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ABSTRACT
This paper aims to bring to light the radical and subversive ideas of the British Enlightenment philosopher Mary Astell. It will be argued that Astell, despite her strict Anglicanism and affiliation with the rather conservative Tories, articulates radical thoughts on questions of gender equality. As will be shown, she is highly critical of contemporary sexual hierarchies, which is evident from her fierce criticisms of customary, natural, and scriptural defenses of patriarchalism. Part of her review of such hierarchies entails her ruthless assessment of the contemporary condition of marriage and the subordination of women therein. Besides reviewing and systematizing her critical positions, it is a further aim of this paper to compare these with her otherwise conservative ideas, such as denying a right to resistance or disobedience; a tension other commentators have tried to solve as well. I argue that, what we find in Astell, is a thinker who holds views many radicals would have concurred with, concerning both the spiritual and political equality of women.
Acknowledgements
I would like to express my gratitude to both Sabrina Ebbersmeyer and Gianni Paganini for including me in their research project, “Women and Radical Thought,” and giving me the opportunity to express my ideas in writing. I would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions for improvement.
Notes on contributor
Martin Fog Lantz Arndal is a PhD Fellow at the Faculty of English, Germanic, and Romantic Studies at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He recently published an article on the religious republicanism of Mary Wollstonecraft and Germaine de Staël in a special edition of The Australasian Philosophical Review. He is currently doing research on gender and the material body in the Romantic period in England, Germany, and Denmark, focusing on Mary Wollstonecraft, Friedrich Schlegel, and Mathilde Fibiger.
Notes
1 Oxford English Dictionary. “Radical.”
2 Israel, Enlightenment Contested, 41.
3 Ibid., 33.
4 Israel, The Revolution of the Mind, 19, 236.
5 Israel, Enlightenment Contested, 41.
6 This idea figures most prominently in the “Introduction” to Israel’s Radical Enlightenment.
7 Achinstein, “Mary Astell, Religion, and Feminism,” 18. This is truly a great piece. Although this article follows up on some of the same intellectual discussions that Achinstein's does — including those concerning religion, liberty, and equality — several of the conclusions reached here differ from Achinstein's, as will be outlined below. For instance, I would not hesitate to designate Astell modern, or what is here termed “radical,” relative to her time, as Achinstein “Texts in motion”, 19 chooses not to.
8 See Israel, The Revolution of the Mind; Jacob, The Secular Enlightenment.
9 Mulsow, “The Radical Enlightenment,” 81–2.
10 Astell, Serious Proposal Part II, 172.
11 Astell, The Christian Religion, 210, 182, 80. Like Elisabeth of Bohemia in her correspondence with Descartes, Astell expresses concern about our knowledge of the union between the body and soul. See Elisabeth, Correspondence, 60.
12 Astell, The Christian Religion, 111.
13 Ibid.
14 Astell, The Christian Religion, 210. Citations used by Astell here are references to Locke, Second Treatise, 366–7.
15 Broad, “Astell’s Concept of Self,” 221.
16 Astell, The Christian Religion, 60.
17 The idea that there exist such a right plays a crucial part in Astell’s criticism of relations of subordination, as will be shown later.
18 As Sarah Apetrei has noted in Women, Feminism, and Religion, 99, what reason, as recta ratio, entails is that it is seen primarily as a “divine faculty within the soul which mystically linked human Reason with the transcendent mind of God.”
19 Astell, The Christian Religion, 58.
20 Astell, Serious Proposal Part II, 167–8.
21 Ibid., 165.
22 That Astell upholds recta ratio and religious introspection as primary sources of any knowledge of God is not necessarily in conflict with her emphasis on the importance of a religious education conducted through the reading of primary materials. Reading the revealed words of God would simply add to any knowledge found, as the source is the same, whereas in the case of interpretations by the church or any other authority (e.g. a husband), there is always the possibility of distortions.
