42. Mary Astell — The First Feminist

AMY: Hey, everybody, we are back with another Lost Ladies of Lit mini episode. I’m Amy Helmes….

KIM: And I’m Kim Askew. And before we begin, we wanted to share a cool update about the episode we did a few weeks ago on the Federal Writers Program. It was a New Deal program that put American writers to work. Apparently, there’s an effort in Congress right now to revive this program (or something like it).

AMY: Yeah, so apparently there’s this guy named David Kipen who is the former literature director for the National Endowment of the Arts. He now teaches writing at UCLA and he runs a lending library called Libros Schmibros in Los Angeles (I love that name). But he’s been pushing pretty vocally for a new version of the Federal Writers Project.

KIM: Right, and an article he wrote for the Los Angeles Times caught the eye of two U.S. Representatives — Ted Lieu and Teresa Leger Fernandez — and together they’ve introduced the 21st Century Federal Writers’ Project Act to allocate $60 million in grants to writers who could chronicle the impact of the pandemic.

AMY: It will be interesting to see if this can actually get passed, or what will become of it. But I love the idea that there are people out there trying to get this going

KIM: Yeah, I'd like to think that we're in the zeitgeist for that, because I do believe we did recommend this. We'll be sure to also send this episode to them and lend them our support for this amazing project. Anyway, now back to our regularly scheduled mini episode, which is all about the first feminist…  

AMY: And honestly, before we started researching for this episode, I maybe would have vaguely guessed that perhaps it was Mary Wollstonecraft, who was Mary Shelley’s mom, that would have earned the title of the first feminist.

KIM: Yeah, that’s absolutely what I would have guessed too, before we started looking into this, and it turns out it was actually a different Mary altogether. 

AMY: Yeah, and this Mary — Mary Astell was her name — she predated Mary Wollstonecraft by about a century. Mary Astell was born in 1666, Mary Wollstonecraft in 1759. But both Marys are generally considered to be the earliest feminist philosophers, and their work set the foundation for the women’s rights movement worldwide. 

KIM: Yes, and Astell is considered what’s called a protofeminist (and it means she anticipated the idea of modern feminism before it was even a concept). And she’s most known for two of her books, one of them is a two-part Serious Proposal to the Ladies, (the first part was published in 1694), and then there’s an indictment of early modern marriage called Some Reflections upon Marriage. And that last one is circa 1700. So let’s find out more about Astell and why we should know who she is. 

AMY: So she was born in Newcastle, England. Her family was middle class, but they had kind of fallen in the world, as they say. The area of Newcastle, before the Reformation, was sort of a center for monasticism, and this was a concept that Mary would actually seize upon and incorporate into her own philosophical thinking. And we’ll delve into this a little bit further in a minute.

KIM: Yes. And so, back to Mary’s life, her father died in 1678, and then she was really surrounded primarily by a household primarily composed of women. However her uncle was her tutor, and he was a clergyman-poet who had been educated at the University of Cambridge. This is important because the fact that he educated her in mathematics, philosophy, literature, history, theology, and even modern languages was pretty exceptional at a time when you think about it, most women were functionally illiterate at that time. But back to our favorite subject, reading: she loved it. She spent her childhood and teens basically in solitude enjoying the pleasure of reading. Amy, I can just picture her sitting under a tree in a grass-stained 17th century gown with her nose stuck in a book, right?

AMY: Yeah, totally. And actually, I read an anecdote that if she happened to be in her house and saw a visitor approaching the house while she was in the middle of some serious reading, she’d lean out the window and jokingly tell them, “Miss Astell is not at home.” I love that story; I think it’s so funny!

KIM: I have to jump in to say that when I was a kid, I was sometimes rude to my sister when I was reading and I wanted to just get out, like I would throw something at her or something. And my mom taught me to say, “Come back later, please.” So I would just say it over and over again. “Come back later, please. Come back later, please.” Anyway, half the time it worked, and half the time it didn't. But anyway, so I totally get Mary Astell.

AMY: Yes. So, “Miss Astell is not at home,” is her version of “Come back later.” And actually, in learning that she received such an impressive education, thanks to her uncle, that really reminds me of Anna Komnene, the historian whom we did an episode on earlier this year, right?

KIM: Yes, exactly. That’s right. 

AMY: But getting back to Mary when she was about 20 she made the decision to move to London, and she vowed that she was going to remain single and devote her life to literature. She felt that although she had been born a woman, she aspired for something greater than the very limited options imposed on women of the day.  

KIM: And as a side note, I also read that her mother probably didn’t have enough money after Astell’s father died to pay her dowry anyway… And there was rumor that at one point she had been engaged to a clergyman, but she never married. So if either of those things are true, kudos to her for flipping a negative situation into a positive one.

