SOURCE: Deluna, D. N. “Mary Astell: England's First Feminist Literary Critic.” Women's Studies 22, No. 2 (March 1993): 231-42.

[In following essay, Deluna examines the two parts of A Serious Proposal to the Ladies as primary examples of Astell's feminism, as well as what these publications advocated for the women of her day, and how they were received by other social critics.]

For literary critics and historians concerned to explore the early configurations of modern feminism in England, it has become old news that Mary Astell is a figure who deserves serious attention. This is news which Ruth Perry, more than anyone else, helped spread. In work partly anticipated by Joan Kinnaird, Hilda Smith, and Katherine Rogers, Perry (in an impressive article in Eighteenth-Century Studies and in her book The Celebrated Mary Astell) has now succeeded in establishing Astell's credentials as England's first major feminist.

By “Astell's feminism,” what Perry and others are essentially referring to is the powerful presence of two arguments in her early corpus of writings—most notably in her Serious Proposal To the Ladies, for the Advancement of their true and greatest Interest of 1694, where the establishment of an all-female college is proposed. First, there is Astell's repeated claim that intellectual exertion should be compassed by women no less than by men. And there is her insistence that such exertion has the power to dignify women as the pursuit of physical beauty or of social amusement does not. These arguments are, of course, more accurately described as protofeminist, since they appear in retrospect to have anticipated distinctly modern notions about a woman's right to enter institutions of higher learning and about the significance of questioning the personal and political value of traditional female social roles.¹

As a result of this recent discovery of a protofeminist Astell, gender study in the field of English literature has changed. Along with investigation of the liberating aspects of Restoration drama (for instance, its positive appraisal of strong-willed heroines and its tolerant sponsorship of a prolific female play wright in Aphra Behn), late seventeenth-century specialists have now also given much attention to the phenomenon of Astell, a highly religious woman who despised the theater and its libertine ethos, and who entreated women to devote themselves to chaste ideals and to the anhedonist rigors of the new philosophy. Astell has also been a subject of much interest to literary critics working in the eighteenth-century, who have often approached her as a remarkable early Enlightenment figure whose work can be set in instructive dialogue with that movement's later female liberators.² The considerable impact these scholars have had on how we define English literary studies is signalled by the inclusion of a sample of Astell's feminist writing in the latest—1986—edition of the first volume of The Norton Anthology; and herein Astell is profiled as a thinker who initiated important progressive discussion of women's social roles, discussion said to be continued by such wellknown eighteenth-century authors as Defoe, Johnson, and Wollstonecraft (1937-38).

The purpose of my essay is to enrich our recent view of Astell's ideas on the condition of women. Her Serious Proposal To the Ladies was her first published work, and it catapulted her to celebrity status as a woman's advocate in her day. This pamphlet—which proposes the founding of an academy of religious retreat, where women could improve their minds through philosophical self-reflection—can, I show, be freshly illuminated when located against the background of contemporary debate on female nature. I refer to a debate carried on in England in the 1680s and early 90s by poets, hacks, and homiletic writers. During these years a host of ladies' conduct-book writers challenged accusations made by a group of flamboyant misogynist satirists. While posing this challenge, however, they solicited female audiences to whom they stressed the value of such traditional ideas of woman's excellence as good housekeeping and wifely subservience.

Astell in her Serious Proposal follows the conduct writers in refuting claims of the misogynist satirists. But as I shall be demonstrating, she targets the conduct writers as well. When in her pamphlet she repeatedly enjoins women to reject frivolous pursuits in favor of the pleasures of philosophy, her language and stance is especially directed at a female readership influenced by the day's conduct literature. As we will see, Astell is throughout her pamphlet reacting against what she finds to be oppressive female ideals purveyed in such literature. If we keep in mind that one of the time-honored practices of the literary critic is that of producing arresting commentary on aspects of the contemporary book scene, then Astell is, arguably, England's first major feminist literary critic.