23 Astell, The Christian Religion, 50.
24 According to Broad’s “Introduction,” 31–2, to her edition of The Christian Religion, this indeed was interpreted as a radical position of an Anglican Christian at the time, as Astell’s correspondence with the British minister John Hickes and an unknown female correspondent suggests. Upon reading Astell’s advice to the young woman on calling no man “master upon earth,” echoing her The Christian Religion, Hickes replied by accusing Astell of putting forward “suspicious” and “skeptical” principles concerning the authority of the clerics and church.
25 Houston, Scottish Literacy, 85.
26 These tendencies will be revisited in her criticism of marriage in part 5.
27 Astell, The Christian Religion, 50. On universality, Descartes states that reason “is naturally equal in all men.” Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, 111 (AT VI, 2).
28 Astell, Serious Proposal Part II, 153.
29 Ibid., 146.
30 Astell, The Christian Religion, 134.
31 Detlefsen, “Custom, Freedom, and Equality,” 77.
32 Astell, The Christian Religion, 174.
33 Ibid., 166, 176.
34 Kinnaird, “Mary Astell,” 74.
35 For more on Filmer and Astell, see Achinstein, “Texts in Motion”; Springborg, Mary Astell, 113–42. It should be mentioned that we do not know if Astell read any of Filmer’s works, though her use of the concept arcana imperii (state secrets), which also figures in Filmer’s Patriarcha (1680), suggests that she might have, as Springborg observantly points out in her notes to Reflections upon Marriage, 8, note 2.
36 Sommerville, Sex and Subjection, 211.
37 Calvin, Commentaries, 68.
38 Knox, The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstruous Regiment of Women (1558). One could also mention William Gouge’s (1575–1663) Of Domesticall Duties (1622) as an example of biblically sanctioned male domination, in which he asserts that the first duty of the wife is subjection, though he did not support marital violence, as was legal under English law at this time.
39 Waldron, “Locke, Adam, and Eve,” 254.
40 Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) also denied that women's political inferiority was grounded in nature: see Lloyd, “Power and Sexual Subordination,” 52. As one reviewer correctly pointed out, the discussion of interpretations of Genesis and what that implied for women reaches all the way back to the Renaissance, when women such as Isotta Nogarola (1418?–1466) engaged in philosophical discussions and correspondences with male thinkers about topics such as Scripture and education. In these she advances arguments in favour of her sex and criticizes how eloquence was seen as an ideal for women’s rhetoric. For more on Nogarola, see Borsiç and Karasman, “Isotta Nogarola.”
41 Astell, Reflections upon Marriage, 36. I will return to the idea of “passive obedience” in part 5.
42 For the view that Astell does open up to a kind of disobedience against a husband’s commands, see note 68.
43 Astell, Reflections, 14.
44 Filmer, Observations, 187.
45 Filmer, Patriarcha, 38.
46 Whiston, A New Theory, 170; Astell, Reflections, 10–11.
47 Astell, Reflections, 19–20.
48 Ibid., 21.
49 Ibid., 22–3.
50 Ibid., 62.
51 Ibid., 21. This tension, between her fierce criticism of scripturally sanctioned subordination and her prima facie acceptance of said subordination, will be taken up again later.
52 Goldie, “Astell and John Locke,” 81.
53 Quoted in Goldie, “Astell and John Locke,” 82.
54 Ibid.
55 Astell, Reflections upon Marriage, 21. Contrary to the interpretation brought forward by Detlefsen, who argues Astell “explicitly” acknowledges the truth of this claim (Detlefsen, “Custom, Freedom, and Equality,” 81), I would argue that Astell goes to great lengths to soften the language of St Paul in order to support her overall reading and argument. For more on Astell and Locke on this matter, see Goldie, “Astell and John Locke,” 81–3.
