In Our Time - Mary Astell

Episode Date: November 5, 2020

The philosopher Mary Astell (1666 – 1731) has been described as “the first English feminist”. Born in Newcastle in relatively poor circumstances in the aftermath of the upheaval of the English Civil War and the restoration of the monarchy, she moved to London as a young woman and became part of an extraordinary circle of intellectual and aristocratic women. In her pioneering publications, she argued that women’s education should be expanded, that men and women’s minds were the same and that no woman should be forced to marry against her will. Perhaps her most famous quotation is: “If all Men are born Free, why are all Women born Slaves?” Today, she is one of just a handful of female philosophers to be featured in the multi-volume Cambridge History of Political Thought. The image above is from Astell's "Reflections upon Marriage", 3rd edition, 1706, held by the British Library (Shelfmark 8415.bb.27)With:Hannah Dawson Senior Lecturer in the History of Ideas at King’s College LondonMark Goldie Professor Emeritus of Intellectual History at the University of CambridgeTeresa Bejan Associate Professor of Political Theory at Oriel College, University of OxfordProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the programs. Hello, Mary Aestell's 1666 at 1731 has been described as the first English feminist. If all men are born free, she wrote, why are all women born slaves? In the face of ridicule at the time, she argued that marriage should,

be a choice for women and not their vocation, that a woman's mind was indistinguishable from a man's, and above all, that women had to be educated. And she'd no time for men who argued for liberty, and yet were tyrants over their wives at home. With me to discuss Mary Estelle are Hannah Dawson, senior lecturer in the history of ideas at King's College London, Mark Goldie, Professor Emeritus of Intellectual History

at the University of Cambridge, and Theresa Bijan, Associate Professor of Political Theory at Oriel College University of Oxford. Theresa, can you tell us about Mary's early life? Yes, she was born in 1666 to a landless gentry family in Newcastle. And the date of her birth was important because it was six years after the restoration of the monarchy under Charles II. The monarchy had of course been abolished by the Revolutionary Parliament during the Civil War. And also they had abolished the Episcopacy. So that means the rule of bishops in the Church of England. And so in 1666, the monarchy's

been restored, episcopacy has been restored, but there's still a kind of sense of uncertain restoration of king and bishop. And this is very much the milieu into which Mary was born and raised. Her father was a coal merchant, and her mother came from an old Catholic family from the Newcastle area. And it was very much a kind of royalist milieu, a royalist culture. Mary herself would not have received a formal education, although she did seem to have access to a library in her parents' home. She clearly learned to read and write at an early age. She read the Bible. She read the book of common prayer. But it seems like the most important person in her early life was her uncle, a man named Ralph Estelle. He was a curate in a local

church but had been educated at Cambridge. And it seems very likely that when it became clear that his niece was showing an intelligence and a joy in learning, that he introduced her to many of the philosophical and theological ideas that would come to characterize her later life. It seems to be very fortunate for her. It seems to have been a very learned man. He was a learned man. I don't know that he was that impressive a clergyman. There seems to be some indication that maybe he lost his living due to drunkenness. But again, the details are scarce.

But certainly it's the case that she was an extraordinary woman, and we are very lucky indeed that she came across the ideas that she did at a young age, particularly the platonist ideas that are going to become very important for her. She had the social ideas as well, didn't she, Teresa? She thought that she was too, as it were, genteel, is a better word, than that, sleeps in my mind, to work, I ain't going to the workplace. But she had too little money to have the job. Dyer to marry? It wasn't simply a sort of social prejudice on her part, although she was extremely

sensitive to issues of her own dignity, both socially and spiritually. But yes, that's right. I mean, her family was downwardly mobile, let's say. Her father passed away when she was 12, and Uncle Ralph died the following year. And it seems that she became aware quite early on that due to debt and due to the precarity of her family situation. She seems to be quite a bold young woman. She goes to London when she's 20, with, we're told, a year's income in her pocket. And she has to make her own way.

And about a few years later, five, six years later, she's being published and so on, always living a meager life in Chelsea. Now, how did she make her way in London in those five or six connecting years? It was an extraordinary thing to do. It seems that she got the idea, having realized that she wasn't going to make a marriage appropriate to her social station, given her lack of a dowry,

she just picks up at the age of 21 and moves to London as a single woman. And so it's not clear what she thought she was going to do when she got there, but that she was going to try her luck. And unfortunately, she seems to have run out of money pretty quickly. And in a moment of desperation, she wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Sankroft, for support, which he did then provide. So apparently he provided her both with financial support, but also more importantly with connections. So it's likely through Sancroft that she met her printer, a Tory printer named Richard Wilkin, who would then become the publisher of all of her works. But it's worth saying that there seems to be no indication that she thought of making her living by her pen, if you will. That was not really, although there were women writers, the idea that a respectable woman could make a living not only writing, but writing those sorts of genres that Estelle would eventually write.