Perry, Kinnaird, Smith, and Rogers have all focused much of their work on the Serious Proposal, and a salient feature of their commentary is their pointing up ways in which the new philosophy may have enabled the pamphlet's feminist arguments. Perry has stressed that Decartes, Malebranche, and the Cambridge Platonists provided an accessible means of intellectual stimulation for Astell and other women: because their works were usually composed in the vernacular, and because here was a new way of doing philosophy which required no university training, only an alert learner willing to reflect on his or her own thought processes (“Radical” 473, 491-93; Celebrated 70). Each of the commentators just mentioned has suggested that the period's new focus on the importance of the workings of the mind must have reinforced Astell's conviction that the greatest source of human fulfillment resided with committing oneself to an intellectual life (Perry, “Radical” 475-76, 491-92; Smith 6, 119; Kinnaird 59-64; Rogers 53, 74). (“Cartesian rationalism,” writes Perry, “was the very cornerstone of her feminism” [“Radical” 491].) In this article I add to these suggestions, for as we will see later on, what gives force and coherence to Astell's protest against the day's conduct books is the strategic use she makes of certain well-known tenets of the Cambridge Platonists.

In 1706 Astell reflected bitterly on “those wise Jests and scoffs put upon a woman of Sense and Learning, a Philosophical Lady as she is call'd by way of Ridicule” (Reflections 85). Whatever jests and scoffs she may have had in mind, no reader would have failed to register that Astell could speak to the situation from personal experience. For instance, the publishing impressario John Dunton, in his Athenian Spy (1704) posted a facetious “singles ad” announcing Astell's availability and thus reading sexual passion into her self-cultivated image of platonic lady (18). A year later, Susanna Centlivre in her play The Bassett Table lampooned Astell by depicting her as the hilariously eccentric Valeria whose egotism has motivated her desire to found a women's college of like-minded airy intellectuals. Some few years later Swift would draw on Centlivre's sketch in a contribution to The Tatler for 1709 (June 21-23). Here, in a zany spoof of A Serious Proposal, Astell is caricatured as the ludicrous “Madonella,” zealous mistress of a female academy of dizzy philosophical speculation.

These squibs attest to Astell's contemporary renown as author of A Serious Proposal; as do the pamphlet's sales figures: five editions from 1695-1701. Further, the tract generated a fair number of documented sympathetic reactions. At least a few tributes written by admiring authors have survived, notably, verse panegyrics by Lady Mary Chudleigh and Elizabeth Thomas.³ And perhaps the most significant accolade Astell received was from her mentor, the Cambridge Platonist John Norris of Bemerton, who in 1695 published their private correspondence.⁴ The work, entitled Letter Concerning the Love of God, Between the Author of the Proposal to the Ladies And Mr. John Norris, contains prefatory remarks by Norris that lavish praise on Astell's capacity as a philosophical and religious writer. “Madam,” he writes, “what obligations I am under to you for the Privilege of your excellent … Letters … I have particular reason to thank you for them, having received great spiritual Comfort and Advantage by them, not only Heat but Light, intellectual as well as moral Improvement” (A6r-v).

Thus A Serious Proposal created a sensation and brought Astell fast fame. But while this fact is borne out by all that we can register about the tract's immediate reception history, neither the squibs, the publication numbers, nor the accolades give us much of a sense of how deeply responsive Astell was to questions about female worth which were being debated by scores of contemporary poets and conduct-book writers.

A Serious Proposal has an immediate historical background in what we might refer to as the scurrilous verge gender war of the 1680s—a paper war which has been recently detailed for us by Felicity Nussbaum (Brink 20-42; Satires ii-vii). In 1682 Robert Gould, a minor Restoration versifier touched off the hostilities with the publication of his Love Given O'er: Or, A Satyr Against the Pride, Lust, and Inconstancy, &c. of Woman, a verse satire that rehearsed stock misogynist themes of female lust and pride. At least a dozen imitations and rejoinders followed, many of which saw multiple editions. Clearly this verse was intended to provide its audience with lively, bawdy entertainment. Titles suggest so much: The Lost Maiden-head, The Restor'd Maiden-head, Female Fire-ships. And indeed, the satirists typically wrote in roughshod rhyme, employed much billingsgate, and dealt in such salacious material as scenes of rape and bestiality, disclosures of the boudoir, and wild permutations of the creation story (in one case, a pregnant Eve who gobbles the apple without scruple, and in another, an Eve who is a wily interloper in a male separatist paradise where men conceive and deliver through their anal canals).⁵