56 Astell, Reflections upon Marriage, 28. This tension will be revisited below.
57 Ibid., 24. Author’s emphasis.
58 Ibid.
59 Locke, Second Treatise, 321. For more on Locke and the marriage contract, see Shanley’s excellent article “Marriage Contract and Social Contract.” On Astell’s criticism of Locke’s social contract theory, see Springborg, “Mary Astell, Critic”; Springborg, Mary Astell, 113–42.
60 Locke, Second Treatise, 174.
61 Ibid., 321.
62 Astell, Reflections upon Marriage, 15–16.
63 Ibid.
64 Ibid., 16. As will be evident later, Astell does in fact agree with Locke that women should submit due to practical necessities. However, unlike Locke, she does not believe this to be in accordance with nature.
65 Astell, Reflections, 77.
66 Ibid., 11.
67 Ibid., 76.
68 Astell, Moderation Truly Stated, 59.
69 Astell, The Christian Religion, 49–50.
70 An obvious target for such statements is, as Apetrei has brilliantly noted, the authority of clerics. The statement “call no man master upon earth,” originally found in Matthew 23:9, saw extensive use in the seventeenth century, for instance by the Deist Matthew Tindal and the Quakers in their rejection of clerical authority, and so does contain seeds of anticlericalism and even anti-authoritarianism; something prima facie odd to find in Astell, who swore by conservative Anglicanism. Despite this, she did, in fact, express herself critically about members of the church and, as Apetrei likewise notes, even takes a hit at earlier theologians by stating that “our Forefathers were Men of like Passions with us, and are therefore not to be Credited on the score of Authority but of Reason” (cited in Apetrei, “Call no man Master,” 507–8).
71 Astell, Reflection upon Marriage, 8.
72 Ibid., 7, 11.
73 Ibid., 62.
74 Ibid., 44.
75 Ibid., 37.
76 Ibid., 46.
77 Ibid., 52.
78 Ibid., 17–9.
79 Ibid., 78, 77–8.
80 According to both Broad and Lister, we might say that Astell envisioned it to be righteous for a wife to disobey quietly: “In her mind, a woman might resist her husband’s beliefs; she does not have to think as her husband thinks” (Broad, “Mary Astell and Marriage,” 736). See also Lister, “Marriage and Misogyny.” These readings are entirely consistent with the views presented here.
81 For readings arguing that a husband’s authority is divine, see Detlefsen, “Custom, Freedom, and Equality,” 75; Achinstein, “Texts in motion,” 21. For another representative of the view expressed here see Apetrei, “Call no man Master,” 510.
82 Astell, The Christian Religion, 138. As Broad suggests in note 152 to this passage, what Astell here calls “active obedience” is the “Anglican royalist position of passive obedience.”
83 Springborg, Mary Astell, 138.
84 I therefore disagree slightly with Achinstein, “Texts in motion”, 29, that Astell is only “peripherally interested in questions of human justice as fairness”. I think Astell's texts and the depiction of her position as outlined above reveals a heightened sensitivity towards questions of justice.
85 It should be noted that Astell was not the first to condemn the contemporary condition of marriage, or to make the link between marriage and slavery, which comes up in Judith Drake’s (1670s–1723) An Essay in Defence of the Female Sex (1697), the anonymous Eugenia’s The Female Advocate (1700), Mary Chudleigh’s Ladies Defence (1701), and later in both Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and John Stuart Mill’s (1806–1873) The Subjection of Women (1869). Through her Reflections, Astell thus take part in a long tradition of criticizing the gender prejudices and inequalities at the heart of the institution of marriage. This is also a testimony to the fact that Astell was not alone in her criticism of the institution of marriage. Regardless, this does not alter the fact that her opinions were certainly radical compared to some of the foremost male writers on marriage (such as Milton, Locke, or Sprint) and according to the condition of advocating equality outlined by Israel himself. For more on the marriage debate and Astell, Eugenia, and Chudleigh, see Broad, “Marriage, Slavery.”
86 Spinoza, Tractatus theologico-politicus, 602.