So philosophy, theology and politics, that was just really not a sort of thinkable thing for a young woman of her social position. Mark Goldie, can you sketch the main political divide in England during Mary Aestell's early life? Well, she begins publishing in 1694, and she's very prolific and writes books and treaties and pamphlets down to 1709.

Now, these years are the first two decades after the revolution of 1688. So the restoration regime has been overthrown, overturned, and for the second time in the 17th century, the House of Stuart has been booted out. Charles I had been executed in 1649, and now his son, James II, had been driven into exile in 1688. And she's very hostile to both revolutions. She's deeply aware of the catastrophe of the civil war. wars, and she's deeply suspicious of those who seek regime change. Why is that? She's committed to a kind of royalism and a kind of loyalty to the Church of England,

which, as Theresa explained, had been devastating for the royalist classes and for the Church of England, the destruction wrought by the puritans during the Civil War period. But I think the reason that she is suspicious of regime change, and she's very hostile to the revolution of 1688, although she does partly come round to it when Queen Anne comes to the throne in 702. Because she's a steward. Because she's a steward. She's the daughter of James II, and Queen Anne is committed to the Anglican Church. But I think the suspicion that she has of regime change is very interesting in the kind of, once tempted to say, sociological analysis of the kinds of people who engage in rebellion. All through her writing politically is a

distrust of those who use the rhetoric of liberty and equality. She thinks that on the whole, this is the rhetoric of disaffected aristocrats who dangerously use populist techniques to get themselves back into power. Who are hypocrites, in fact? Indeed hypocrites. And that's going to be a central theme, as I'm sure we'll see. So she criticises those who engineered, the Whigs who engineered the Revolution of 1688. She sees them now as sycophants of the new king.

William and as people who are lining their pockets and getting into power as a result of that revolution. They simply use the rhetoric. And she idolizes and idealises the martyrs as she sees it, martyr Charles I first. What were her personal politics? Well, her personal politics are deep-dyed Tory and high Anglican, very devout indeed. And I think that some of the criticisms that now no doubt will come back to of her politics, of her feminism may have something to do with the fact that her politics were Tory. In other words, that people were suspicious, not simply as it were from a misogynist point of view,

but were suspicious of her because her plans for the education of women were going to be to create Anglican women who she would like to purge England of any alternatives to her vision for an Anglican England. So she stuck to that throughout her life. She was a very firm, high Anglican, very firm. Tory and very firm love for Charles I'm first martyrdom. More or less right? Absolutely right.

Yes, that's right. Hannah Dawson, there was a new way of thinking around at the time in Estelle's time. A new logic pioneered by Descartes. And this will be very important to it. Can you tell us about it? Yes. So I think it's helpful to think about Mary Astell as part of this new philosophical movement of the 17th. century, to think of Mary Asterl as a new philosopher like Francis Bacon, like René Descartes,

like John Locke. And one of the hallmarks of this new philosophy was the thought that we didn't come to knowledge through what other people told us. We came to knowledge through what we ourselves could find out on the basis of the evidence of our reason and of our experience. So we come to know not through authority, but through our own minds. And Asdell proposed this art of reason whereby human beings could, by virtue of their own clear and distinct, complete ideas, come to know God and virtue. And this was so important for Astell to establish that's art of reason, not only, of course, because that's the only way you could come by true knowledge as opposed to opinion, but also because she wanted to give women an art of reason and she wanted to prove that

women were capable of reason. And this was particularly urgent for her in her view because there was at the time, even amongst the greatest philosophers of her company, the view that women were defective in reason. They were ruled by their passions. They were subsumed by their bodies. And they needed therefore the reason and the rule of men to direct them. So Aristotle had said in this kind of foundational way that the male was by nature superior and the female inferior, that the one rules, the man rules and the woman is ruled. Locke himself had said that in a marriage, a woman should submit to the jurisdiction of a man because he is abler as well as stronger. And so what Astel is doing in providing women with the art of reason is pushing

back against this and saying we too are capable of this of exercising this god-given faculty we too are capable of intellectual transcendence she was also very influenced by descartes and his mind-body idea the separation of mind and body not separation the disconnect between the two can you develop that for her what did she take from that yes so unfortunately a first far as she was concerned, human beings were necessarily a combination of mind and body. The mind and the body had to be connected on this earth. But what she took from Descartes and what was also important in terms of her Platonism was her view that the mind and the body were distinct substances, that there was extended matter on the one hand and there was thinking substance on the

other. And this thinking substance was immaterial and it was immortal and it was the substance of the soul of which women were equally to men possessed. And this is, of course, why I think she was very drawn to that Cartesian dualism to the view that the mind and the body are distinct, because she needed to say, she wanted to say that women have minds too, that they have this reason that can be developed to the highest understanding. Would you be correct to say she was a Christian Platonist and did that cause problems?

