SOURCE: Waters, Kristin. “Sources of Political Authority: John Locke and Mary Astell: Introduction.” In Women and Men Political Theorists: Enlightened Conversations, edited by Kristin Waters, pp. 5-19. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 2000.

[In the following excerpt, Waters summarizes Astell's political philosophies and arguments on marriage, comparing them to the writings of John Locke and several other writers of the time.]

ASTELL'S THEORY

[Descartes'] radical epistemology put women on a theoretical par with men.¹

A study of Mary Astell's philosophy is not for the faint of heart. Her political views have an affinity with those of Hobbes and Edmund Burke in their common defenses of monarchy, but she differs from Hobbes, criticizing his mechanistic individualism and atheism, which were anathema to her. Her feminism, or protofeminism, foreshadows certain aspects of radical feminism and even the separatist feminism of the late twentieth century. Her arguments about political foundations are radical-conservative and monarchical, but suggest (the danger of) arguments used today by postmodern writers against liberal foundationalism. She did not hold a high opinion of men. She wrote ostensibly for a female audience and both excoriated and was excoriated by the glib and witty writers of her day—Addison, Steele, and Defoe. She was a formidable intellect about whom there is tantalizingly little current scholarship and vast room for further study.

Her biographer Ruth Perry writes that both of the new radical epistemologies of the time, rationalism and empiricism, enabled women like Mary Astell to think of themselves as rational creatures situated in the Enlightenment ideology of human achievement. The rationalism of Descartes held that intellectual introspection could find truth, and the empiricism of Locke and Bacon found that one could “collect and record natural curiosities, peer through microscopes and telescopes and describe what she saw there.”² In principle, both of these new methodologies were available to women in ways that authority-based medieval epistemologies were not. The democratic impulses of the century rubbed off on women, and while the franchise was not yet in sight, education and increased opportunities were. One writer observes that the “Cartesian philosophy fostered an introspective psychology, a radical consciousness of self-important to the growth of feminism—by its insistence on the thinking I as the touchstone of all knowledge and even existence.”³ Then, as today, new epistemologies created a radical shift which enabled new kinds of understanding to flourish.

[P]erhaps I have said more than most Men will thank me for, I cannot help it, for how much soever I may be their friend and humble servant, I am more a friend to Truth.⁴

Astell's first book had the intriguing title of A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, for the Advancement of their True and Greatest Interest, By a Lover of Her Sex. The work begins with the Enlightenment premise that women have the same potential for reasoning as men and proceeds to argue the need (intellectually, economically, and socially) for a college for women. One of the early “second wave” feminists to revive Mary Astell's work is the Australian feminist Dale Spender. Spender's thesis is that counter-hegemonic theories such as feminism historically have difficulty gathering a head of steam and creating lasting social change because the dominant ideologies periodically erase them. Thus, they need to be reinvented by each succeeding generation. In the case of Mary Astell, despite her wide audience in the late seventeenth century, it is not a certainty even that she was read by another ardent feminist, Mary Wollstonecraft, in the late eighteenth century. And, until very recently, her work has been nearly invisible.

Spender credits Astell with formulating an early account of patriarchy as a system in which men claim control over women, physically, spiritually, and intellectually. A goal of Astell's is to reclaim women for themselves. Spender also attributes to Astell an early formulation of the concept of “victim blaming,” that women are “blamed” for social arrangements that men devise. As Astell says:

Women are from their very infancy debarred those advantages, with the want of which they are afterwards reproached, and nursed up in those vices which will hereafter be upbraided to them.⁵

Astell's serious proposal is to establish a women's college, where women could take up intellectual pursuits, tend to spiritual needs, and be protected from the problems associated with male control: forced domestic service, sexual exploitation, and domestic violence. The college would be funded by charitable subscription, and could be less expensive than the dowries required in marriage. She argues that women and men are made by God for the same purposes, and with the same intellect. Abstract thinking is what differentiates humans from animals. Since God has made nothing in vain, it follows that women should use their intellect.⁶ The Serious Proposal was well received generally, and led her to write and publish Part II, which is a work on methodology, designed particularly for women to help them individually improve their learning, in the absence of an educational institution.

In 1700 she published Some Reflections upon Marriage, Occasion'd by the Duke and Duchess of Mazarine's Case. This work, about the divorce suit of her Chelsea neighbor, reveals Astell in all her complexity. The case was wildly famous, with many published accounts of the trial. The Duke of Mazarine, whose name was taken from the French cardinal who was the Duchess Hortense Mazarine's guardian, was a notorious brute and abusive husband.⁷ His wife fled his abuses and the case wound up in court. Not just a commentary on marriage, this work is primarily a political critique. In it, Astell deftly inverts the analogy between the marriage contract and the social contract, used in different ways by Locke and Hobbes.