This corpus of verse might seem to have no historical ties at all with the pious work of Astell; but in fact it does, and in ways that should become apparent in a moment. We can begin by noting that the misogynist satirists stimulated the establishment of a women's conduct-book market.⁶ The years immediately following Robert Gould's misogynist onslaught saw a steep increase in the publication of beauty manuals, guides for the Christian woman, histories of famous women of exemplary virtue, books of social etiquette, and housewives' manuals.⁷ In stark contrast to the anti-misogynist verse rejoinders, this literature was positive and inspirational, and for the most part free of colorful language and salacious material. Thus while on the one hand, the misogynist satirists met with protest from poetic anti-misogynist opponents who brawled with them in answerable style, on the other they encountered resistance from a host of writers and publishers who defended women within the more decorous generic conventions of the conduct book. In the latter case, what the misogynist poets helped to sponsor was not only a refutation of their position but also a newly popular literary market for and about women.

One favored item in this conduct literature seems to have been the history book of great exemplary females. Unlike the self-help guides, some of which were reprints of works written earlier in the century, these history books were all written in the 1680s. In 1682 a trio of them appeared.⁸ These histories emphasized the wondrous in female nature, the prodigies of piety, chastity, and moral fortitude. Typical, yet also one of the more nicely packaged of these works, is Female Excellency, or the Ladies Glory (1688), which delivers nine mini-narratives celebrating the lives of such “Worthies” as “Deborah the Prophetess,” “Valiant Judith,” “Virtuous Susanna,” and “Chast Lucretia.” Each history is prefaced by a graphic illustration of the famous female and a moralistic poem emblazoning her life in brief.

That the authors of these histories were indeed determined to rally in response to the misogynist aggression is suggested both by the content and the publication date of their works. And we have a further indication of their polemical intent when we consider that in one of these histories, Haec et Hic, the narratives about great women begin only after the anonymous author takes explicit aim at the misogynists satirists. “He” complains (albeit mock-seriously) in his preface:

envious Men seek to envenom the Names of Women, and inveigh against them in such terms as you have heard, with many other as groundless, as bitter Sarcasms … so scandalous, that I cannot forbear crying out with the Poet Horresco referens; I blush at and abhor the farther Repetition of them, and scorn to sully my paper in such black scandals, or teach my Pen such undutiful Language.

(51)⁹

The writers and publishers of the histories and the ladies' skills and devotional guides were able to avoid the anti-misogynist rhymers' awkward posture of denying woman's wretchedness and obscene nature in wretched and obscene verse. And the perspective of this more polite literature was what we might call “profeminine,” that is, a perspective which contested misogynist accusations as it reified traditional conceptions of women's social roles. It is true that this conduct literature held up a great variety of recommended models of virtuous female behavior, some even contradictory. But it is also the case that it promoted what were highly conventional roles for women.

The Whole Duty of a Woman is a case in point. Its title page reads:

The Whole Duty of a Woman: Or, a Guide to the Female Sex, From the Age of Sixteen to Sixty, &c. Being Directions, How Women of all Qualities and Conditions ought to Behave themselves in the various Circumstances of this Life, for their obtaining the Divine and Moral Vertues of Piety, Meekness, Modesty, Charity, Humility, Compassion, Temperance, and Affability, with their Advantages; and how to avoid opposite Vices … the whole Art of Love … The whole Duty of a Widow, &c. With the whole Art of Cookery, Preserving, Candying, Beautifying, &c. Written by a Lady.

This work is at once advertising guidance for the Christian woman, cupid's secrets for the ingenue, cooking lessons for the homemaker, and beauty tips for the coquette. Yet clearly, to read this title page is to recognize that women are being primed for the tradition-bound duties of wife, mother, and source of comfort and pleasure to men.

To a degree, these conduct books simply recorded information that was available to females through boarding school curricula or more private tutorial programs, such as servants' learning sessions in great households or instructions passed on from mother to daughter. At the same time, though, the wide dissemination of these books would have made such information accessible to the general reading public, with the result that this literature would have “sold” traditional female roles on an unprecedented scale. Now enter Mary Astell's Serious Proposal. Significantly, it appears in 1694, at a time when the misogynists were still active and when the market in profeminine conduct books had been grandly thriving for just over a dozen years. A Serious Proposal “answers” both the satirists and the conduct writers. Remarkably, it was a ladies' conduct book to end all such conduct books.