If I can come in on that. Teresa. So it's an idea that's important for her epistemology, absolutely, and also for her ethics. So the idea that we are rational souls that are, in effect, an emanation of divine reason. And so ethically, Astel sees the human condition as one where in we're in, we as sort of individual particles of soul are trying through our reason to live ethical lives and find our way back to, to this. the creator. And so from the present perspective, perhaps Christian Platonism sounds a bit contradictory, but it was very much sort of the, we might even say, dominant sort of philosophical theology of the moment. Estelle is very much of her era in having this sort of platonist

understanding of Christianity and really a sort of hierarchical vision of individual souls making their ways back up to God. Torres-a-while-we're with you. What was wrong with marriage in Estelle's view? You've only got half an hour. Well, she publishes her really famous critique of marriage initially in 1700 in a pamphlet called Some Reflections Upon Marriage. And today it's by far her best known work. It's the most taught work, certainly. But it's very important to be clear that when Estelle is critiquing marriage, she's not objecting to the institution of patriarchal marriage itself.

She's very clear that she sees that there is a divine foundation and indeed a scriptural foundation for the idea that in a marriage, the husband is the head of the wife. And so wives do, she thinks, she thinks, oh, their husband's duties of absolute, if also rational obedience. But the issue she identifies comes out of what Hannah was saying. It's what distinguishes marriage from the other hierarchical institutions to which Estelle is firmly committed is the idea that women are meant to enter into marriage freely as equals, right? They must consent to the marriage contract. But how free can that consent really be if there are simply no other options for women in English society? And more particularly if women have been denied the education that they need in order to be able to develop their reason. so as to be able to rationally evaluate the proposals that are made them. So a big theme of reflections on marriage is the prevalence of unequal marriages in Estelle's view.

Marriages where wives excel their husbands not only intellectually but also ethically, where husbands take advantage of women in effect as fortune seekers. And the fact that women have basically been abandoned by society as prey to the, you know, predatory men. But there's also a deeper point, and I think it's one that we're going to come back to and pervades all her writing, is the idea that something has gone very deeply wrong in a society where marriage is seen as the be-all and end-all for half of humankind. So women are raised to think that marriage is the purpose for which they're made, which in effect teaches them to think of themselves as being made to be servants to men. As Hannah said, being taught that they are are naturally inferior. And so she has this great line in reflections on marriage in which she compares

a woman who has contracted herself as a wife to a man who has contracted himself to keep hogs, right? She says, because God made all things for himself and a rational mind is too noble a being to be made for the sake and service of any creature, the service she at at any time becomes obliged to pay a man is only a business by the by. Just as it may be any man's business and duty to keep hogs, he was not made for this. But if he hires himself, out to such an employment he ought conscientiously to perform it. Mark Goldie, how are her views on marriage related to her views on politics? She's very keen to connect her thought on marriage to that of politics.

And one of the central themes of her writing is a constant drawing of parallels between the state and the family. And this goes back very much to the remark we made earlier about her exposure of the hypocrisy of weak thought. She's a brilliant ironist, a brilliant satirist and ventriloquiser of the ideas of others. Indeed, it's sometimes quite difficult to know what her own position is because she's so busy voicing, as it were, views of her opponents. And her central theme, particularly in the 17006 preface that she adds to her reflections on marriage. It's quite short, as you'd expect from a preface, but it contains all her, if you like, most quotable quotes. where she wants to say that if you, men, people think that in politics and in the state,

it's right to overthrow arbitrary rule and tyrants, why isn't it right to do so in marriage and in the family? If it's right to get rid of one tyrant in a monarch, what about the hundred thousand tyrants over wives, over women in marriage? If absolute monarchy is wicked in the state, why is acceptable in the family? She repeatedly drives that home. How did it go down? Could I just underscore one aspect that she particularly takes in that preface? She is a reader of Locke, and she has, I think, a very ambiguous view of Locke, the great philosopher of the moment who just died in 1704.

But she picked up one of his obscure works, the paraphrases on the epistles of St. Paul published just after Locke's death. And there she finds Locke commenting on that passage in St. Paul's epistle to the Corinthians, which says women should be covered in church. Even my own mother's generation still kept their hats or their headscarves on in church, and she tutted the wantonness of women who did not do so. But in that, in Locke's account of that passage, he says that Christian. makes no difference to the natural inferiority of women, the natural superiority of women, of men. And Estelle is outraged by that. She sees it not only as hypocritical from the great teacher of natural equality, but as a betrayal. Locke talks constantly in his great political work about natural equality. So how can he possibly attribute naturalness to the relationship of the sexes? Hannah Dawson. So Mary Astell has this extremely famous, ask this extremely famous question,

which is that if all men are born free, how is it that all women are born slaves? And this is an incredibly rich question that I think repays kind of deep unpacking. So first of all, as Marcus said, what she's doing is she's calling out the rank hypocrisy of these kind of supposedly enlightenment philosophers who go on about how all. all men are born free and that they're not, and that they are legitimate in resisting tyrants, and yet they are subjecting women to the very slavery that they condemn on their own terms.

