Mary Astell

Introduction

By Mary Astell's name we remember a woman pioneer in the defense of women's education and her plan to live unmarried, without having to accept any marriage to survive. Mary Astell is one of the key figures in any historical approach to thinking about women on women's education.

Discussion

In 1694, Mary Astell became famous for a short essay A Serious Proposal to the Ladies for the Advancement of Their True and Great Interest. This short text offers a strong defense and argued the education of young girls, and proposes the creation of an all-female college, secular institution dedicated to both education and retirement. The impassioned debate that this trial arouses among her contemporaries, but also its critical fortune prestigious, make the text "feminist" the most important of the seventeenth century, at the dawn of the Enlightenment. If A Serious Proposal is not the only text to try to promote the education of girls at that time, she is the one that offers the most convincing synthesis of the issues of women's issues and the most daring proposals, because that she supported her defense of women on Cartesian philosophical foundations, while scratching the passage John Locke. To better understand its scope, this anthology offers a selection of excerpts “pre-feminist” earlier that can trace the genealogy of Astell's thought by placing it in the context of the seventeenth century which is her. The inclusion of some texts after the publication of A Serious Proposal will particularly inform posterity of a critical test so paradoxical and highlight the major interest that Mary Astell presents the intellectual history of feminism. (Kinnaird, 53-79)

In 1700 the laws and customs of marriage were so contradictory and confusing that thousands of Londoners were not sure about the legality of their marital status, and did not know what a valid ...