One of A Serious Proposal's easily discernible ingredients is Astell's practice of joining with the conduct writers in repudiating various familiar charges of the misogynist satirists. Although Astell is primarily concerned to address women, a fair amount of her rhetorical energies are expended in backhanded jabs at the misogynists, whom she imagines will object to her educational scheme on the grounds that women, in their estimation, are irredeemably vain, proud, and ignorant. Astell throughout her Serious Proposal takes the surprising tack of acknowledging the general truth of these charges, rejecting, however, the charge that women cannot alter their condition. For example, she repeatedly opposes the satirists' claim that women are naturally ignorant. To believe this claim, she states at one point, is to argue that women lack the souls which would allow them to develop intellectual agility; and to deny women souls, she concludes, “wou'd be as unphilosophical as it is unmannerly” (154).¹⁰ At another point Astell reflects on the difficulty of women escaping the predictable consequences of having been “nurs'd up” and “taught to be Proud and Petulant, Delicate and Fantastick, Humorous and Inconstant (144). What is remarkable, she declares, is not that “all Women are not wise and good” but that “there are any so” (142).

A number of exclamatory statements similar to these seem aimed simultaneously at an audience of women and the misogynists. Consider, just to take one example, the following:

can Ignorance be a fit preparative for Heaven? Is't likely that she whose Understanding has been busied about nothing but froth and trifles, shou'd be capable of delighting her self in noble and sublime Truths?

(154)

Here Astell is once again countering the misogynists' contention that women are naturally stupid, but this passage can also be seen to address women, in which case Astell must also be seen tactfully upbraiding them for having preoccupied themselves with frivolity instead of great truths and religious duties. Indeed, A Serious Proposal continually engages women—somewhat covertly in passages like the above, but patently in the greater portion of the text. To be sure, as any reader of the pamphlet knows, Astell hardly misleads her audience in having advertised her work as a proposal “To the Ladies,” and in having organized it in the form of a friendly epistle that opens with “LADIES” and closes with Astell stating, “she desires your Improvement, who is Ladies, Your very humble Servant.”

A Serious Proposal is, I submit, especially calculated to engage a female audience which has been exposed to and influenced by the day's conduct literature. Astell's title-page makes a show of imitating conduct-book conventions. Her work's full title announces, A Serious Proposal To the Ladies, For the Advancement of their true and greatest Interest. By a Lover of Her SEX,¹¹ a display that appropriates such characteristic features of ladies' conduct literature as the solicitation of an exclusively female readership and the advertisement of a text designed for women's self-improvement. Astell, though, seems to be reproducing these features while also suggesting an upcoming revisionary, or even revolutionary, approach to the genre. Contemporaries would have been struck by the fact that there was none of the usual title-page cataloguing of the feminine qualities or practical skills which the book's purchaser might acquire. Moreover, this tract, proposing as it does a “truer” and “greater” guide to female advancement, appears to be highlighting its disapproval of, or at least departure from, typical ladies' conduct fare.

Astell's title-page is clearly intended to decoy would-be conduct book purchasers even as it provides them with more than a hint of the author's self-conscious distance from that literature. Early on in the tract this hint becomes pure fact, because it soon becomes apparent that in addition to the title-page's disingenuous reproduction of the conduct book's generic signposts, the work is thoroughly saturated with the language and themes of the ladies' beauty guide; but in Astell's hands, this material is made to operate metaphorically. To put it simply, A Serious Proposal is a woman's beauty guide figuratively speaking.

To wit, these passages, selected almost at random from the pamphlet's early pages:

[I] only design … to improve your Charms and heighten your Value … [I] aim … to fix that Beauty, to make it lasting and permanent, which Nature with all the helps of Art cannot secure.

(139)

Your Glass will not do you half so much service as a serious reflection on your own Mind … Vertue [which] has certainly the most attractive Air, and Wisdom the most graceful and becoming Mien: Let these attend you, and your Carriage will be always well compos'd, and ev'ry thing you do will carry its Charm with it.

(140)

the Beauty of the Mind is necessary to secure those Conquests which your Eyes have gain'd; and Time that mortal Enemy to handsome Faces, has no influence on a lovely Soul, but to better and improve it. For shame let's abandon that Old, and therefore one wou'd think, unfashionable employment of pursuing Butter flies and Trifles!