But of course, the kind of deeper point in a way is that actually men didn't think that men were born free. Sorry, Assel didn't think that men were born free. She is a Tory, as has been said, and she doesn't think that it's right to resist a tyrant, just as it's not right. In fact, she doesn't understand the category of current, just as it's not right to resist a husband.

There's no room for resistance in her philosophy. But I think that there is a kind of deeper third layer to this idea of hers, which is that Astell is captivated, I think, by the theory of unfreedom that she finds in someone like Locke. She does think she is very concerned by the peculiar horror of what it means to live subject to the arbitrary, will of a husband. And if I might just quote a little from her to evince the kind of horror of this

situation, she says, to be yoked for life to a disagreeable person and temper, to have folly and ignorance tyrannize over wit and sense, to be contradicted in everything one says and does, and bore down not by reason, but authority. It's not just the brutality, the violence that is permitted under early modern marriage that Estelle's so upset by it. But it's sort of, it's the gaslighting. It's the idea that one should call brutality, love and folly wisdom. Teresa, she saw the solution to most of these problems as education, particularly, of course, the education of women.

So what role did the pursuit of education of women play in her life? Again, you know, as Hannah has emphasized, Estelle, as it pains to say that there's no difference between the intellect of a woman and that of a man. There's no difference between the soul of a woman and that of a man. And so there's no difference in the role that education. But this was revolutionary at the time. Absolutely. And she really does drive down into its most radical implication. She suggests that there really isn't any difference in the purpose of education for a woman as for education for a man. And so, you know, we've talked about reviews on marriage, but actually the first pamphlet she publishes, and certainly the one that's most famous during her own lifetime, is a serious proposal to the ladies for the advancement of their true in greatest interest, which is published initially in 1694, and it goes through multiple editions. And basically in this pamphlet, Estelle is making her own proposal to the ladies.

I mean, the contrast there with the marriage proposal is important and explicit. The idea is that women need to have alternatives to marriage, right? because as Hannah brought out in that wonderful quotation, she's so in touch with the suffering of women in an unequal marriage. So there has to be a place for these unmarried women to go. But in the England of her day, they're treated as simply superfluous, right? Estelle herself had the experience of being a superfluous woman, a sort of problem for her relations. So her idea that she defends in this treatise is that there should be independent women's academies or colleges where the daughter of well-to-do families who did not want to get married or did not have the opportunity to get married would basically put their dowries into an endowment for a learned society. She calls it a religious

retirement. At one point in the pamphlet, she actually describes it as a monastery, which perhaps was not the most strategic thing she could have said. But the point there is that she's drawing attention to the problem that women face in Protestant societies in particular. With the abolition of the monasteries, with the abolition of convents, there really is no alternative for a woman but to make an unequal match. Mark Goldie, what relationship would this have, her ideas on marriage and education, with her ideas on God? She's very much part of broad traditions of Anglican and more broadly Christian spirituality and a great deal of her rights. And a great deal of her writing is comprised of exhortations to piety and to virtue. She's deeply ascetic. She's

very puritanical with a small P. She dislikes capital P Puritans, that's to say, the dissenters who broke away from the Church of England. But she's puritanical in her dislike of or fear of the realm of passion of the appetites. She speaks of the, just as many Christian writers had in the previous periods spoken of the body as a sepulchre, some something that is merely a distraction, something that bears us down. At the same time, I think there's an ambiguity and ambivalence about her attitude to the passions, which we might come back to, because I think there's a strain of mystical Christianity there, which also takes some sources from the Stoics, the notion that we should re-educate our passions,

we should reconstruct our passions so we come to have a passionate desire for the things that we ought to desire. It's our understandings that we should educate so that we then have a will to look to, towards the love of God. Can I come in on that? Teresa, please. Just to piggyback on what Mark has said just there, I think that that sense of passion is really important because oftentimes in scholarly treatments of Astell,

we can sort of treat her as a little too mystical, a little too otherworldly. But this is a woman who feels passionately. She has a love for her fellow women and the need to improve their condition. She signs a serious proposal, a lover of her sex. Right?