AMY: Yeah, I guess you could maybe see it that way. Like she’s like, “I’m just never going to marry” because it didn’t work out for her. But I can also understand if she was really reluctant to marry… I mean, it typically wasn’t a fairytale arrangement for most women back then. [It’s like an episode of “The Bachelorette” where all your options are not necessarily great and your PARENTS get to pick the winner. I shudder.] 

KIM: Oh, I shudder too, both of us are shuddering right now! Yeah, right, I’m going to go with the idea that she actually didn’t want to get married. I believe that. I don’t believe those rumors.

AMY: “Dowry, schmowry,” right? Like Libros Schmibros. But anyway, once Astell had moved to London, she met William Sancroft. He was the Archbishop of Canterbury. (So she started making friends in high places, clearly.) He was  kind of a renegade, and he helped support her financially and he even introduced her to her future publisher. So then she also began corresponding with a contemporary philosopher, John Norris, regarding the moral and metaphysical ideas of a French philosopher named Nicolas Malebranche. Her correspondence with Norris was later published as a book called, Letters Concerning the Love of God. 

KIM: When she was about 28 years old, she published part one of her Proposal that we mentioned, and that was followed a few years later by part two, which offered an actual method for the improvement of women’s reason. It was built on the ideas of Decartes and his followers. It was published anonymously and signed, “By a Lover of Her Sex.” 

AMY: Yes, so it seems that she had taken great pains to conceal her identity, which you can kind of understand. I mean, she’s probably expecting some backlash for these radical ideas that she’s writing about. But eventually, the public picked up on who she really was… and actually, people in educated circles tended to be complimentary of her and her work. The general consensus seemed to be, “Yes, she’s got some really shocking ideas, but dang if she isn’t really artful in the way she presents it.”

KIM: That’s so impressive when you think what she was up against. Together with the Letters, the first and second Proposals turned Astell into a minor celebrity in London. She was celebrated for her wit and eloquence and even openly praised by men like Daniel Defoe (He was, of course, the author of Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders). At the height of her career, she also had several upper class female patrons who supported her work, and they helped to sustain her writing career for several years. Yay for women supporting women! That’s cool. Amy, I thought it would be interesting if we read an excerpt from Astell’s Proposal to the Ladies, to give readers a taste, and since you have such a great reading voice, will you do the honors for us.

AMY: Yes, I’ll try. It’s a little challenging because it’s kind of got some 17th-century syntax to it. So listeners, please stay awake for this little section, and we will summarize this in a second. But I keep thinking, people it’s called A Proposal to the Ladies, I just want to start off with, “HEY LAAAAADY!”

KIM: Yeah.

AMY: It didn’t start that way, though. But she writes: 

  The Incapacity, if there be any, is acquired not natural; and none of their Follies are so necessary, but that they might avoid them if they pleas'd themselves. Some disadvantages indeed they labour under, and what these are we shall see by and by and endeavour to surmount; but Women need not take up with mean things, since (if they are not wanting to themselves) they are capable of the best. Neither God nor Nature have excluded them from being Ornaments to their Families and useful in their Generation; there is therefore no reason they should be content to be Cyphers in the World, useless at the best, and in a little time a burden and nuisance to all about them.  And 'tis very great pity that they who are so apt to over-rate themselves in smaller matters, shou'd, where it most concerns them to know, and stand upon their Value, be so insensible of their own worth.

       The Cause therefore of the defects we labour under, is, if not wholly, yet at least in the first place, to be ascribed to the mistakes of our Education; which like an Error in the first Concoction, spreads its ill Influence through all our Lives.

And it goes on from there.

KIM: I would have butchered that completely. But anyway, I mean, she read it so beautifully, you almost don’t need a summary because it was so well done. But in summary, Astell is making this eloquent appeal for the higher education of women in early modern England. And the second part offers a method, as we said, for the improvement of their minds, with a further plea to ladies of quality to practice Cartesian rules for thinking in order to obtain virtue and wisdom. 

AMY: So I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t remember enough Descartes from philosophy class to really understand what that means… hell, I don’t remember ANY Decartes from philosophy class really. But it sounds like she was using logic so that people were like, ‘Hmmm… that makes total sense, I can’t really refute it.”) 

KIM: Well, I just want to say I did actually visit Descartes, France, at one point, with a philosophy professor, and I got a sticker from there that said, “I think, therefore I am.” So it always reminds me that he was arguing that because you can think, you exist, and basically arguing that reason is fundamental to being human. And so that's sort of what she was building on. Anyway, here we go….

AMY: Okay. So wait. Descartes is a place in France, too?

KIM: Well, the town is named after his family.

AMY: Okay. Okay.

KIM: The town is very old, so it probably predates his name….

AMY: Okay, got it..

KIM: ... but that’s where he lived

AMY: So then in her other important publication, Reflections, Astell analyzes some of the most common causes of marital discontent in her time. And to avoid such discontent, she suggests, women ought to be thoroughly educated so that they can make a better choice of husband—or else not marry at all. That makes sense. Pick a good guy, right?

