable interest in women's education. In 1659 he was responsible both for the translation and publication of Anna Maria Schurman's The Learned Maid, or Whether a Maid may be a Scholar which had already aroused considerable interest on the Continent. In 1675 he wrote A Letter Touching a Colledge of Maids, or a Virgin Society in which he proposed the formation of a girl's college ‘somewhat like the Halls of Commoners at Oxford’, combining both religious and secular objects and with the declared purpose of improving ‘ingenuous Maids in such qualities as best become their Sex, and may fit them both for a happy Life in this, and much more in the next world’. Unlike Anna Maria Schurman, Barksdale's proposal was not confined to daughters of the upper-class although his college acknowledged class differences. The daughters of the rich would be served and waited on by ‘Maids of meaner birth and estate’ but both would be guided by governesses in ‘a method of private Reading and Devotion’. The entrance fee would be £5 ‘more or less, according to the quality of the persons’ and, although his broadly based curriculum included training in the traditional accomplishments of music, dancing, needlework and drawing, the library was to include ‘choice Authors of History, Poetry, and especially of Practical Divinity and Devotion’. There were to be not only examples of English writers but of works of ‘Learned, as well as Modern Language’.¹¹⁰ The most able were to study both natural and moral philosophy. The girls could be taken away from the college by their fathers at any time, either for a few days or ‘to dispose of them in marriage’.¹¹¹ While there was no suggestion of provision for wives, Barksdale's ‘Virgin Society’ resembles in design that put forward nearly twenty years later by Mary Astell.

After 1694, her idea of a ‘Protestant nunnery’ won support from, among others, John Evelyn, George Wheler, Robert Nelson and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. The idea did not die. In the works of Thomas Amory, in Samuel Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison, and in the novels of Sarah Fielding and Sarah Scott among others, one can trace the recurrent theme of a ‘Religious Retirement’ for women.¹¹² Not all these authors were agreed on the details of what was required but all saw the desirability of a place of retirement from the world where women could go both for religious and secular education.

Three years after Mary Astell made her proposal, Daniel Defoe published his An Essay upon Projects in which he put forward his scheme for ‘An Academy for Women’. While expressing his ‘very great esteem’ for ‘what is proposed by that ingenious lady’, he was at some pains to distinguish his proposals from her's. The ‘Religious Retirement’, he insisted, ‘would be found impracticable’ not only for the reason that ‘nothing but the height of bigotry can keep up a nunnery’, but because ‘the levity’ of the opposite sex would ‘not bear the restraint’.¹¹³ The difficulty in discerning important differences between the two proposals might lead one to conclude that Defoe was jealous of Mary Astell for having published her proposal first.

In his Essay there is a suggestion of just how much single women were the prey of those whom Mary Astell described as ‘bold importunate and rapacious vultures’. To protect his Academy against infiltrators he demanded an Act of Parliament to ‘make it felony without Clergy for any man to enter by Force or Fraud into the House, or to solicit any Woman though it were to marry, while she was in the House.’¹¹⁴ It is a sinister comment on the nature of society at that time and makes clear why Mary Astell saw the need for a place of retreat for women.

What is new in Mary Astell's proposal is that it represents ‘the first considered attempt to interest Englishwomen in the higher education of their sex’¹¹⁵—a notion that had not previously been made the subject of a general appeal to women nor been made so powerfully. What is interesting is that the idea re-emerges in the late seventeenth century—and not merely in the work of Mary Astell.

Roger Thompson saw Mary Astell's proposal as part of what he called ‘a desperate rearguard action against a shocking decline of standards’.¹¹⁶ His view is supported by evidence that the quality of education for women had not improved. Certainly there had been mounting criticism of existing boarding schools for girls as the century progressed. After the Restoration there seems to have been a further sharp decline in standards—possibly a reflection of the more general decline in public manners of these years.

Although A Serious Proposal was the first of Mary Astell's published works, in many ways it anticipates the conclusions she reached about the lives of women, whether single or married, that later found fuller expression particularly in her Reflections upon Marriage published in 1700. (In the texts that follow I have reversed the chronological order and made Reflections upon Marriage precede A Serious Proposal¹¹⁷ for the latter presents the only solution she offered given the state of marriage as it was.) She saw more education as the only answer available to women in their existing circumstances, but would have been the first to acknowledge that it was by no means a complete answer. ‘My earnest desire’, she wrote, ‘is that you Ladies would be as perfect and happy as 'tis possible to be in this imperfect state’ (p. 142). That more education was her only answer suggests perhaps just how ‘imperfect’ she saw this state as being.

Her argument starts from the basic premise that in so far as women are inferior to men it is the result not of nature but of education. She challenges those who ‘deny us the improvement of our Intellectuals’ either to take their stand on the old argument that women have no souls, which, she adds ‘at this time a day when they are allow'd to Brutes, would be as unphilosophical as it is unmannerly, or else let them permit us to cultivate and improve them’ (p. 154).

She does not spare her audience. Far too often women were ‘content to be Cyphers in the World, useless at the best, and in a little time a burden and nuisance to all about them’ (p. 143). Angrily she asks of women: ‘Why are you so preposterously humble?’ (p. 141) The ‘ill conduct of too many’ had led them to ‘pass for those little useless and impertinent Animals’ (p. 152). What, she demands of them ‘stops your flight’ and ‘keeps you groveling here below, like Domitian catching Flies when you should be busied in obtaining Empires?’ (p. 143) Perhaps conscious of the severity of her censure she hastens to reassure her audience. Her aim, she insists, ‘is not to expose, but to rectifie’ (p. 142) their failures.

One such failure was their wastage of time in slavishly following fashion, in endeavouring to excel in ‘trifles’, in seeking distinction in mere ornamental accomplishments—and to what purpose but that of winning ‘Fustian Compliments and Fulsome Flatteries’ (p. 140) and ‘to attract the Eyes of Men … vain, insignificant men’ (p. 141)? Women had become slaves to ‘that Tyrant Custom’ (p. 147) intent ‘on doing as their neighbours do’ lest they attract to themselves ‘all the Scofs and Noises of the world’ (p. 162). She appeals to women to ‘dare to break the enchanted Circle that custom has plac'd us in’ (p. 141).

Her scorn for how little men have to show for all the lavish care and time bestowed on their education is unbounded. She would offer them advice but ‘they think themselves too wise to receive Instruction from a Woman's Pen’. Men, ‘often guilty of greater faults’ yet ‘divert themselves with our Miscarriages’ (p. 142). Denying women the benefit of a liberal education, they then complain of the consequences when women are ‘taught to be Proud and Petulant, Delicate and Fantastick, Humorous and Inconstant’ (p. 144). It is against men, the ‘Enemy from without’ (p. 145), that her religious retirement offers a refuge: for ‘Heiresses and Persons of Fortune’ it offered a haven from ‘the rude attempts of designing Men’ (p. 165). She expressed contempt for money and what money will buy, whether a marriage, ‘a sounding Title or a great Estate’ (p. 139). Her ‘retirement’ represented for women who had ‘more Money than Discretion’ an escape from predatory men.