A CAREFUL ARGUMENT

For the sake of argument, Astell hypothesizes the truth of Locke's claim that the sovereignty of the monarch is not absolute, and argues by analogy that the sovereignty of the husband is not absolute, something few writers including Locke were willing to claim. Using this device she exposes the excesses of marital abuse perpetrated by the Duke of Mazarine on his wife. In a remarkable twist, however, Astell concludes that Hortense Mazarine made a vow before God to obey her husband, and the vow may not be broken. God is the foundational authority. It is heinous that the husband should behave in such a way, but the proper response to unreasonable power is passive obedience—a term used by Tories and “high flyers” to describe the proper response to objectionable political authority. In other words, the Dissenters should have practiced passive obedience, not revolt, towards the Stuart monarchs.

Following the analogy, Astell reasons that if divorce in marriage is not justified, so neither is “divorce” in civil government. God is the foundational authority for the power of the monarch and passive obedience is required even in cases of the most blatant abuse.

Because God made all Things for himself, and a rational mind is too noble a being to be made for the sake and service of any creature. The service she at any time becomes obliged to pay to a man, is only a business by the bye. Just as it may be any man's business and duty to keep hogs; he was not made for this, but if he hires himself out to such an employment, he ought conscientiously to perform it.⁸

A woman fool enough to marry a man must obey him as she might be obliged to “tend the pigs.” Her argument contains another clever twist leading to her most radical conclusion. Astell argues for political authority: men must submit to the state, women must submit to men. In this there is only one loophole. Women may refuse to marry. Astell strongly advocated not marrying, getting out from under the authority of men, staying celibate:

… If a Wife's case be as it is here represented, it is not good for a Woman to Marry, and so there's an end of the Human Race. But this is no fair consequence, for all that can justly be inferr'd from hence, is that a woman has no mighty obligations to the Man who makes love to her, she has no reason to be fond of being a wife, or to reckon it a piece of Preferment when she is taken to be a Man's Upper-Servant: it is no advantage to her in this World, if rightly manag'd it may prove one as to the next.⁹

She realizes that taken to its conclusion (i.e. if all women followed this path) it would be the end of the human race, but seeing that as an unlikely outcome, she strongly recommends a separate woman's sphere. Astell perceives what much later comes to be critiqued, especially by socialist feminist writers, as the “public/private distinction” in liberalism and uses it to her advantage.¹⁰ These writers argue that by creating a public world of legal action and protection for men and a private sphere for women, men can exclude women from legal redress and protection and can be physically abusive, take sexual advantage, and exact slave or servile work conditions for women, who have no recourse to the state. This analysis would apply to women who are under male power.

Astell's view is that the public sphere—the state—is not the proper sphere for women. Theirs is not to engage in politics or statecraft. So women who choose not to marry are in a kind of Lockean state of perfect freedom (although she would not call it that!) with no cause to be concerned with state authoritarianism or spousal control. Such women can have intellectual lives, go about their daily business, develop female friendships, and engage in religious devotion. Women like herself, so long as they have some small means of support, are truly free. This view foreshadows current arguments by Mary Daly, who dismisses the male sphere as “necrophiliac” and who exalts “woman-identified” culture as having a special and harmonic relationship with the world.¹¹ Astell's work also resonates with that of poet and essayist Adrienne Rich, who argues for woman-centered education.¹² Of course, Astell herself was deeply engaged with the prevailing male intellectual culture. But she had a profound vision of the benefits of a highly developed women's culture to society and especially to women.

In 1703 Astell published Moderation Truly Stated, a reply to arguments for “occasional conformity,” the practice of Dissenters attending Anglican services once a year to make themselves eligible to hold office. In An Impartial Enquiry into the Causes of Rebellion and Civil War in this Kingdom: An Examination of Dr. Kennett's Sermon, Jan. 31. 1703/4 (1704), she expresses outrage that a minister of the church would use the day commemorating Charles I's execution as an excuse to criticize the church and monarchy. Contrary to received wisdom, she argues that Dissenting views are more dangerous than papist ones. Her next pamphlet was A Fair Way with the Dissenters and Their Patrons Not Writ by Mr. L. [eslie], or any other Furious Jacobite, whether Clergyman or Layman; but by a very moderate person and Dutiful Subject to the Queen. This was a reply to Defoe's pamphlet The Shortest Way with the Dissenters, a heavy satire which proposes the total destruction of all non-Anglicans. In A Fair Way she argues for the destruction of Dissenters, but as a political party devoted to factionalizing and working against stability and order.

