Tuesday, September 26, 2017

Rachel on Mary Astell






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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