REFLECTIONS UPON MARRIAGE

Six years after A Serious Proposal was published there appeared Some Reflections upon Marriage Occasion'd by the Duke and Dutchess of Mazarine's Case which is also considered.¹¹⁸ It ran through four editions by 1730 (1700, 1703, 1706, 1730). To the third edition of 1706—(the one reproduced here) was added a Preface ‘in answer to some Objections’.

The Duchess of Mazarine, a near-neighbour of Mary Astell's, had been forced into an unhappy marriage, one of the consequences of which was a scandal that reverberated around Europe. The case of the duchess served, Mary Astell wrote, ‘as an unhappy shipwrack to point out the dangers of an ill Education and unequal Marriage’ (p. 90). Neither side escaped her censure but her sympathy was reserved for the duchess ‘who being capable of everything must therefore suffer more’.

For such unhappy marriages entered into on ill-considered motives, there was no solution. The wives had to bear the consequences and Mary Astell did not underestimate them. ‘To be yok'd for Life to a disagreeable Person and Temper; to have Folly and Ignorance tyrannise over Wit and Sense; to be contradicted in everything one does or says, and bore down not by Reason but Authority; to be denied ones 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’ (p. 90). These words sum up Mary Astell's whole condemnation of so many upper class marriages.

Nevertheless, she saw marriage as ‘too sacred to be treated with Disrespect’. Being the ‘Institution of Heaven’, it was not just ‘the only Honourable way of continuing Mankind’ (p. 93), but provided ‘the best that may be for Domestic Quiet and Content, and for the Education of Children’ (pp. 93-4). Happy marriages, she insisted, were possible but they required care—above all a choice based on reason with the chief inducement that of friendship. But if marriage was ‘such a blessed State’, why were there so few happy marriages? In large part the blame lay with men in their motives for entering into marriage and their ill-conduct within it. More often than not such motives were mercenary; ‘What will she bring is the first enquiry? How many acres? Or how much ready Coin?’ Such considerations were not unimportant, she acknowledged, for ‘Marriage without a Competency’ was ‘no very comfortable Condition’ (p. 94) but it was not the main, and certainly not the only, consideration. Mercenary marriages were doomed. For the very best of women, as Mary Astell ironically suggested, they could become ‘a very great Blessing’ by giving her the ‘opportunity to exercise her Virtue’. For, she continued ‘Affliction’ was ‘the only useful school that Women were ever put to’ for it ‘rouses her understanding, opens her Eyes, fixes her Attention’ (p. 96). Such a wife ‘was never truly a Happy Woman till she came in the Eye of the World to be reckon'd Miserable’ (p. 97). By no means all injured wives would react like this! Many, and who could blame them, would follow the example set by their husbands.

Marriages for love, if rarer, were no different. Equally irrational, men were ‘govern'd by irregular Appetites’ (p. 97) or a man might think himself in love with a woman's wit but ‘cannot hope to find a Woman whose Wit is of a size with his’ (p. 98), and when the occasion arises for a woman to turn her wit on him he might find it less agreeable! When you add those who ‘Marry without any Thought at all, further than that it is the Custom of the World’ (p. 99) to those who marry for money, love or wit, there are very few marriages remaining.

Mary Astell would be the first to admit that it is not just men who are in the wrong, but as ‘a Woman … can't properly be said to Choose’, as ‘all that is allow'd her, is to Refuse or Accept what is offer'd’ (p. 99), women are more to be pitied than censured. If a man can anticipate no happiness from marriages for money, wit or beauty, how much less can a woman expect of them? Hers is by far ‘the harder bargain’ for ‘if the Matrimonial Yoke be grievous, neither Law nor Custom afford her that redress which a Man obtains’ (p. 101). If she has the bad fortune to marry a man with a ‘disagreeable Temper’, she will be ‘as unhappy as anything in this World can make her’. She cannot, like her husband, ‘find entertainments abroad’, she has not ‘a hundred ways of relieving’ herself, all she can do is stay at home and ‘make her best on't’ (p. 103).

For women, then, the right marriage partner was of far greater importance than for men. No ‘Woman of any tolerable Sense’ should trust herself to a man who ‘doats on a Face’, who ‘makes Money his Idol’ or ‘who is Charm'd with vain and empty Wit’. How could she love or honour such a ‘trifle of a Man’ and if she cannot either love or honour him she should never promise to obey him, for such obedience ‘as is paid only to Authority, and not out of Love and a Sense of the Justice and Reasonableness of the Command, will be of uncertain Tenure’. If nevertheless a woman obeys, she must be ‘endow'd with a Wisdom and Goodness much above what we suppose the Sex capable of, I fear much greater than e're a Man can pretend to’ (pp. 104-5)!

If this is what a woman who marries ‘prudently’ can expect, what of those who marry beneath them, who ‘purchase a Lord and Master’ and ‘at the price of her Discretion’? Even more will he assert his authority and tend to overlook any obligations entered into before marriage. For every man expects a wife ‘whom he can intirely Govern … who must be his for Life, and therefore cannot quit his Service let him treat her how he will’. Even those who marry their social equals have ‘no security but the Man's Honour and Good nature’ (p. 106). And what are those worth?

So what remains as the best guarantees of a happy marriage? ‘A good understanding’ and ‘a Virtuous Mind’ are the principal considerations in the choice of a marriage partner, and Mary Astell adds ‘as much equality as may be’ (p. 108). But a wise choice of a partner was not sufficient to guarantee married happiness. The role of subjection that women were assigned was ‘a bitter Cup’ (p. 109) and it would be easier for them to bear if it was not claimed ‘oftner and more Imperiously than either Discretion or Good Manners will justifie’. The vows of marriage which involved a mutual agreement and a ‘certain Civility and Respect’ are quite ‘as much the Woman's due as Love, Honour and Obedience are the Man's’ (p. 108). If, despite all a woman forfeits by marriage, there is not only no acknowledgement of a husband's obligations to her but even disrespect, a woman must be a saint if she continues to pay him the obedience he demands. But if men continue to regard women with contempt and women continue to suffer it, they cannot but become aware of ‘their own real superiority’ (p. 112).

There is little here to suggest that marriage could be a ‘blessing’ for women. The most that is hoped for is that it should prove ‘tolerable’ (p. 114). Of those who entertained great hopes of marriage, many would be disappointed, their only consolation being their reward in heaven. Marriage was their ‘time of Tryal’ (p. 115).

Finally, and seemingly conclusively, Mary Astell argues that ‘she then who Marrys ought to lay it down for an indisputable Maxim that her Husband must govern absolutely and intirely, and that she has nothing else to do but to Please and Obey’. If incapable of exercising ‘Humility and Self-denial, Patience and Resignation’ (p. 116) then the role of wife is not for her.