And so there's this real sense that her, her passion for other women, her passionate friendship with other women, really is driving her to intervene in a realm which is really not her sphere in the public realm and publicly in print. And so I don't think we should lose sight of her own passionate ambition to make the world a better place for her and her sisters. Hannah, she has been called the first feminist. Does that stand up? Well, obviously we have to be very careful about anachronism and retrojecting our own concepts back on. to the 17th century. And the word feminism, of course, doesn't come into existence until the 19th century. It was invented by a Frenchman, Feminismo. But of course, just because a word doesn't exist in the 17th century,

it doesn't mean that the concept doesn't. And it seems to me that if you take the view that feminism is the belief that women as a class are oppressed and that that's wrong, then I think that we can call Estelle a feminist. It seems to me that she had a very very, rich, thick understanding, a structural understanding of the ways in which women were oppressed, not just through kind of violence and force and clear government, but also through language and ideas and norms and stereotypes. And she absolutely was kind of interested in resisting that in the academy for women that Theresa has talked about. And I also think it's really important to think about Estelle as a feminist, because feminists, because feminists,

feminism is not just an idea. It's not just a fad that was invented in the 19th century. It is rooted in the real experiences of women's lives. It is a response to the reality of sexism and of patriarchy. In Astell's case, it is a response to a legal situation in which wives, the identity of wives was covered, was owned by their husbands in which wives could not own their own property, even the gift. that the husband gave his wife were his. A husband was permitted at this time to beat his wife within reason. Mark Goldie. It is not simply the slavery of marriage. It's the slavery of ignorance. It's education that will empower women. It wouldn't have crossed her mind to call for votes for women.

And after all, hardly any men had votes at that time. She doesn't call for women's entry into the professions. She focuses on education. And I think if you looked at many of the feminists of the 18th century, Wilston Craft is the most famous. They differ hugely politically, but they have a huge focus upon education. That is the source of empowerment to educate women.

Is there any sense in which she was trying to get... She moved in a rather select circle down in Chelsea. She began to know aristocratic women who cultivated her and sponsored her. That was the word used at the time. And she mixed with them and so on. And she was very abrasive and made her own circle. Was there any way in which she was trying to get these ideas out

to a wider, larger public. Absolutely. I mean, so as we've said, I mean, what's extraordinary about Astell is perhaps not so much her interest in women's education. It's not so much her particular philosophy, although she innovates in interesting ways.

It's the fact that she published. And not only did she publish, she was hugely popular. She has a wide reading audience. Her works go through multiple editions. And that's what's really extraordinary. She has this knack, not only for irony, for humor, for writing in a way that, you know, makes us laugh today,

but also with a real sense of the publicist eye of sort of framing an argument in a way that is irresistibly compelling, even as it's repulsive to many of her readers. And I would just say that in terms of her feminism, I think it is right to apply that label to her, but it's also just worth seeing that the kinds of argument she was making about the natural equality of these sexes were really, really innovative and new. I mean, there's a long history of, you know, what we might call feminist writings, but it's very much focused on arguing that the best of women are equal to, if not superior, the best of men. So we might think of this as a kind of platonic feminism. There's a kind of, you know, there's a history of extraordinary women who have, you know, have been truly extraordinary. And we see this in Christine de Bazin and a lot of

the other sort of early feminists, but Estelle's not interested in that. She's not offering us a catalogue of great ladies, right? She thinks that that's sort of beneath her dignity as well. What she's arguing is, look, women on the whole are equal to men on the whole. There are no natural relations of inferiority or superiority of subjection, authority, whatever, between them. And that, I think, is the real, real innovation and the really important argument. Mark, can you briskly tell us in what way she was a radical, in what ways a conservative, a high Tory conservative. Well, she's both at the same time,

and practically everyone who's written anything on Astell has had to struggle with what seems a paradox to many people who are modern secular liberals. Here is a high Tory Anglican, and yet one who is an abrasive feminist, and very explicitly so. But we've seen that in fact that she's very much a modernist in terms of her philosophy.

She is greatly enabled by a sander expression. by the overthrow of Aristotelian assumptions about the natural differences of men and women. And in that respect, she's a thoroughgoing modernist of her time. I think that there's a class element, dare I say it, that we should bring in. She has a situation of precarities, as it's now fashionable to say. She's on the margins of the gentry. And I just like quickly to draw attention to her last pamphlet of 1709, which is a brilliant attack upon the Earl of Shaftesbury's defence of,

comedy and satire and wit. Now, Shaftsbury makes the point that is often made in our societies, that a free society is one that allows for satire and cartoons and making fun at those in power. But he particularly wanted to make fun of religion because he disliked powerful churches and zany religious radicals. But she takes very much against that. She dislikes the ridiculing of what ordinary people hold dear, their religious beliefs. And again, she dislikes the thought that these people wouldn't allow ridicule and contempt from their own servants. So it's a kind of critique of the smugness of liberal elites, of male liberal elites. Hannah, can you tell us what other thinkers thought of her in her time?