The Christian Religion, As Profess'd by a Daughter of the Church of England was written as a reply to Locke's philosophy, and its political implications. Political scientist Patricia Springborg identifies a systematic critique of Locke's three major principles: a principle of self-preservation, a right of freedom from heritable encumbrance, and a principle of government based on popular consent.¹³ In A Fair Way, Astell uncovers serious problems with Locke's justification of a “rogue government” which she compares with a highwayman. She notes that in Locke the right of conquest is denied to the monarch but asserted with respect to the people. Just as anti-foundationalists of the late twentieth century gradually lay bare arguments for first principles, so does Astell argue that all social institutions are contingent. Her very different purpose is to justify dynastic transition through a religious foundation, but it raises honest questions about the sources of political authority.

Another important feature, especially of her first two books, A Serious Proposal and Some Reflections upon Marriage, is Astell's insistence that women have “an oblique angle of vision” from the standard or dominant one. This foreshadows a central innovation of twentieth-century feminism. An epistemological approach known as feminist standpoint epistemologies rejects the notion of a single logical point from which knowledge is generated. Instead, this view argues that one's subject position, social location, race, gender, and class position, and other factors as well, influence the creation of knowledge.¹⁴ As Astell puts it in Some Reflections upon Marriage:

Allow us then as many glasses as you please to help our sight, and as many good arguments as you can afford to convince our understanding; but don't exact, we beseech you, to affirm that we see such things as are only the discovery of men who have quicker senses; or that we understand, and know what we have by hear-say only; for to be so excessively complaisant, is neither to see nor to understand.¹⁵

Astell's work is important for standpoint epistemology, first, because she proposes an early version of this theory, and second, because she herself provides a distinctly seventeenth-century feminist standpoint which serves as an excellent counterpoint to the standard accounts of early modern political theory.

LOCKE, ASTELL, AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

Locke's philosophy and its systematic critique are the bricks and mortar of modern western political thought, from conservative and liberal to socialist and communitarian theories. Locke's theory is the standard against which other theories are drawn, measured, and compared. Jean-Jacques Rousseau's identification of the ills of modern society with the privatization of property is affirmed against Locke's elevation of indefeasible property rights. Mill and Marx both understood and were students of Locke's modern liberal theories.

A work that synthesizes socialist and feminist criticism of liberal theory derived from Locke is Alison Jaggar's Feminist Politics and Human Nature.¹⁶ Jaggar provides a comprehensive synthetic critique of modern liberalism. Drawing on the critical history of modern liberal theory, she identifies two salient features of liberalism, what she calls normative dualism and abstract individualism. Normative dualism issues from the liberal conception that human beings have a dual metaphysical ontology: they are composed of mental and physical components—minds and bodies. Medieval and classical Greek metaphysics did not posit a clear separation of these two sorts of being, avoiding the problems posed by oppositional dualities. Further, the Enlightenment period, in its view of reason as the essential human element, valued the mind more highly than the body. Ecofeminists such as Carolyn Merchant argue that this ideal which placed human reason above and in power and control over the physical, whether it be human bodies or the earth and the natural world, had disastrous results through the industrial revolution to the present in promoting harm to the physical environment. Women have long been troublesomely connected with nature. How can we revalue the physical and assert women's (and human) connections without relegating women to “naturally determined roles” and assigning positions that preclude rationality as a quality of women? As Merchant says:

celebrations of the connection between women and nature contain an inherent contradiction. If women overtly identify with nature and both are devalued in modern Western culture, don't such efforts work against women's prospects for their own liberation? Is not the conflation of woman and nature a form of essentialism?¹⁷

Jaggar explains that Enlightenment (and contemporary) mind/body dualisms are normative because they value the rational more highly than the physical. Insofar as women are not seen as primarily rational, but rather as primarily physical, they are devalued, and viewed as something to be controlled rather than as beings exercising rationality. Thus, a seemingly neutral abstract premise underlying liberal theory will have the real-world consequence of devaluing women both in their traditional activities and in innovative ones.

Jaggar identifies a second problem with liberalism—its abstract individualism, a position which attributes rationality to individuals, rather than groups. Synthesizing the work of many social and feminist theorists, Jaggar challenges the presocial construction of individuals, a premise questioned, for example, by writers as diverse as Marx, in his social theory, and Wittgenstein in the private language arguments. She recounts both empirical and conceptual arguments against individualism, that cognitions and emotions are socially and contextually constructed, not innate and presocial; and that meaning and interpretation are social and cannot be made sense of in individual isolation.