(141)

Through such acts of verbal displacement, which recur everywhere in the tract, Astell devalues notions of female excellence found in the day's beauty manuals and replaces them with putatively superior ideals—namely, women's spiritual edification through the study of the new philosophy. Appropriately enough, Astell's verbal strategies seem to conjure and exploit a (once) compelling, platonic bias of mind over body.

While, then, A Serious Proposal represents an effort to encourage women to lead a life of the mind, it can also be accurately characterized as a dissuasive from ideals of physical beauty which were being promoted in so much of the contemporary conduct literature. There is, however, one sense in which Astell's pamphlet is a ladies' conduct book—that is, of a particular kind: the Christian woman's guide.¹² Indeed, the predominantly religious orientation of A Serious Proposal can hardly be ignored. What, though, is wholly different about Astell's work is the accent she places on “Christian” rather than on “woman.” Whereas the typical Christian woman's guide of the time linked religious piety to such domestic virtues as wifely subservience and good housekeeping, Astell—borrowing from the Cambridge Platonists—insists on a crucial connection between holy living and philosophic mediatation.

For instance, at one point in A Serious Proposal, she summarizes her vision for women thus—in words that carry no gender-specific considerations: “joyn[ing] the sweetness of Humanity to the strictness of Philosophy, that both together being improv'd and heighten'd by grace, may make up an accomplish'd Christian.¹³ In effect, Astell is arguing that the central tenet of the Cambridge Platonists (that philosophic enquiry can enhance Christian ways) should not be understood as a directive to men only; and in making this case, she repudiates familiar prescriptions registered in the ladies' Christian manuals.

Having spelled out what I consider to be Astell's clever feminist critique of representations of ideal womanhood found in the day's conduct literature—most specifically, in the beauty manuals and the guides for the Christian woman—one of the more intriguing aspects of the pamphlet's critical effort remains to be noted: the encouragement Astell was giving her contemporary female readers to venture beyond the confines of the fledgling woman's literary marketplace. As Perry has remarked, the new philosophy was, in a practical way, accessible to many Englishwomen since it only required an interested learner and books which were available in the vernacular (“Radical” 473).

Of course Astell herself is an excellent case in point. At a time when the scurrilous verse gender war was raging, and when ladies' conduct literature became enormously popular as never before, she was eagerly familiarizing herself with the new philosophy, particularly the work of Descartes, Malebranche, and Norris. In the early 90s she wrote to Norris after having read the third volume of his Practical Discourses on several Divine Subjects (1693). In this first of what would be many other letters she would write to him, she called attention to what she felt to be a troublesome implication of one of his arguments. The opening words of her letter are revealing because here she shows just how self-conscious she was about the untraditional path she had cleared for herself in having undertaken a home educational programme in philosophy. She begins by informing Norris that she expects more from him than to be relegated “to the Distaff or Kitchin, or at least to the Glass and the Needle.” Then she goes on to say that he is partly responsible for her intellectual habits: “you have increased my Natural Thirst for Truth, and set me up for a Virtuoso. [For] though I can't pretend to a Multitude of Books, a Variety of Languages … Academical Education, or any Helps but what my own Curiosity afford” (1-3). A few years later, Astell again revealed just how acutely aware she was of her breakway self-educative endeavor. At this time, (in her Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Part II [1696]), while defending such female “virtuosos” as herself from the real or imagined taunts of other women, she remarked, “She who makes the most Grimace at a Woman of Sense … is yet very desirous to be thought Knowing in a Dress, in the Management of an Intreague, in Coquetry or good Houswifry.”

As I have been suggesting, in A Serious Proposal (Part I) we find Astell pointing to a feasible literary solution to what she believed to be women's narrow education. There was her emphatic, if somewhat cryptic, advice:

For shame let's abandon that Old … unfashonable employment of pursuing Butter flies and Trifles!

(141)

since the French Tongue is understood by most Ladies, methinks they may much better improve it by the study of Philosophy … Des Cartes, Malebranche, and others

(155)

Notes

1. For more detailed discussion of the applicability of the term “feminism” to Astell's essays on women, see Perry, Celebrated 13-19; Smith 4-5; Kinnaird 58.