However, Mary Astell cannot leave it there and she goes on to qualify the statement. No-one will convince a woman of the wisdom and goodness of her husband against all evidence to the contrary so, although she may submit, it will be from necessity not from reason. This is why, she argues, it is in men's interests for women to be good Christians. A Christian woman ‘will freely leave him the quiet Dominion of this World whose Thoughts and Expectations are plac'd on the next’, and by directing all their ambition heavenwards women will be sufficiently compensated ‘for all the neglect and contempt the ill-grounded Customs of the World throw on her’. Thus the duty of obedience would be paid ‘for God's sake’ (p. 128), and obedience to her husband was a woman's religious duty.

To survive the trials of marriage, women, Mary Astell argued, needed ‘a strong Reason … a truly Christian and well-temper'd Spirit’ and ‘all the Assistance the best Education can give her’. Little wonder that women married so hastily for if they stopped to consider ‘they seldom would Marry at all’ (p. 131). More education would ensure that women ‘marry more discreetly’ or that they ‘never consent to be a wife’ (p. 127).

The Preface which was added to the third edition of 1706 represents the best of her writing.¹¹⁹ It appears to have been written at great speed and in passionate anger. If there is ambiguity—even apparent contradiction—in Reflections, the added Preface poses even greater problems for reaching any conclusions as to what exactly Mary Astell thought. Did she really believe, for example, that wives must obey their husbands and in all cases believe them ‘Wise and Good and in all respects the best’ (p. 116)? Must a woman obey for no other reason than that there must be one seat of authority ‘for Order's sake’ (p. 104) however lacking her husband might be in the qualities demanded in those that exert authority? In the Preface to the first edition she insists “Tis a very great Fault … to submit to Authority, when we should only yield to Reason' (p. 69). Was a man's right to govern forfeited when he abused his power as husband? Again the Preface suggests so when it argues that ‘if Arbitrary Power is evil in itself, and an improper Method of govening Rational and Free Agents, it ought not to be Practis'd any where’. If marriage was a divinely ordained institution how was it that it ignored any idea of women's happiness? It is a curious choice of text that Mary Astell takes to head her preface to the third edition of Reflections: ‘If a Virgin marry, she hath not sinned, nevertheless such shall have trouble.’ Was marriage divinely ordained for men only? Must women be content with marriage as ‘an excellent preparation for heaven’ as it was their ‘Duty to suffer everything without Complaint’? Yet in the Preface such an idea of women's role in marriage provoked that passionate response: ‘If all Men are born free, how is it that all Women are born slaves?’ (p. 76). Women, she argued, were as yet ‘too weak to dispute men's authority’ and were ‘not so well united as to form an Insurrection’ (p. 86)—but had they the right to challenge men's authority, and, when stronger and more united, to overthrow it? ‘Far be it from her,’ she insists, ‘to stir up Sedition of any sort’ (p. 70), and yet she can ask ‘can it be thought that an ignorant weak Woman shou'd have patience to bear a continual Outrage and Insolence all the days of her Life?’ (p. 117)

Although it is tempting to try and resolve these questions, it would be a mistake. George Ballard, unable to accept the strong words in which she expressed her scorn for men, invented an unhappy love affair as explanation.¹²⁰ If we are to understand her we have to accept the ambiguities and contradictions of her writing. They were a part of her make-up and help to explain the tensions that inevitably developed in a woman of intelligence holding such diverse beliefs.

The year before Reflections was published, a sermon was preached by John Sprint at a wedding in Sherborne in Dorset. As his text he took ‘But she that is married careth for the things of the world, how she may please her Husband’. On the grounds of being misrepresented by his female critics, ‘my waspish accusers’, Sprint decided to publish the sermon. He did so under the title The Bride-Woman's Counsellor. The duty of a wife in pleasing and comforting her husband was God's punishment for her role in the Fall as ‘the Tempter's Agent’. To refuse that duty ‘doth wickedly pervert the end of her Creation’. A good wife would never ‘will or desire what she herself liked, but only what her Husband should approve and allow’. She must be like ‘a mirror which hath no Image of its own, but receives its Stamp and Image from the Face that looks into it’. A wife should not address her husband by his Christian name—‘a Custom more Common than comely’—but as ‘Lord and Master’, a fitting address for ‘one whom God hath appointed and ordained to be her Superior and Head’.¹²¹

Whether Mary Astell read the sermon we do not know, but it seems likely. Two works published in 1700 demonstrate the angry response it provoked among women. One was the poem, The Ladies Defence: Or the Bride-Woman's Counsellor Answer'd, by Lady Elizabeth Chudleigh, and the other The Female Advocate; or, a Plea for the just liberty of the Tender Sex, and particularly of Married Women that appeared under the pseudonym ‘Eugenia’. The very response to the sermon might suggest that the views expressed in it were exceptional and not wholly representative of attitudes to the role of the wife in marriage. It is more difficult, however, to dismiss Lord Halifax's The Lady's New Year Gift; Or, Advice to a Daughter (1688)¹²² written for his daughter Elizabeth—then twelve years old—to whom he was devoted. Significantly it was by far his most popular work, and over the following century ran to 25 editions. He admitted that at times he shrank ‘as if struck at the prospect of danger to which a young woman must be exposed’. The institution of marriage was, he thought, ‘too sacred to admit a liberty of objecting to it’ (p. 278). He explained to his daughter that one of the disadvantages of her sex is that ‘young women are seldom permitted to make their own choice’ of a husband. More often they are called on to accept the recommendations of their parents even if this goes against their inclinations. All they can do is to make the best of it and ‘by a wise use of everything they may dislike in a husband turn that by degrees to be very supportable which, if neglected might in time beget an aversion’. The inequality between the sexes, the existence of which Halifax did not doubt, makes women ‘better prepared for the compliance that is necessary’ (p. 277). In order to help his daughter prepare herself for marriage he reviewed the type of husband with whom she might be forced into marriage. First was the adulterer or persistently unfaithful husband (and here Halifax acknowledged the double standard of a society which made ‘that in the utmost degree criminal in the woman’ which ‘in a man passeth under a much gentler censure’ (p. 279)). Second was the drunkard ‘and there is by too frequent examples evidence enough that such a thing may happen, and yet a wife may live too without being miserable’ (p. 280). Third was the choleric or ill-humoured man and ‘there is a great deal of nice care requisite to deal with a man of this complexion’ (p. 282). A covetous husband is the fourth possibility, and although even he could be endured, ‘a close-handed wretch’, significantly, was the worst fate that Halifax could envisage for his daughter. Finally there was the feeble-minded husband—for whom there was a great deal to be said in Halifax's view, for ‘if you will be more ashamed in some cases of such a husband, you will be less afraid than you would perhaps be of a wise one’! To have an idiot as a husband was the next best thing to having him dead ‘in which case the wife hath right to administer’ (p. 285) so all the more important, warned Halifax, ‘when your husband shall resolve to be an ass … take care he may be your ass’ (p. 286).

