Mary Astell (Rachel Vachon)
Mary
Astell is widely known as the “first English feminist” nowadays, but in her
time she was simply considered a philosopher and rhetorician who strongly
advocated for women’s education and sometimes quarreled with other philosophers
such as John Locke and John Norris. Born November 12, 1666 in Newcastle upon
Tyne, England, Mary spent her childhood getting a proper education because her
Uncle, Ralph Astell, thought that it was incredibly important that Mary go out
into the world with as much knowledge and knowhow as he was given when he was a
child. She learned French, Latin, and studied in theological doctrine - or the
belief that Christ is both the son of God as well as the man Jesus - along with
philosophy, and the two are more often than not inseparable from one another in
her works. In her early twenties, she moved to London and began writing as a
full time job.
From the very beginning she held nothing back in her published works:
penning A
Serious Proposal to the Ladies for the Advancement of their True and Greatest
Interest anonymously, at first, in
1694 and then Letters Concerning the Love
of God in 1695 with John Norris, a Cambridge educated Platonist. In A Serious Proposal, Mary argues against
the popular belief at the time that women we dull witted because they lacked
the ability to be educated - instead stating that she believed it was their
lack of access to quality education that made most women the way that they
were, not because they were unable to learn. She implored women to seek a life
of knowledge rather than a life as a slave to society and or her husband, but
did not outright denounce marriage altogether. In her opinion, if a man and a
woman could come into a marriage on an equal footing intellectually, then there
would be a true mutual respect for one another between the two of them and the
marriage would prosper. But if the woman would have to sacrifice her
intelligence for the comfort of her husband, then Mary believed that it was a
better idea to remain unmarried until a better man came along and focus solely
on studying in the meantime.
And this was not the only time Mary proposed an
idea that seems contrary to things we hear about today. For example, rather
than rejecting Christianity for logic like many other enlightened individuals
of her time did or even advocating for women’s rights despite her faith, Astell
actually used her faith and understanding of rationalism to established
arguments around firmly held misogynistic interpretations of the bible as well
as beliefs in philosophy. In her conversation with John Norris through letters,
which later became Letters Concerning the
Love of God after John was able to convince her to publish them, she
utilized her understand and belief in Descartes’ theory of dualism - the idea
that one’s mind and one’s body are two separate beings - to explain why women
were important to the religion and how claiming that they were inferior to men
in any way was an insult to God.
To summarize a portion of her theory as best as I
can: Mary believes that God is the infinite and incorruptible mind - a being
of perfect wisdom, goodness, justice, holiness, intelligence, presence, power,
and self-existence, while human minds are finite, naturally incorruptible
beings that are sometimes hindered by human bodies which are finite, naturally
corruptible beings. God, who is more of a collection of ideas than a physical
person, needs the adoration of the human mind, but in order to instill a need
for community and comradery between the human bodies, he creates each human
mind differently so that it can only understand a handful of his ideas on it’s
own. That way the human bodies must come together in order to understand him
and love him completely through education and discussion. But because human
bodies are corruptible (society forces one sex to behave one way while the
other can behave differently), and the mind, though incorruptible, is only
finite and at the mercy of the human body, society is unable to come together
as a whole to adore God properly. She argues that it is not God who intended
for women to be inferior to men, and it is not women who see themselves as
inferior to men, but rather men themselves who force women into this role by
conditioning the society as a whole - in effect damaging everyone’s relationship
with God and hurting, or at the very least insulting, God’s very existence and
plan in general.
Mary continued to expand upon and
explore her theories in later books, Some
Reflections upon Marriage, Occasioned by the Duke and Duchess of Mazarine’s Case;
Which is Also Considered published in 1700 and The Christian Religion, As Professed by a Daughter Of the Church of
England in 1705, and acted upon them in her personal life as well. She
never married out of fear of being coerced into giving up on her philosophies,
instead focusing her efforts on creating a sanctuary of sort for women where
they could contemplate and live simply either for a short time or permanently
as an alternative to marriage. She raised money and planned the curriculum for a charity school at
the Royal Hospital in Chelsea, but unfortunately developed breast cancer and
passed away in Chelsea in 1731 at the age of sixty-five. Her legacy continues
on, though, in the theories that she helped shape, the societal changes that
she was a catalyst for, and in the writers/philosophers who followed her.
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