Well, she put the cat amongst the pigeons in a most spectacular way, I think. And the response to her was very varied. As we've already heard from Teresa, she had this very close circle of aristocratic women friends who adored her and then you can see subsequent women admiring her and drawing on her. For example, Sarah Chapone famously wrote about the hardships of the English laws in relation to wives in the 18th century. But she was also mocked and pilloried and hated. So Gilbert Burnett, for example, attacked her so-called monastery for being papist. Richard Steele pilloried her in The Spectator,

saying that she was proposing a nunnery for virgins. And also she was plagiarized, arguably. I mean, people, I mean, so Daniel Defoe, for example, he said he had the idea first, but he put her idea for an academy of women out there. And so did Bishop Barclay, actually, in the Ladies' Library. He borrowed a lot of her ideas from the serious proposal. So she was highly celebrated.

She was highly controversial. Teresa, how seriously has she been taken since her time, since her high time? As Hannah brought out, so she was celebrated in her own day. She was notorious. She was loved. She was reviled. But what's really extraordinary, again, is just the speed with which she seems to have been forgotten. So at her death in 1731, she was mourned by her lady friends. but there wasn't really much public memory of her and her writing. So her first biographer is actually a corset maker named George Ballard in the 1740s.

But even Ballard had a really difficult time finding information about her. And I think there's a couple things to say about it. I mean, one thing to say about that is simply the kind of the questions of women's education, the sort of questions that had motivated Estelle during her day had somewhat died down. There's also a sense in which Estelle herself had retreated. from public life. She had turned her attentions in later life not to publishing but to running a charity school in Chelsea. But for whatever reason, what we find then is that, you know, she's, there's a brief biography of her in the 1740s, but then after that she really is forgotten until

the 20th century. And so there's a single monograph, I think, about her in the early 20th century. And then finally, it's not until the rise of academic feminism and women's studies in the 1970s and 80s, that we begin to have a scholarly interest in her in earnest. Mark, do we have any notes, any indication of the way she thought things had gone since in the second part of her lifetime when she virtually stopped publishing? Was she pleased with the way things had developed, or did she think she'd had no influence? She, during the reign of Queen Anne, she had considerable confidence. And in fact, the closing remarks of her 70606 preface are extremely hopeful for a time when half of humankind will be able to fulfill their potentiality.

But a strange thing is she goes silent in 1709, and we're not clear why, though she does set up a charity school for young girls in Chelsea. That's all that time writing. And then I'm trying to subtract 9 from 31 anyway, and all that time silent. So it's not quite right to say that she went completely silent. I mean, so she reissues several of her pamphlets, and she writes a new preface, actually, to Bartlemy Fair in 1722. So she's not completely gone, but there is really a sense that with the death of Queen Anne, this kind of providential moment where it was possible for women to, you know,

assume the public stage really has gone out. And that's reflected then in the way that she lives her life. De Reader remarked that the first new modern interest in her was at the turn. under the 20th century. And at that time, a lot of colleges were being created for women in Cambridge and in North and Oxford and North America. And that naturally focused attention on her views on education. And although she did not intend by any stretch to create an Oxford or Cambridge College, she does make one fascinating remark where she points out that some of the found dresses of colleges in Oxford and Cambridge, that some of these colleagues had been founded by women, such as Elizabeth Declare. And that struck a chord. beginning of the 20th century. And of course Virginia Woolf is precisely taken by this idea that Mark has just articulated and in three guineas, she does say that Mary Astell was the one who saw how important it is for women to be transformed through education and she commends her for her proposal for a college for women. Well that leads on to the final question for each three of you. What impact has she had in

recent years? I think if I may, so I As we've said, she is much more taught now than she was. I mean, I think we can safely say that Estelle is now remembered and has been integrated into the curriculum, not only in the history of philosophy, but in the history of political thought. But I think that there still is a problem for those who want to read and teach Astell. There is a problem with those who want to take her seriously. And it's precisely the idea that there's a kind of contradiction or paradox, if you will, between her feminism on the one hand and her, conservatism on the other. And so what I want to argue in my own work on Astell is to say, you know, there's not a contradiction, there's not a paradox. So what we have here is an

original mind who's thinking in a coherent way. And it's our duty as readers and teachers to do our best with it. And I think she has quite a lot to say, actually, to our highly partisan age. I mean, she was a partisan polemicist who took part in the fray, who came up with ideas about inclusion for women in a partisan discourse. And I think there's just, you know, It's really the right time to think with Astell. It's just a kind of question if we're going to be able to take her seriously on her own terms. My own hope is that actually studying her will give a leg up to some of the other women writers at the time. There's almost a danger in pouring too much attention onto her with good reason because she's so prolific and so challenging.