Given such possibilities, Halifax suggested his daughter should ‘pray for a wise husband, one that by knowing how to be a master for that very reason will not let you feel the weight of it’ (p. 286).

Earlier Hannah Woolley in The Gentlewoman's Guide to the Female Sex (1675) had emphasised a wife's duty ‘to give honour, respect and reverence’ to her ‘lawful (though lording) husband’ and stressed how she should endeavour ‘to hide his faults and infirmities, and not detect them yourself, or suffer them to be discovered’.¹²³ As did Mary Astell, she warned of the consequences of marrying ‘one you have either abhorrence or loathing to; for it is neither affluence of estate, potency of friends, nor highness of descent can alloy the insufferable grief of a loathed bed.’¹²⁴ Later in The Queen-like Closet, she issued a warning to all women who if they ‘would consider the Policy of Men … might be generally happy; whereas now very few are so’. She had seen enough of them, she adds ‘as it hath given me a sufficient Caution to beware of them.’¹²⁵ Yet here spoke a woman who, unlike Mary Astell was married twice, and happily, to ‘two Worthy, Eminent, and brave Persons’.¹²⁶ Nevertheless, in the language she reserves for men in general she rivals Mary Astell.

Evidence suggests that Mary Astell was far from exaggerating the frequency of mercenary marriages among the upper class. It was, said Hannah Woolley, ‘an ordinary thing, in these Late Times, for Gentlemen, when they hear of a Fortune, presently to make their Addresses to that Lady, a Gentlewoman, let her be as deformed or unhandsome a Creature as is imaginable’.¹²⁷ Although he believed ‘Gentlemen in their Marriages ought to consider a great many things more than Fortune’, Gilbert Burnet added, ‘tho' generally speaking, that is the only thing sought for’.¹²⁸ Later Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was to make the same point when she commented bitterly that ‘people in my way are sold like slaves; and I cannot tell what price my masters will put on me’.¹²⁹

John Norris, in the course of his duties as adviser to the publishers of The Athenian Mercury, was asked whether friendship was possible between a man and his wife. After consideration he replied that Yes, there could be ‘strict friendship between Man and Wife’. A husband, he wrote like ‘the greatest Monarch in the World may find Opportunities to descend from the Throne of Majesty to the familiar Caresses of a dear Favourite: and unking himself a while for the more glorious Title of Friend.’¹³⁰ Norris, who appears to have been attractive to women, was married and had a large family. His answer serves not merely to remind us of just what women like Mary Astell were up against in even the most sympathetic of men, but of how deeply rooted was the particular analogy which he uses.

.....

SOME CONCLUSIONS

Many of those who have written about Mary Astell, and even those referring to her in passing, have attempted to label her. She has been variously described as a Platonist, a Cartesian rationalist, a Lockean feminist, an English Femme Savante, and ‘the first major English feminist’.¹³¹ If some of these labels are more relevant to her than others, there is not one that, by itself, adequately describes her ideas.

Not for nothing has John Norris been called ‘the last of the Cambridge Platonists’.¹³² By the end of the century the school was in decline and the ideas of Locke had taken over. It is true that Mary Astell was caricatured by Swift as ‘a profess'd Platonne’ but when his caricature proceeds to have her ‘run over Norris’ it is making an important point.¹³³ The reason she entered into correspondence with Norris was her disagreement with some of his arguments. On occasion, as we have seen, she found difficulty in accepting Norris's insistence that God was the only proper object of her love. She ‘found it more easie to recognise his Right than to secure the Possession’.¹³⁴ In her last letters to Norris she was at some pains to reconcile his views with those of Locke, and particularly Locke's argument in An Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690). But Norris, in his reply to her, firmly rejected Locke's argument. What finally persuaded her that the two were irreconcilable was Locke's publication of The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695) which she saw as threatening to undermine the authority of the Anglican Church. By the time she wrote The Christian Religion in 1705 she had taken sides, if reluctantly, against Locke.

After Letters Concerning the Love of God she appears not to have pursued the debate. One who did was Damaris Masham (1658-1708), daughter of Ralph Cudworth, one of the most notable of the Cambridge Platonists, who was to become a close friend and disciple of Locke's. The object of Norris's Reflections upon the Conduct of Human Life in a Letter to my Lady Masham (1690), she pursued the debate begun by Mary Astell in A Discourse Concerning the Love of God (1696) which revealed how profoundly Locke had influenced her thinking, and just how far she had moved away from Norris's platonism.

That Mary Astell respected Locke ‘that Great Master of good Sense’¹³⁵ there can be no doubt. She would have welcomed his notion that ‘Reason must be our last judge and guide in all things’¹³⁶ although Locke had no monopoly of the idea. What she could not accept was the complete break with traditional authority that Locke's Two Treatises of Civil Government represented. She still clung to the idea of the sanctity of kingship which Locke was at such pains to discard, and was as far from accepting the idea of a contractual theory of government between king and subjects as she was from the idea of a voluntary compact in domestic relations. She rejected the idea that ‘by the Miscarriage of those in Authority, it [Supreme Power] is forfeited.’¹³⁷ At the conclusion of her Reflections upon Marriage she makes it clear that she cannot go along with those who argue that ‘if a Man has not these Qualifications [to govern] where is his Right? That if he misemploys it, he abuses it. And if he abuses, according to modern Deduction, he forfeits it.’¹³⁸

Surprisingly she seems to have been unaware of Locke's Thoughts on Education (1693) which owed so much to the views of Fénelon, and to which Damaris Masham was deeply indebted. Indeed, if anyone fits the title of ‘Lockean feminist’ Damaris Masham might seem the best qualified.

If Locke's political ideas were not to Mary Astell's liking, neither was his theology. She was all in favour of women applying reason to their religious faith, and she would have accepted Locke's insistence that the scriptures were the only source of religious truth, but Locke's The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695) went too far for her in its rejection of the mysteries of Christianity and in its insistence that all could interpret the Gospels for themselves. It threatened to displace the clergy from their authoritative role within the Church. It is true that however, at the end of her exchange of letters with John Norris, she had attempted to reconcile their views. But Locke's work was only the beginning of a powerful movement within the Church in favour of a more reasonable Christianity. Archbishop Tillotson was to revolutionise preaching when he adopted a coolly reasoned and unemotional approach in his sermons. But, above all, it was John Toland, the Deist, who shocked High Anglicans with his Christianity not Mysterious (1696) and the host of pamphleteers that were released when the Licensing Act expired in 1695. They were seen as representing a dangerous trend towards scepticism and irreligion. When Mary Astell's Christian Religion was published in 1705, it set out to attack Locke and Tillotson—but always in highly respectful language.

