Mary Astell 1666 – 1731

Mary Astell was an English philosopher and one of the first advocates in English of the equal education of women. In A Serious Proposal to the Ladies she argued for the founding of an academic community in which women might cultivate rational and religious life apart from the demands of marriage and society. Some Reflections upon Marriage offered a sustained critique of the legal and economic subordination of wives, and her later political writings defended the Tory and Anglican causes. Her work, neglected for two centuries, has been recovered as a foundational text of feminist philosophy.

Mary Astell was born in 1666 in Newcastle upon Tyne, the daughter of a hostman in the local coal trade. Orphaned of her father at twelve, she was educated informally by her clergyman uncle Ralph Astell, who introduced her to Cambridge Platonism and to classical and patristic letters. Around 1688 she moved to London and settled in Chelsea, where she lived for the rest of her life on the patronage of a circle of pious aristocratic women including Lady Catherine Jones and Lady Elizabeth Hastings.

Her major works are A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694, with a second part in 1697), in which she argues for the establishment of a Protestant religious community devoted to the education of women; Some Reflections upon Marriage (1700; expanded 1706), a sharp analysis of conjugal subordination; and the philosophical and theological The Christian Religion (1705). She wrote in addition a series of Tory political pamphlets in the controversies of Queen Anne's reign and helped establish a charity school for girls in Chelsea.

Astell's combination of high-church Anglican loyalty with a rigorous defense of women's rationality and capacity for the life of the mind has made her one of the most discussed early modern women philosophers. She refused all proposals to translate her thought into the more comfortable terms of domestic ideology. She died in Chelsea in 1731 of breast cancer, having undergone a mastectomy without anesthesia.