Mary Astell and the Case for Women's Education

Mary Astell, a self-educated Englishwoman, was among the first writers in English to argue systematically for women's education. In A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694), she proposed a residential college where women could study and live a life of the mind, arguing that God had given women rational souls that deserved cultivation. In Some Reflections upon Marriage (1700), she criticized marriages in which wives were subject to unreasonable husbands.

In a 1706 preface she turned the language of liberty against its champions, asking: 'If all Men are born free, how is it that all Women are born Slaves? ' Astell's politics complicate easy labels. She was a devout Anglican and a Tory who supported royal authority and opposed Locke's ideas on resistance, yet she used reason to challenge male domination in the household. Her career shows that arguments for women's rights in the Enlightenment came from more than one political tradition.