Astell's political thought presents the opposite situation from Locke's. Instead of an immense standing literature, her “erasure” has been so complete that there is no substantial secondary literature critiquing her work, only a few excellent, but isolated, articles.¹⁸ And yet Patricia Springborg argues that Astell's work is nothing less than a systematic critique of Locke's whole philosophy. Curiously, the received wisdom from Laslett and other prominent scholars is that Locke's political theory was fundamentally inconsistent with his metaphysics and epistemology. Yet, Perry and Springborg view Locke holistically. Springborg says that Astell's is

a Locke who until recently has been eclipsed by the Locke of the American Revolution, the Locke of possessive individualism (or of the political economists) and other post-Enlightenment Lockes. Astell's Locke, in fact, provides a test of authenticity that only very recent scholarship has met. For this reason, perhaps her pioneering critique was for so long overlooked. The issues on which it focuses are Anglicanism, trinitarianism, and the settlement of 1688; contracts, oaths, and political allegiance; biblical patriarchalism and the claims of dynastic monarchy; and the rights of freeborn Englishmen versus the ancient constitution.¹⁹

In another critical exposition of Astell's theories, Ruth Perry argues that Astell “thought the doctrine of individualism selfish and asocial and was suspicious of the way genetic theories of citizenship beginning with a ‘state of nature’ erased the social and political meaning of maternity.”²⁰ Perry argues that the Enlightenment and “glorious Revolution were times for reasserting male authority” and that Locke effected a “paradigm shift” from a political world populated by men and women involved in a web of familial and sexual interconnections to an all-male world based solely on contractual obligation.²¹

Future scholarship on Astell will no doubt add substantially to the traditional assessments of political theory. The investigation of liberal conceptions of freedom and equality lay at the heart of any evaluation of western political philosophy, and in western cultures, liberalism has exercised a profound influence, earning for itself the need for both sympathetic and critical accounts. Astell's critique of Locke raises serious questions about the sources of political authority, social contract theory, the legitimacy of revolutionary transfers of authority, and foundationalism not based on a higher power. Her original theories contribute ideas about education, marriage, a gender division of culture, religion, and political power. Considering Locke and Astell together recontextualizes the origins of liberal theory and may provide a less distorted account than one that views political theory only through the lenses of later times.

Notes

1. [Ruth] Perry, The Celebrated Mary Astell [: An Early English Feminist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986)], p. 70.

2. Ibid.

3. Joan K. Kinnaird, “Mary Astell: Inspired by Ideas,” in Dale Spender, ed., Feminist Theorists: Three Centuries of Key Women Thinkers (New York: Pantheon, 1983), p. 33.

4. Astell, Some Reflections upon Marriage, p. 54 of this volume.

5. Astell, A Serious Proposal, p. 40 of this volume.

6. Perry, The Celebrated Mary Astell, pp. 60-70.

7. The cardinal was the second most powerful man in France under French King Louis XIV. In The Celebrated Mary Astell, Perry elaborates on the Duke's abuses: “The duke proved an impossible husband. A religious fanatic, he woke his young wife in the middle of the night to tell her his visions and forbade her to nurse the baby on fast days. Sexually obsessed, he mutilated the magnificent statues at the Palais Mazarine and splashed paint on the nudes to make them ‘decent.’ He wanted to forbid his farmers to milk cows because it looked so obscene, and he once considered sawing off the teeth of his young daughters to make them unattractive and thus to protect them from future sexuality.”

8. Astell, Some Reflections upon Marriage, p. 47 of this volume.

9. Ibid., p. 54.

10. See Alison M. Jaggar, Feminist Politics and Human Nature (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allenheld, 1983) for an especially clear treatment of this issue.

11. Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978).

12. Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966-1978 (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1979).

13. [Patricia] Springborg, “Mary Astell (1666-1731), Critic of Locke,” [American Political Science Review, 89:3 (1995) pp. 621–33.

14. For discussions of standpoint epistemologies, see Diane Bell, “Yes, Virginia, There is a Feminist Ethnography: Reflections from Three Australian Fields,” in Gendered Fields: Women, Men and Ethnography, ed. D. Bell. P. Caplan and W. Karim (London: Routledge, 1993); Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 1991); and Sandra Harding, The Science Question in Feminism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986).

15. Astell, Some Reflections upon Marriage, in Springborg, The Political Writings of Mary Astell, [(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)] p. 10.

16. Jaggar, Feminist Politics and Human Nature, p. 43.

17. Carolyn Merchant, Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution (New York: Harper and Row, 1980), p. xvi.

18. The entire 1950 Encyclopedia Britannica entry on Mary Astell says: “English author, was born at Newcastle-on-Tyne. She published, in 1697, a work entitled A Serious Proposal … A scheme of hers for an Anglican sisterhood, which was favorably entertained by Queen Anne, was frustrated by Bishop Burnet. Mary Astell was attacked in the Tatler (No. 52) under the name of Madonella.”

19. Springborg, “Mary Astell (1666-1731), Critic of Locke,” p. 624.

20. Ruth Perry, “Mary Astell and the Critique of Possessive Individualism,” Eighteenth Century Studies, 23:4 (1990), p. 448.

21. Ibid., pp. 449-50.