2. Scholarship on Astell that I have not yet mentioned includes the work of Fraser (329-31), Clinton, Janes, Nadelhaft, Adburgham (40-45), and Hill (1-62). Work done earlier in this century includes that of Florence Smith, Benson (28-32), and Utter and Needham (229-34).

3. These are Chudleigh's “To Almystrea” and Thomas' “Almystrea.” Both of these works are reprinted in full in Perry, Celebrated 493-94.

4. On Norris' relationship with Astell, see Perry, Celebrated 73-82.

5. The satire featuring a pregnant and voracious Eve is Misogynus; and the satire set in a male separatist paradise is The Great Birth of Man. Works rallying in support of Gould's cause include (in addition to Misogynus and The Great Birth): A Consolatory Epistle to a Friend Made Unhappy by Marriage, The Folly of Love, Female Fire-ships, The Restor'd Maiden-head, and Mundus Muliebris. Rejoinders to Love Given O'er and its satellites include: The Female Advocate, The Pleasures of Love and Marriage, The Lost Maiden-head, Sylvia's Complaint, and Mundus Foppensis. Love Given O'er, The Female Advocate, and The Folly of Love are conveniently reproduced in Nussbaum's Satires.

6. On the late seventeenth-century explosion of ladies' conduct literature, see Crawford 265-81, Mason 208, Upham 264-70.

7. In characterizing this assortment of early modern texts as ladies' conduct literature, I am loosely following Nancy Armstrong's definition of the genre as women's education literature that 1) had the “objective of ensuring a happy household” (63), and 2) proferred a “feminine ethos” (89), which might be aptly described as a valuing of passive moral virtues as well as domestic skills in a woman (66-67). Titles of this suddenly very saleable literature include: The Queens Closett Opened (1683), Directorium Cosmeticum (1684), The Good Housewife Made a Doctor (1684), De Morbis Feminis (1685), The Accomplisht Ladies Closset (1686), The Wonders of the Female World (1683, 2nd ed. 1684), The Accomplished Lady (1683), Haec et Hic (1683), The Illustrious History of Women (1686), and Female Excellency (1688).

8. These were Haec et Hic, Female Excellency, and The Wonders of the Female World.

9. The subtitle of Haec et Hic reads: “The Female Gender more worthy than the Masculine. Being a Vindication of that ingenious and innocent Sex from the biting Sarcasms, bitter Satyrs, and opprobrious Calumnies, wherewith they are daily, though underservedly, aspersed by the virulent tongues and Pens of malevolent Men.”

10. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations from the Serious Proposal (Part I) are from Hill's modern edition (which follows the original third edition); however, taking the 1694 edition as my text, I have replaced some of Hill's omitted words and phrases.

11. I quote from the title-page of the 1694 edition.

12. Examples of this conduct literature include such works as The Excellent Woman described by her true characters and their opposites (London, 1692) and The Character of a Good Woman (London, 1694).

13. I quote from pages 103-4 of the 1694 edition.

Works Cited

The Accomplished Lady. London, 1683,

The Accomplisht Ladies Closset. London, 1686.

Adburgham, Alison. Women In Print. London, 1972.

Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction. New York: Oxford U.P., 1987.

Astell, Mary. Reflections upon Marriage. The Third Edition. To which is added A Preface, in Answer to some Objections. London, 1706.

———. A Serious Proposal To the Ladies. London, 1694.

Benson, Mary. Women in Eighteenth-Century America. New York, Columbia U.P., 1935.

Centlivre, Susanna. The Basset Table. London, 1705.

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Chudleigh, Lady Mary. “To Almystrea.” Reprinted from manuscript by Ruth Perry. In The Celebrated Mary Astell. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1986. 491-92.

Clinton, Katherine. “Femme et Philosophe: Enlightenment Origins of Feminism.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 8 (1975): 283-99.

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Crawford, Patricia. “Women's Published Writings 1600-1700.” Women in English Society. Ed. Mary Prior. London: Methuen, 1985. 211-81.

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———. Practical Discourses on several Divine Subjects. Vol. 3. London, 1693.

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———. Satires on Women. Augustan Reprint No. 180. Los Angeles: Clark Library, 1976.

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Upham, A. H. “English Femmes Savantes at the End of the Seventeenth Century.” JEGP 12 (1913): 262-76.

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