KIM: Yes.

AMY: Since she was talking to single ladies, basically, so I’m thinking in my head, “All the single ladies! All the single ladies!”

KIM: Literally, I mean, the whole idea of “putting a ring on it” is 20th, 21st century (I don’t know when that song came out) but it’s like, she was here in the 17th century saying, “No thanks. I think I’ll try something else.”

AMY: Yeah, yeah, exactly. I love that one of her takeaways for women is basically, “Choose wisely, girls.” You know? It can make or break.

KIM: And don't we see that in every other work of literature that we've pretty much talked about on this show?

AMY: Exactly. And a few that are coming up in the next few months, you'll see this theme.

KIM: Yeah. Her big idea to accomplish all this was what she dubbed a monastery. So that's the idea of the monastic living that we were talking about earlier, really coming into play. And it focused on education, and without this traditional hierarchical structure of like a confessor and all that. And I can imagine the TED talk for this right? Cue the PowerPoint. “Here's the monastery. Here's you…” anyway... 

AMY: In front of a screen with a clicker. 

KIM: Yeah, I mean, if she did a TED talk on this now, I think it would go viral.

AMY: Totally. Totally. Okay, so anyway, getting back to this idea of this monastery for women, like what was that going to be about?

KIM: Yeah, rather than, like I said, the traditional hierarchical structure, the bonds of the teachers and students would be based on friendship and affection and personal development rather than, like, a confessional-type authoritarian figure with acolytes. Women could stay as long as they wanted, and (this is key) they were free to leave at any time. (It seems obvious, now, but maybe not so much.) Then there would be prayer, meditation, and fasting, as well as charitable works and studying. The idea was that women would learn to become self-sufficient both emotionally and intellectually. I mean, radical for that time, right?

AMY: Yeah, and yet you can also totally see why the idea never really got off the ground. I can’t see most men of that era really supporting this idea…I think, rather, they’d be quite threatened by it, in fact!

KIM: Oh, absolutely!

AMY: And it also kind of sounds like a sort of, like, secular convent, which I think given the whole Catholic/Protestant tension that was happening at the time, maybe that also would make people a little wary of this idea of, like, a secular convent, you know?

KIM: That makes sense.

AMY: But in London, though, Astell was able to sort of create an idea of this educational community she proposed. As we said earlier, she had this wealthy circle of friends and patrons who supported her emotionally in addition to economically, and some of them had also chosen a life similar to Astell in that they either didn’t want to get married or they refused to remarry after becoming widows. So together they helped less fortunate women, housing homeless widows and teaching their maids to read and write. And though Astell was never able to create this “monastery” of education that she envisioned, she was able to start a charity school for the daughters of retired soldiers, and that was in existence until 1862. She designed the school’s curriculum and it may have been the first school in England with an all-women Board of Governors. 

KIM: That’s really cool, too. When she was about 60 years old, she went to live with one of her close friends and patrons, Lady Catherine Jones. 

AMY: And I read up a little bit more about Lady Catherine, who also never married, and there are some people that speculated that their relationship may have been something more than just platonic. It’s impossible to say for sure, but we do know that Lady Catherine ended up being buried in Westminster Abbey with another close female friend named Mary Kendall. So who knows? Maybe she didn’t want to get married for other reasons.

KIM: So for her part, Astell died in London a few months after a mastectomy. She is remembered for her groundbreaking method of negotiating the position of women in society by engaging in philosophical debate— (and that’s rather than basing her arguments in historical evidence as had been done previously.) Astell drew on Descartes' theory of dualism, a separate mind and body, and used it to underscore the idea that women, too, had the ability to reason. Her most famous quote is, “If all Men are born Free, why are all Women born Slaves?" Among 21st-century scholars, there is also a growing appreciation for her poetry and rhetoric as well as her use of figurative language. Some have said she’s a successor to John Milton and that she influenced Samuel Richardson’s masterpiece Clarissa! It’s been a while since I’ve read Clarissa, but I could see that. Amy, you read it more recently right, so what do you think?

AMY: Okay, first of all, confession time, because we mentioned that I was reading Clarissa in the very first Lost Ladies of Lit episode, right? It was my pandemic novel, and I am still not finished with it! It's so long. And granted, because when we started this podcast, we were like having to read all these other books. And so it's kind of sitting on my nightstand, and I just started back on it. I'm about 500 pages in right now. But yeah, it's really illuminating to hear that Astell inspired him, because the whole time I've been reading Clarissa it has always struck me as pretty remarkable that a man wrote this very sympathetic portrait of a young woman who is doomed by marital expectations, basically, and I kept thinking, “How can he crawl inside a teenage girl's head like this?” Because he has such, really kind of feminist ideas in the book. