Mary Astell
Early Modern · Europe · 1666 to 1731
English writer who held that women have minds equal to men's, and who called for schools where they could study.
What it is
Mary Astell (1666 to 1731) was an English philosopher who argued that women have minds as capable as men's and should be educated to use them. She is often called a proto-feminist, and some commentators call her "the first English feminist". She was born in Newcastle and lived her adult life in London, supported by a circle of patrons and friends.
Her best-known book, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694 and 1697), set out a method for improving women's minds. She wrote about metaphysics, knowledge and ethics, built around the idea that understanding God correctly is the key to understanding anything else. She also wrote on marriage, and her work influenced later educated women, including the Bluestocking circle.
The main ideas
- Equal minds. She argued for the fundamental intellectual equality of women and men, and for equal educational opportunities.
- A method for thinking. In her Proposal she gave six rules for reflection: know exactly what question you are asking, drop needless ideas, move in order from the simple to the complex, leave no part of the subject unexamined, keep the subject in view, and judge no further than you perceive.
- Custom as a disease. She wrote of ignorance as a sickness caught from "Tyrant Custom", the prejudices people absorb without thinking. The cure is to examine them and give the mind room to grow.
- Minds and God. A dualist, she held that minds and bodies are different kinds of being and that the correct view of God underlies correct metaphysics.
- Something divine within. Following the Cambridge Platonists, she held that God gives each human a "particle of divinity", so that people are made in a way to know and love God.
- Reason first. Her theory of knowledge is rationalist: she gave priority to the mind over the body and to innate ideas, and she taught a method leading from confusion to clarity.
What it looks like in practice
Imagine hearing a rule repeated all your life, such as what someone like you can or cannot do, and then asking where the rule came from and who gained from it. Astell would say that examining it, in a clear order and without judging beyond what you can perceive, is how a mind frees itself from custom. This is an illustration of her line of questioning, not a passage from her writing.
Books and moments
- A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (Part I 1694, Part II 1697) is her best-known work, on women's education and the improvement of the mind.
- Letters Concerning the Love of God is her exchange with the philosopher John Norris about how God should be loved.
- Some Reflections Upon Marriage is her essay on the position of women in marriage.
Questions and criticism
- A religious frame. Her case for women's minds rests on a Christian picture of a divine particle in each person, which not every reader accepts.
- Does the metaphysics hold? Her account of minds, bodies and God belongs to the rationalism of her time, and it is fair to ask how much of her case for educating women depends on it.
- Education for whom? It is fair to ask how far her plan for women's education reached beyond those with leisure and patrons.
Close neighbours
René Descartes is the thinker whose division of mind and body she took up, and the Cambridge Platonists shaped her idea of the divine in each person.
Written by epchē in our own words, and checked against independent sources on 29 October 2026. The sources are listed below.
Who they connect to
Influenced
- Mary Wollstonecraft · Wollstonecraft carried on the argument for women's education that Astell had made a century earlier. (scholars disagree about this link)
Influenced by
- René Descartes · She drew on Descartes' stress on clear reasoning as open to every mind.
Reacted against
- John Locke · She questioned the way Locke's theory of consent left women under a husband's rule.
Other Early Modern thinkers
- Hugo Grotius · 1583 to 1645
- Thomas Hobbes · 1588 to 1679
- Blaise Pascal · 1623 to 1662
- Giambattista Vico · 1668 to 1744
Sources we used
- Mary Astell · Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, read on 29 October 2026
- Mary Astell · Wikipedia, read on 29 October 2026