In A Serious Proposal Mary Astell had stressed the importance of women who had acquired a knowledge of the French language, using it to read not romances but for ‘the study of Philosophy (as I hear the French Ladies do) Descartes, Malebranche and others’.¹³⁹ English women, she suggested, should emulate Madame Dacier, the classical scholar, and Madeleine de Scudéry. Curiously, although she admitted to a great admiration for Descartes and a commitment to his ideas, she does not appear to have ever read him in the original. All her references are to translations of popularisations of Descartes's work such as Francois Bayle's The General System of Cartesian Philosophy (1670) and Arnauld's The Art of Thinking or the Port Royal Logic (1685). It was the latter work that she used as the basis for the second part of A Serious Proposal—in which the influence of Descartes's method is clear. The confirmation that she is unlikely to have read Descartes in the original is found in one of her letters to John Norris, who had urged her to read Malebranche, where she admitted she was unable to read ‘that ingenious Author in his own Language’.¹⁴⁰

There is also no evidence that she read the work of the most influential of the French reformers, Poulain de la Barre, a radical Cartesian, translated from the French as The Woman as good as the Man: or the Equality of both Sexes in 1677. Nor does she make reference to other French writers who were concerned with women's education—with the exception of Madeleine de Scudéry. In her emphasis on the close relationship between the contempt in which women were held and their inadequate education as compared with men, Mary Astell seems to have followed Madeleine de Scudéry closely. But in the objects with which such education were to be pursued she differed fundamentally from that author. If Mlle de Scudéry believed in an expansion of educational provision for women it was not to be at the expense of any sacrifice of the ornamental accomplishments. Her aim was not to give women self-respect and intellectual independence but rather ‘to produce women who could function agreeably in social situations’.¹⁴¹ Of Madame de Maintenon, François Fénelon or Charles Perrault Mary Astell makes no mention, just as—even more surprising—she seems not to have read Anna Maria von Schurman's A Learned Maid (1641) which Clement Barksdale had translated into English in 1659.

Nevertheless French ideas, and more particularly the ideas of Descartes, greatly influenced Mary Astell as they did all English rational thought. The satires on ‘learned ladies’ in Restoration drama owed much to Molière's Les Femmes Savantes. It was to Aphra Behn that we owe the first translation of Fontenelle's Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds in 1686. The habit of compiling long lists of illustrious women from history or the Bible to make the point that men had no monopoly of glory, a habit Mary Astell shared with many others of both sexes writing on women at the end of the seventeenth and in the early eighteenth century, is also found in French writers on women. But Mary Astell was selective in what she absorbed of any influence. It seems that it was not so much the details of Cartesianism but the general principles that she adopted in her thinking. She remained very independent, taking only what she wanted from any writer. So the influence of Platonism, like the influence of Locke and Descartes was not allowed to exclude other, and often, contradictory influences.¹⁴²

She read widely. In Moderation Truly Stated (1704) there are over 60 works published during the Interregnum and covering a remarkable range of opinion, to which she makes detailed reference, as well as a host of sermons.¹⁴³ In seeking to explain the sudden upsurge in interest in women's education and women's role in marriage of the 1690s, historians have perhaps underestimated the lasting effects of the period of the Civil War on women's consciousness. However opposed to the ideas of that period, Mary Astell was very familiar with its writings and must have been aware of its ideas about women and marriage.

The description of Mary Astell as ‘the first major English feminist’ is only one of several such labels: ‘the founder of the feminist movement’, ‘undoubtedly a blue-stocking and a feminist’, ‘the first systematic feminist in England’.¹⁴⁴ Of course, much depends on what is meant by ‘feminist’. Almost certainly there will be many modern feminists who will find it difficult to recognise Mary Astell as a forebear. Joan Kinnaird's concern to make what she sees as her very ‘tame’ feminism compatible with High Anglican Tory views has led her to suggest that ‘our tendency to assume that there is necessarily a contradiction between feminism and conservatism’ has led us astray.¹⁴⁵ On the contrary, she argues, Mary Astell's conservative views on marriage and women's education were fully in accord with her conservative views on religion and politics. Feminism, in the seventeenth century and early eighteenth century, it is concluded, was as much of conservative as radical origins. Yet surely this is to see Mary Astell as totally divorced from her historical context and to attempt to fit her into some preconceived idea of what late seventeenth and early eighteenth century feminism ought to have been. We need to remember that ‘a feminist movement at that stage would have been inconceivable.’¹⁴⁶

Mary Astell was not a freak in her religious and political views which bind her closely to the general intellectual atmosphere of her period and her class. She was by no means exceptional in combining traditional views on religion and politics with views on women's education and marriage, which, for her time, were remarkably enlightened. Aphra Behn and Mary de la Rivière Manley were both passionate Tory advocates despite their more liberated views on women. Lady Mary Chudleigh, the poetess who wrote The Ladies Defence: Or The Bride-Woman's Counsellor Answer'd (1700), shared Mary Astell's religious devotion and high Tory views. In the disputes and debates of the years following the Glorious Revolution there was, as Geoffrey Holmes has said ‘no genuine ‘radical’ element’.¹⁴⁷ ‘Feminism’ or the kind of enlightened views on women that Mary Astell displayed are not conditional on the existence of a radical movement any more than they are dependent on ‘conservative Anglican thought’.¹⁴⁸

In another effort to explain Mary Astell, she is labelled as ‘sexually odd’ and ‘a man-hating recluse’.¹⁴⁹ There is in her feminism, another writer claims, ‘a rejection of physiological womanhood’.¹⁵⁰ Is there a hint here of precisely the same sort of contemporary accusations levelled at ‘learned ladies’, of being desexed, or of ‘acting above their sex’?

In her writings it is true that her scorn for men is expressed with powerful directness. ‘Their Vast Minds’, she wrote, ‘lay Kingdoms waste.’¹⁵¹ The young men of her time were ‘bold importunate and rapacious vultures’!¹⁵² Such comments led Francis Atterbury, Bishop of Rochester, to suggest she was vulgar and lacked breeding! ‘She has not the most decent manner of insinuating what she means’, he wrote, ‘but is now and then a little offensive and shocking in her expressions.’¹⁵³ A more recent writer has found such expressions ‘an unattractive feature of Mrs. Astell's personality’.¹⁵⁴ If her language is more powerful, is her scorn for men all that different from that expressed by other women at the time, and more particularly those who shared her idea that where women were found inferior to men it was the result of their exclusion from the educational opportunities enjoyed by men, and owed nothing to nature? Not surprisingly, having arrived at such a conclusion, women went on to analyse the causes of such exclusion. Who was to blame? The growing consciousness of the deprivation inflicted on them by men, of men's contemptuous attitude to them, of the humiliation of their assigned role, all led to the same answer. The expression of anti-male feeling should not surprise us. It is indeed a step in the direction of a demand for equality, and as such, a move towards ‘feminist’ expression.

