Mary Astell’s question — “If all Men are born Free, why are all Women born Slaves?” — turned a claim about liberty into a challenge to women’s exclusion from education and authority. In late seventeenth-century England, she argued that women possessed the same capacity for reason as men, and that their limited education helped sustain the assumption that they were intellectually inferior. Her books made that case through philosophy, theology and arguments about marriage. They also proposed a practical answer: a women’s institution devoted to learning.
Newcastle beginnings and a move to London
Astell was born in Newcastle upon Tyne on 12 November 1666, the daughter of Peter and Mary Astell. Her father was a coal merchant and a member of the Hostmen, the Newcastle guild associated with the coal trade. The family was relatively comfortable, but her father’s death when Mary was 12 left her without a dowry. With family resources directed towards her younger brother’s higher education, Mary and her mother went to live with her aunt.
She received no formal schooling. Instead, her uncle Ralph, a Cambridge graduate and former clergyman, gave her an informal education. How far that tuition continued is uncertain, and few records survive of her early adulthood. After her aunt died in 1684, Astell moved alone to London, several years later. There she joined a circle of literary women, among them Lady Mary Chudleigh, Judith Drake and Elizabeth Elstob. Their support, together with help from William Sancroft, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, helped her find a publisher. Astell’s arrival in London belongs to the period following the Glorious Revolution of 1688; the precise circumstances and timing of her move are not established.
A proposal for women’s education
Published anonymously in 1694 as “By a Lover of her Sex”, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, for the Advancement of their True and Greatest Interest set out Astell’s case for women’s intellectual development. She did not treat women’s supposed ignorance as proof of natural incapacity. Rather, she argued that the denial of education prevented women from developing their rational faculties, then allowed their resulting lack of knowledge to be used against them.
Her proposed remedy was an all-female institution in which women could pursue religious and secular learning. Astell imagined a protected, monastery-like community, offering women a life of the mind beyond the limited choices of marriage or convent life. She wanted education to include subjects usually dominated by men, such as philosophy and theology. In 1697, a second part of the Proposal set out a method for improving women’s minds. Critics regarded the original plan as too Catholic for England, and it was never adopted. Its importance lies in the ambition of its argument, not in the establishment of the institution she envisioned.
Astell’s philosophical approach drew in part on René Descartes. The distinction between mind and body helped her argue that bodily differences did not make women less capable of thought. She wrote about women’s education as a matter of intellectual and religious development, rather than simply a route to political equality. That distinction is important: her case for women’s rational capacities sat alongside political and religious views that were conservative by other standards.
Marriage, friendship and political conviction
In Some Reflections upon Marriage (1700), Astell examined the risks women faced in marriage, particularly when a choice was made hastily or without sufficient knowledge. She warned that inequality in intelligence, character and fortune could bring misery, and urged women to seek a husband whose understanding and virtue they could respect. Education, in her view, could help women judge more wisely and prepare them for married life.
Her argument did not amount to a modern programme of equality within marriage. Astell generally endorsed marriage as a religious institution and expected wives to submit to their husbands. At the same time, she insisted on women’s intellectual equality and exposed how unequal power could make marriage dangerous. Some scholars have also read the book’s treatment of obedience in the home as an ironic challenge to political thinkers who accepted authority in the domestic sphere while arguing against it in the state.
Astell’s religious and political commitments complicate any simple description of her as a liberal feminist. She was a High Tory and supported the Anglican doctrine of passive obedience to political authority. Her arguments for women’s education rested on intellectual and religious premises, not a demand for complete political equality. The tension between those commitments is part of her thought: she could challenge the assumption that women were naturally inferior while defending a conservative account of political order.
Her interest in women’s intellectual lives also appeared in her writing about friendship and religion. Astell corresponded with the theologian John Norris after reading his work on divine love. With her consent, the letters were published in 1695 as Letters Concerning the Love of God. Her books were issued anonymously, although her identity became known. In 1709 she withdrew from public life to lead a charity school for girls in Chelsea, funded by Lady Catherine Jones and Lady Elizabeth Hastings. Astell designed its curriculum; it is thought to have been England’s first school with an all-women board of governors.
Books, readership and later life
Astell wrote on more than education and marriage. Her publications included political pamphlets and The Christian Religion, as Professed by a Daughter of the Church of England (1705). She also wrote An Enquiry after Wit (1722), responding to the Earl of Shaftesbury’s writing. These works place her educational arguments within a wider body of religious, philosophical and political thought.
In later life, she lived with Lady Catherine Jones, who had invited her into her home in 1726. Astell died in Chelsea, London, on 11 May 1731, aged 64, after a mastectomy to remove a cancerous right breast. She was buried in the churchyard of Chelsea Church. Her life is not richly documented, but her surviving works and the books she owned offer evidence of a woman engaged with the intellectual debates of her time.
In 2021, 47 books and pamphlets associated with Astell, many bearing her annotations, were identified in the Old Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge. The notes show her engagement with natural philosophy as well as the subjects more readily associated with her public writing. Her work has also been linked to later educated women, including the Bluestockings, whose conversations often addressed women’s education and equality. That connection is a matter of intellectual influence, not evidence that later educational reforms followed directly from Astell’s proposals.
Why Mary Astell deserves a place in British Legacy
Mary Astell deserves a place in British Legacy because she made a rigorous case against treating women’s educational deprivation as proof of intellectual inferiority. In A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, she argued that women could reason and proposed an institution where they could study philosophy, theology and other subjects from which they were commonly excluded. The institution was never established, but the proposal gave her argument a concrete form: women needed not only recognition of their abilities, but a place and a curriculum in which those abilities could develop.
Her work also matters for its tensions. Some Reflections upon Marriage warns women about unequal relationships and urges education as preparation for making consequential choices, while retaining conservative assumptions about wives’ submission. Astell was a High Tory, not an advocate of complete political equality. Preserving both sides of her thought makes her more than a convenient symbol: it shows how a challenge to women’s intellectual exclusion could be made within a religious and political outlook that did not challenge every hierarchy. Her writing, her school curriculum and her proposed community of learning connect her legacy to England’s history of women’s education, while inviting readers to examine the arguments and limits of an early English advocate for women’s rights.
Sources
Mary Astell — Wikipedia, revision 1377858445
Adapted in part from Mary Astell by Wikipedia contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0. Text has been edited and combined with the existing article; this adapted text is shared under the same licence. Contributor history.