Mary Astell: Theorist of Freedom from Domination (review)

Mary Astell's A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694) was admired by Queen Anne and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, imitated by Daniel Defoe, and satirized by Richard Steele. Her Reflections upon Marriage (1700) also provoked public debate and ran to multiple editions. Astell's religious and political writings, however, attracted less attention in her lifetime and have been little read since. As Patricia Springborg observes in Mary Astell: Theorist of Freedom from Domination, feminist scholars have tended to focus on Astell's argument for women's education and her critique of marriage, while ignoring her passionate and polemical defenses of the Church of England and the monarchy. Springborg's study aims "to recover the contexts for Astell's thought" and provide "a coherent overall assessment" (2) of her writings, correcting misconceptions of her feminism and her views on natural rights.

Readers now may be most familiar with the provocative question Astell posed in the third edition of Reflections upon Marriage (1706): "If all men are born free, how is it that all women are born slaves?" Often read as endorsement of women's equal rights with men, under Springborg's scrutiny this question becomes a critique of early modern republican and rights theories, exposing the hypocrisy of John Locke and other "fathers of a liberalism that did not extend to women" (7). Astell championed not greater freedom for women in public life or marriage, but rather "a true equality based on the equal capacity for perfectibility" (101). Like her contemporary Judith Drake, Astell believed that "rights pertain to minds, not to bodies" (87). Springborg traces the philosophical underpinnings of Astell's position to Cartesian and Neoplatonic thought, developed in a series of letters with John Norris, rector of Bemerton. Norris so admired Astell's intellect, even when she challenged his views, that he published their exchange as Letters Concerning the Love of God (1695). Bishop Francis Atterbury was less pleased when Astell critiqued one of his sermons. In a letter to a friend, he acknowledged "She attacks me very home," while lamenting her lack of the "Civil Turn of Words" that "her Sex is always Mistress of" (29).

As a High Church Tory, Astell embraced the corporate over the contractual model in familial and political relations, viewing marriage and the monarchy as divinely instituted bodies, with husband and king as head. Springborg demonstrates how Astell exploited the implications of this metaphor to reveal men's misuse of power, linking "the fickleness with which men treat their marriage vows" to their disavowal of James II (149). In Reflections upon Marriage Astell emphasized a woman's need to choose well in marriage precisely because she must yield to her husband's rule, while in A Serious Proposal she argued that gentlewomen unable or disinclined to marry, as she herself was, should have the freedom to develop their minds in a community of women. Springborg suggests Astell attempted to create such a community through relations with other women intellectuals, including Anglo-Saxon scholar Elizabeth Elstob and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.

Much of Springborg's prior research on Astell has examined her critique of Locke and he looms large in this study, from brief discussion of Astell's references in Moderation Truly Stated (1704) to closer analysis of The Christian Religion (1705), "a systematic treatment of the then known works of Locke" (193). Springborg's knowledge of period political debates and her textual explication combine to good effect in chapter 6, "Astell and the Highway Man." For Locke, the citizen's expectation of protection from robbery on the highway exemplifies "tacit consent" to the social contract. Yet Locke also makes the highwayman "a synonym for the rogue government of absolute monarchy" (198). Astell turns the image on its head by parodying Locke's insistence on self preservation as just cause for political rebellion: "He who robs upon the High-Way, has his Prospects, and Persuasions, and Necessities; and when he...