‘Her sympathy with the lives of women’, wrote Ada Wallas, ‘was broader than her social theories lead one to expect.’¹⁵⁵ It is a perceptive comment. If Mary Astell never flattered women and was not afraid to tell them their weaknesses in as direct a language as she employed for men's failings, her admiration and love for women is extended to those with whom she had little or nothing in common, and whose ideas often must have been alien to her. So she condemned novels and novel-reading but this did not prevent her reading, with admiration, Madeleine de Scudéry's novel concerned with women's education.¹⁵⁶ She was a sincere and devout Christian but this did nothing to prevent her close friendship with Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ‘the free-thinking Mary’ as Lady Louisa Stuart called her. She thought the notorious Madame Mazarine's behaviour imprudent, childish and inexcusable, but this did not prevent her feeling real sympathy for her. It was that sympathy that led her to greet any achievement women made with unsparing admiration.

In her Reflections Mary Astell argued that the scriptures should not be used to prove the natural subjection of women to men. Relations between the sexes ‘ought to be decided by natural Reason only.’¹⁵⁷ But if men were to play the game of using scriptures against women in proof of their inferiority, she was prepared to list carefully woman after woman from the Bible to prove the contrary. Glory was no monopoly of the opposite sex. ‘The Bible is for, not against us’, she bravely insisted, ‘and cannot without great violence done to it, be urg'd to our Prejudice.’¹⁵⁸

‘To plead for the Oppress'd and to defend the Weak’, she wrote, ‘seem'd to me a generous undertaking.’¹⁵⁹ It was—even if her idea of the ‘Oppress'd’ and ‘Weak’ was mainly confined to the upper classes. In the interest of such pleading and defence she was prepared to forget her own, sometimes passionately held, beliefs.

After her publications of 1704-05, four works in all, Mary Astell was to produce one more work in 1709. Bart'lemy Fair or an Enquiry after Wit was an answer to a pamphlet, Letter concerning Enthusiasm (1708) written by Lord Shaftesbury, but which Mary Astell wrongly attributed to a member of the Whig Kit-Kat club—and almost certainly Swift. Shaftesbury had argued for a moderate religion free from enthusiasm and based firmly on reason. Such a true religion need have no fear of ridicule or raillery. A rational religion could only emerge strengthened. He argued strongly against any attempt to straightjacket the beliefs of those within the Church. Riled by the recent satires on her and her ‘protestant nunnery’ in The Tatler Mary Astell was all too ready to assume the author was the same and she launched out in an attack on the Whig Kit-Kat club. Disillusioned by the failures of the High Church cause in 1705 the pamphlet is a bitter attack on the influence of Deism and what she saw as the increasing irreligion of her day.

Apart from her preface to the letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, she was to write no more. Contemporary accounts suggest that, disappointed by the failures of the causes into which she had put all her energies, she occupied herself in her religious devotions and good works. She became more of an eccentric and adopted a very simple, not to say frugal, way of life.

After 1705 she must have experienced a great sense of defeat as one after another of the causes she had fought for failed. The High Anglican party, although enjoying a temporary recovery, was in decline and the particular brand of Toryism with which it was associated was to be overtaken by the Whig ascendancy. Her beloved Church was torn by dissension and she was to find herself on the losing side. Cambridge Platonism was virtually dead. What remained was her faith—in religion and in women and to these she devoted the remainder of her life.

No-one, I think, would have resisted sympathy so much as Mary Astell yet she presents a not untragic figure. The fight over the particular issues of her time to which she had devoted so much of her energy had found her on the losing side. Those issues are now of no more than historical interest yet they were fought with all the passion involved when traditional ideas and values are under attack. Perhaps we have underestimated the tension of those years between 1689 and 1714, which for Mary Astell must have been acute. As has been suggested, it was precisely because in all but her ideas on women's education and the nature of marriage she was such a traditionalist, that she was so remarkable. It made her call to women to reject ‘that Tyrant Custom’ all the more courageous. And if, as she told women ‘there is a sort of Bravery and Greatness of Soul, which … consists in living up to the dignity of our Natures’,¹⁶⁰ who could have demonstrated it better?

Notes

1. Mary Astell, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies For the Advancement of their True and Greatest Interest. By a Lover of her Sex. London, 1694. (Hereafter A Serious Proposal I); and Mary Astell, Some Reflections upon Marriage Occasion'd by the Duke and Dutchess of Mazarine's Case which is also consider'd. London, 1700. (Hereafter Reflections)

2. Mary Astell, A Fair Way with the Dissenters and their Patrons London, 1704.

3. Mary Astell, An Impartial Enquiry into the Causes of the Rebellion and Civil War in this Kingdom, 1704.

4. Florence M. Smith, Mary Astell, Columbia University Press, New York, 1916.

5. Karl D. Bulbring, ‘Mary Astell an Advocate of Women's Rights Two Hundred Years Ago’, Journal of Education, April 1891

   Katherine S. Pattinson, ‘Mary Astell’, The Pall Mall Magazine, June 1893.

   Harriet M'Ilquham, ‘Mary Astell: A Seventeenth Century Women's Advocate’, The Westminster Review, vol. 149, no. 4, April 1898.

6. A.H. Upham, ‘English Femmes Savantes at the end of the Seventeenth Century’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, XII (1913).

7. George Ballard (1706-55), a learned antiquarian with a sympathetic appreciation of women's abilities, was the author of Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain, who have been Celebrated for their Writings or Skill in the Learned Arts and Sciences, 1752.

8. For example, Mary Hays, Female Biography, 1803. See below p. 6

9. Extracts from the Records of the Company of Hostmen of Newcastle-on-Tyne, Publications of the Surtees Society, vol. CV, 1901, p. 286.

10. Part of his epitaph read:

    … whose heart bled
    When rebel feet cut off his head.
    And great good Shepherd humbly lay
    To his mad flock a bleeding prey.

    Quoted Richard Welford, Men of Mark 'Twixt Tyne and Tweed, 1895, p. 122

11. Records of the Company of Hostmen, p. 248, but on the same page there is a reference to a ‘Mr. Austell, Clearke’ in January 1647 which may well indicate Peter Astell.

12. Ibid, pp. 105-6, 249.

13. Ibid, p. 121

14. Ibid, p. 271

15. Welford, op. cit., p. 122.

16. Roger Howell, Newcastle upon Tyne and the Puritan Revolution, 1967, particularly Chapters I, II and V.

17. Memoirs of the Life of Mr. Ambrose Barnes, Publications of the Surtees Society, vol. L, 1867, p. 414.

18. John Brand, History and Antiquities of the Town and County of Newcastle on Tyne, 2 vols., vol. I., 1789, p. 317 footnote.