But there are a lot of other interesting women writers of the 17th century. Lucy Hutchinson is a Republican writer at the Civil War. And in Astell's own time, there's Damaris Masham, there's Catherine Coe. who are both philosophers. In fact, Masham engages, contradicts Asteel. Both of them are weeks. And I think it's perhaps time that we look at the Republican and the weak tradition of feminist writing in the 17th century. Yes. I mean, I think building on what Mark has just said, it wasn't the point is that the canon hasn't seen women writers. And the more we're looking, the more we're finding that there wasn't just Astell, but there's a kind of, there's an

array of women writers. And I think that Mary Assel speaks particularly powerfully to us now because of this extraordinarily rich and thick understanding that she has of gender. That's to say, she does not think that what women are, how they behave in the world, is a function of their nature for the most part, but rather she has this amazingly capacious understanding of custom, of nurture, of power, of violence, of the way in which these forces shape the way that women and men are. And to go back to Teresa's thought about pigs, you know, the idea that this fundamental idea

that just because a man looks after a pig, it doesn't mean that he was made for that. And so it's for women. Just because a woman might spend her time in the kitchen, it doesn't mean that she's made for that. In terms of philosophy, though, to come to that, she was in the time of Locke and Descartes, was she considered to be anywhere near the equal

or in their class, how was she rated in that regard? Well, there's always a problem with how we treat women in the history of philosophy. I mean, for a number of reasons. One is that they didn't tend to produce philosophical treatises in the way that we recognize today, or if we want to work women's voices into the curriculum, we do so by putting them in conversation with some great man. And so this is very much how she's been treated with respect to philosophy

and also with respect to political philosophy. So, no, I don't think that she was treated. taken seriously as a philosopher in her own day. I mean, indeed she was mocked again for her kind of platonic excesses. I mean, Demeris Masham, who again is a woman writing in criticism of Astell, sort of accuses her of ecstas in a way that's just unphilosophical. So again, you know, it's a way of how do we take these women seriously without reducing them to kind of inferior or minor conversation partners with great men, sort of reading them obsessively as responding to Locke or whomever.

But at the same time, taking all parts of their views into the picture. Well, thank you all very much. That was Trippie from Hannah Dawson, Theresa Bejham and Mark Goldie. Next week, we'll be talking about Jura, Albert Dura, the great German printmaker. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. So I think a question that you didn't ask me, was about what she thought of liberty.

And of course, she didn't think that men were born free and she didn't think that women, wives were free in relation to their husbands, but where she did think that true freedom lay and was possible was in the mind. And so I think something that we didn't necessarily explore in relation to her treatment of marriage is that even if you found yourself in an unhappy, unequal marriage, subject to a tyrannical husband, that there was still a way in which you could take refuge in the freedom and the solace of your mind. And this, of course, is a kind of Christian stoic defence of slavery in a way,

which is to say, don't worry if your body is enslaved because your mind might still be free. Yeah, I would build on that and say there's much more to say about her, again, her ethics and her idea of rational obedience really is kind of the crowning virtue. that there's a kind of one can enjoy a sense of one's own superiority in submitting and to and suffering unjust rule. And this really comes across in the reflections on marriage, the sense that, you know, the wife who knows herself to be superior to her husband can take a kind of comfort in that. But I also just, I do have a poem that I want to read. No, you're telling. It really, well, we can't, heaven forfend that we stop you reading a poem. I just so beautiful

captures. Silence. Well, so, but it's interesting. So we think of Aestall as a pamphleteer, as a polemicist, but her first, her earliest writing is poetry, and we know this because she dedicated a collection of it to Archbishop Sandcroft. And so it exists among his papers. But so she has this one poem that was written when she was about 17 or 18, and it's entitled Ambition. So just read a bit of it. What's this that with such vigor fills my breast? Like the first mover, it finds no rest. Their sophistry I can control who falsely say women have no soul. Vile greatness I disdain to bow to thee thou art below, even lowly me. Short-winded fame shall not transmit my name that the next age may censure it. This I'm ambitious of no pains will spare, to have a higher mansion there, where all are kings. Here let me be, great, oh my God, great in humility, which I just think so perfectly captures not only her sense of humor and of irony, but also again, just even as an 18-year-old, she's really wrestling with her place in the world as a

superfluous woman and trying to find a way to channel her ambition. But it's also just interesting because she's never apologetic for that ambition. I mean, if we think about the discourse of ambition of the day, I mean, ambition had been the original sin of Eve, right? And Eve's ambition to have divine knowledge or immortality is what caused the fall of man. But Estelle never makes any apologies for the fact that she's so ambitious. And I just think it's really extraordinary. I've got a question for Hannah and Teresa. And it's about the contrast between the attitude to rationalism of Astell and of contemporary, or some contemporary feminists. We've stressed the debt of Astell to Cartesian dualism and her sense of that of liberation,

through thinking about the separation between reason and the passions, reason in the body, and the way in which reason women are as rational as men and so on. And yet some strands of contemporary feminism virtually turn that on its head and critique what they regard as an enlightenment male concepts of reason as distorting of the human self and wanting to re-engage with the passionate sense of the human self. if you like, a return to Aristotle's sense of the integrated self of body and mind. And there seems to be a real tension between those different strands of feminism.