19. Ballard, op.cit., p. 445.

20. Welford, op.cit., p. 123.

21. Ballard, op.cit., p. 445.

22. Remarks and Collections of Thomas Hearne, Ed. Rev. H.E. Salter, 1915, vol. X, p. 426. (On her knowledge of French see p. 51 suggesting any knowledge she had of French was acquired much later in her life.) See also Mary Astell, The Christian Religion as Profess'd by a Daughter of the Church of England, 1705, p. 139.

23. Mrs Mary Pilkington, Memoirs of Celebrated Female Characters, (1804), 1811, p. 33.

24. Ballard, op.cit., p. 445.

25. Records of the Company of Hostmen, p. 251.

26. A Collection of Poems humbly presented and Dedicated to the most Reverend Father in God William by Divine Providence Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, 1689, Rawlinson MSS poet. 154:50.

27. Mrs Mary Pilkington, op. cit., pp. 33-4.

28. Mary Hays, Female Biography, vol.I, 1803, pp. 213, 216. This suggestion could explain her interest in science and her belief that women were as capable of scientific speculation as men (see below p. 201). Such an interest would seem to be confirmed by her letter to Sir Hans Sloane, the physician, of 25 April, 1724 (see Sloane MS. 4047:163) expressing a wish to call on him in order to see his ‘noble Repository’. It also suggests that Susan Centlivre's character of Valeria in The Bassett Table was inspired by Mary Astell.

29. A Collection of Poems, 1689, prefatory letter.

30. George Paston, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and her Times, 1907, note pp. 12-13.

31. Reginald Blunt, Paradise Row, 1906, pp. 65, 67.

32. Rawlinson MSS. D198:91-99.

33. Diary of Ralph Thoresby, ed. Rev. Joseph Hunter, vol. II, 1830, p. 161.

34. James Sutherland, English Literature of the Late Seventeenth Century, 1969, p. 348

35. John Norris, A Collection of Miscellanies, 1717, p. 228.

36. Letters Concerning the Love of God, between the Author of The Proposal to the Ladies and Mr. John Norris, 1695, Letter III from Mary Astell to John Norris.

37. In his reply to her he wrote ‘I must needs acknowledge that this (as all our other Duties) is more intelligible than practicable, though to render it so I know of no other Way than by long and constant Meditation …’.

38. Reginald Blunt, The Wonderful Village, 1918, p. 86.

39. Letters Concerning the Love of God, 1695, See below p. 195.

40. A Collection of Poems, 1689, from Stanza III of an untitled poem; see below p. 189.

41. Ms Ballard 37:49.

42. Thomas Barnard, An Historical Character relating to the Holy and Exemplary Life of the Rt. Honourable the Lady Elizabeth Hastings, 1742, p. 13.

43. Lady Louisa Stuart, granddaughter of Lady Mary, in her introductory anecdotes to: Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ed. Lord Wharncliffe, vol. I, 1893, p. 85.

44. From a Letter to the Countess of Bute dated 20 October 1752, in: The Works of the Right Honourable Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, vol. IV, 1817, p. 184.

45. Lady Louisa Stuart, op. cit., p. 85.

46. Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, vol. I, p. 84.

47. Letters Concerning the Love of God, Preface.

48. Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, vol. I, p. 86.

49. Quoted Fidelis Morgan, The Female Wits, 1981, p. 6.

50. Letters Concerning the Love of God; see below p. 195.

51. A Serious Proposal I; see below p. 163.

52. Ibid.

53. A Collection of Poems, 1689, preface.

54. Ballard, op. cit. p. 447.

55. Letters Concerning the Love of God, preface.

56. For a discussion of the authorship of the former work see Florence Smith, Mary Astell, 1916, Appendix II. The Bodleian Catalogue includes the latter work under Mary Astell's name. Dr George Hickes would seem to suggest her as the author in a letter to the Master of University College, dated 9 December 1704. See Ballard MSS 62:85.

57. A Collection of Poems, 1689; see below p. 185.

58. A Serious Proposal I; see below p. 140.

59. Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—-y W—-y M—-e, Preface; see below p. 235.

60. Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800, 1977, p. 44.

61. The Lawes Resolutions of Women's Rights, 1632, p. 6.

62. Reflections; see below p. 114.

63. Ibid. p. 119.

64. A Serious Proposal I; see below p. 169.

65. Reflections; see below p. 127.

66. Ibid. p. 130.

67. Thomas Middleton, The Roaring Girl, II.ii, 1611.

68. Mary Astell, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Part II, 1697; see below p. 178.

69. A Collection of Poems, 1689; see below pp. 188-9.

70. Ibid.

71. Bathsua Makin, An Essay to Revive the Ancient Education of Gentlewomen in Religion, Arts and Tongues, 1673, p. 26.

72. Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, vol. II, p. 225.

73. See Fidelis Morgan, The Female Wits, 1981, p. 54.

74. Ibid. p. 9.

75. Myra Reynolds, The Learned Lady in England 1650-1760, 1920, pp. 49, 50.

76. Letters Concerning the Love of God; see below p. 191.

77. Ibid. p. 193.

78. The Tatler, no.32, from Tuesday 21 June to Thursday 23 June, 1709.

79. Elizabeth Elstob (1683-1756), the Anglo-Saxon scholar, believed women had an equal right to learning as men. Mary de la Rivière Manley (1663?-1724), playwright and novelist, after being deceived into a bigamous marriage with her cousin, was deserted by him and supported herself by writing. The most well known of her works is Secret Memoirs and Manners of Several Persons of Quality of both Sexes. From the New Atlantis, 1709, in which she sought to discredit the Whigs by relating the more scandalous adventures of many prominent figures. She wrote as one very aware of most women's economic dependence and its consequences for their oppression.

80. The Tatler, no.63, from Thursday 1 September to Saturday 3 September 1709.

81. The Works of the Celebrated Mrs Centlivre, 3 vols. 1761, pp. 210, 217, 218, 228.

82. Mary Astell, The Christian Religion as Profess'd by a Daughter of the Church of England, 1705; see below p. 201.

83. Welford, op. cit., p. 126.

84. Mrs Mary Pilkington, op. cit., p. 34.

85. Mary Hays, op. cit., p. 220.

86. Mrs Mary Pilkington, op. cit., p. 34.

87. Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, p. 86.

88. C.E. Medhurst, Life and Work of Lady Elizabeth Hastings, 1914, pp. 230-1.

89. Throughout the section that follows I am indebted to the following: Alice Clark, The Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century, 1919; Roger Thompson, Women in Stuart England and America, 1974; K.V. Thomas, ‘Women and the Civil War Sects’, Past and Present, no. 13, April 1958; Patricia Higgins, ‘The Reactions of Women, with special reference to women petitioners’, from Politics, Religion and the English Civil War, ed. Brian Manning, 1973; Phyllis Mack, ‘Women as Prophets during the English Civil War’, from The Origins of Anglo-American Radicalism, ed. M. Jacob and J. Jacob, 1984, pp. 214-230; Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down, 1975, particularly Chapter 15.

90. Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down, Penguin Books, 1975, p. 311.

91. Quoted from Keith Thomas, op. cit. p. 52.

92. Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders, (1721), 1924, p. 12.

93. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel, 1957, p. 154.

94. Keith Thomas, op. cit., p. 55.

95. The Ladies Calling, 1673, The Preface.

96. Ibid. p. 16.

97. Ibid., p. 70.

98. Ibid., pp. 3-4.

99. Hannah Woolley, The Gentlewoman's Companion: or a Guide to the Female Sex, 1675, p. 104.

100. George Savile, Marquis of Halifax, The Lady's New Year Gift; or, Advice to a Daughter, (1688), in Complete Works, Penguin, 1969, p. 276.

101. Myra Reynolds, op. cit. p. 88.

102. David Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order, 1980, p. 147.

103. J.E. Gagen, The New Woman, 1954, p. 100.

104. A Serious Proposal I. Numbers in brackets following quotes from this work refer to pages in this book.

105. Ballard, op. cit. p. 446.

106. Ballard MSS 43:29 (Bodleian Library).

107. Gilbert Burnet, History of His Own Time, vol. II, 1734, p. 653.

108. The Catechism of Thomas Becon, ed. for the Parker Society, 1844, p. 377.

109. John Duncan, Lady Lettice, Vi-Countess Falkland, ed. M.F. Howard, 1968, p. 92.

110. Clement Barksdale, A Letter Touching a College of Maids, or a Virgin Society, written 12 August 1675, Sig Av, A2, A2v.

111. Ibid. Sig A2v.

112. John Evelyn, Numismata, 1697, p. 265; George Wheler, A Protestant Monastery, 1698 Chapter IV; Robert Nelson, An Address to Persons of Quality and Estate, 1715, p. 213; Robert Halsband, The Life of Mary Wortley Montagu, 1956, p. 7; Thomas Amory, Memoirs Containing the Lives of Several Ladies of Great Britain, 1755; Thomas Amory, The Life of John Buncle, Esq., vol. I, 1756, vol. II, 1766; Samuel Richardson, Sir Charles Grandison, in 7 volumes, vol. VI, letter IV, 1811; Sarah Fielding, History of the Countess of Dellwyn, 1759; Sarah Scott, Millenium Hall, 1762.

113. Daniel Defoe, An Essay on Projects, (1697) from The Earlier Life and the Chief Earlier Works of Daniel Defoe, ed. Henry Morley, 1889, pp. 145-6.

114. Ibid., p. 148.

115. Ada Wallas, Before the Bluestockings, 1929, p. 111.

116. Roger Thompson, Women in Stuart England and America, 1974, p. 201.

117. A Serious Proposal I, Numbers in brackets following quotes refer to pages in this book.

118. Reflections, Numbers in brackets following quotes refer to pages in this book.

119. Reflections, Numbers in brackets after quotes refer to pages in this book.

120. See Ballard, op. cit. p. 450, footnote.

121. John Sprint, The Bride-Woman's Counsellor. Being a Sermon preach'd at a Wedding May the 11th, 1699, at Sherborne in Dorset, pp. 2, 6, 7, 12-13.

122. Halifax, op. cit. All references included in brackets.

123. Hannah Woolley, The Gentlewoman's Companion, 1675, pp. 2, 106, 107.

124. Ibid., p. 89.

125. Hannah Woolley, The Queen-like Closet, Supplement, 1684, p. 127.

126. Ibid. p. 99.

127. Ibid. p. 126.

128. Gilbert Burnet, History of His Own Time, vol. II, 1734, p. 652.

129. The Works of the Rt. Honourable Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, vol. I, 1817, p. 217.

130. John Norris, A Collection of Miscellanies, 1717, pp. 311-14.

131. Kinnaird, op. cit., p. 55.

132. Sutherland, op. cit. p. 348.

133. The Tatler, no. 32, 1709.

134. Letters Concerning the Love of God; see below p. 195.

135. Mary Astell, Christian Religion, p. 256.

136. John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1690, Bk IV from The Works of John Locke, in 9 vols., vol. II, 1824, p. 280.

137. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett, Second Treatise, 1967, p. 243.

138. Reflections, see below p. 132.

139. A Serious Proposal I, See below p. 155.

140. Letters Concerning the Love of God, 1695, p. 149.

141. Carolyn C. Lougée, Le Paradis des Femmes: Women, Salons and Social Stratification in 17th century France, 1976, p. 29.

142. So while, like John Norris, she was a discipline of Nicolas Malebranche in his belief that we ‘see all things in God’, she must also have been familiar with Malebranche's theory that women's inferiority was the result of their possessing more sensitive brain fibres (La Recherche de la Vérité, 1674, which was frequently translated into English).

143. Among the 60 works were: John Goodwin's Theomachia (1644); John Milton's Eikonoklastes (1649); Peter Sterry's England's Deliverance from the Northern Presbytery (1651); Thomas Edwards's Gangraena I, II & III (1646); John Lilburne's England's Birthright Justified, (1645); Henry Burton's Conformity's Deformity (1646); John Saltmarsh's The End of one Controversy (1646); Sir Edward Coke's Institutes II (1643); Samuel Rutherford's Free Disputation against Pretended liberty of Conscience (1648); John Bastwick's Independency not God's Ordinance (1645); and Richard Baxter's Christian Concord (1653). In addition, she makes reference to Clarendon's History of the Great Rebellion and Calamy's Abridgement of Baxter's Life.

144. Kinnaird, op. cit., p. 55; Robert Halsband, The Life of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, 1956, p. 117; Beatrice Scott, ‘Lady Elizabeth Hastings’, Yorkshire Archaeological Journal, vol. 55, 1983, p. 99; Katharine M. Rogers, Feminism in Eighteenth Century England, 1982, p. 71.

145. Kinnaird, op. cit. p. 66.

146. Sheila Rowbottom, Women, Resistance and Revolution, 1972, p. 31.

147. Britain after the Glorious Revolution, 1689-1714, ed. Geoffrey Holmes, 1969, p. 13.

148. Kinnaird, op. cit., p. 75.

149. Roger Thompson, op. cit., p. 12.

150. Ruth Perry, ‘The Veil of Chastity: Mary Astell's Feminism’, Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture, vol. 9, 1979, p. 25.

151. Reflections, See below p. 115.

152. A Serious Proposal I, See below p. 165.

153. Folkestone Williams, Memoirs and Correspondence of Francis Atterbury, D.D., Bishop of Rochester, 1869, vol. I, p. 170.

154. Kinnaird, op. cit., p. 67.

155. Ada Wallas, op. cit., p. 128

156. Madeleine de Scudéry, Artamène ou Le Grand Cyrus, Paris, 1649-53.

157. Astell, Reflections, See below p. 74.

158. Ibid. p. 84

159. Ibid. p. 131

160. A Serious Proposal I, See below p. 171.