And I'd be glad to hear what you thought about that. Well, I mean, I think she, I mean, from her point of view, I mean, obviously she thinks that enlightenment reason has just not yet reached enlightenment. I mean, so all of the kind of problems that feminists, the subsequent feminist critics, have levelled at Enlightenment Reason is precisely because they hadn't yet taken away the terrible, sophistical mists before their eyes.

I mean, Locke hadn't got there yet. So I do think there's a way in which she might be aligned with contemporary feminist critiques of reason in the sense that she's precisely showing the ways in which Enlightenment Reason was defective. I agree with that. But it is, I mean, Mark, you're right to suggest that in some contemporary feminism,

there is a kind of rejection of reason even in the sense that reason itself is a kind of construction of white European masculinity. And Estelle always holds on to that idea that, no, the exercise of reason is the appropriate activity of a rational creature and it's always liberating. But you have to ask everybody to take it for granted that we are rational creatures. Yeah. Well, actually, it's interesting in her philosophical magnum opus, the Christian religion, as professed by a daughter of the Church of England. Again, she has such excellent titles.

She defines mankind not as a rational creature, but as a religious creature. Right. So she has this sense of the place of reason as being about orienting ourselves towards our creator and honoring him, sort of making progress towards him in virtue. And for her, I think it really was just, I mean, she's such a pious person. She had such a strong sense of her own ambition as her own ambition is orienting her towards. towards something, a purpose for which she was made, that I think that it leads her to be critical of the institutions under which she lives, but not critical of the wonders that that reason could work. I put a bit of a tangent, so, Mark, if yours is a... I just said Theresa's right to emphasise that reason, although she's a strong rationalist, reason is not for secular for her. We tend to think that rationalism is somehow secular reaction against the religious traditions.

But she speaks of reason as being a particle of the divinity. If you use your reason, then you are literally getting in touch with the divine, that God has created reason. Reason is as much a part of revelation as the word of the gospel and the Bible is. It's one way in which God reveals himself through our reason. Absolutely. This is what's so offensive to masham and lock, again, this sort of ecstatic sense of reason. You know, Estelle's often appealing to the metaphor of angels.

And it's not simply a metaphor. Angels are very real for her as they were for many in this platonist cosmology. And so she describes her seraphic soul. She describes her female friends as her seraphic sisters. There really is, again, this mystical dimension that we are at risk of losing if we want to just tell this story about, you know, the rise of reason in the Western world. Can I make my tant? Yes, please do. No, I just think it struck me and I think it has to struck all as.

as surprising and problematic the way in which Mary Astell invokes the status of a slave on behalf of aristocratic white women living in Chelsea. And that when there were chattel slaves from Africa walking the streets of London at the time. And of course, subsequent black feminists have precisely looked on in amazement at the way in which white feminists have gone on about marriage or slavery and thought you have no idea. Yeah, no, it's the only time I've found, you know, we have some references to slavery in her letters, but the one sort of extended treatment of it, again, is in the Christian religion. And it's Estelle imagining herself as a slave in northern Africa who comes to know of Christianity through enslaved Christians off the Barbary Coast.

And through the exercise of reason in the reading of scripture works her way to an understanding of the Church of England as the truth. church. So again, I don't think that's quite exculpatory. I think it just reaffirms Hannah's point that she is extremely, you know, on the one hand, she's incredibly sort of questioning and skeptical and broad-minded about the way she's critical of the institutions under which she lives. But again, on the other hand, she's extremely narrow in her understanding of the relevance. Thank you all very much. I'm sure that will be much enjoyed. I enjoyed it a lot. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. Before you go, I'm Miles, the producer of a brand new podcast for Radio 4 called Tricky.

This is how it works. Four people from across the UK meet up and without a presenter breathing down their necks talk about issues they really care about. Sex work is quite complicated for a lot of people and it's okay to be against it but not to shame someone because of their professional. Across the series will hear anger, shock and even the odd laugh. Another thing that really gets to me is when people say, I know what we need to do.

I know what black people. Shut up. You don't, like, that's the thing. That's not how it works. Nobody knows if you knew you would have done it. Discover more conversations like this by searching tricky on BBC Sounds.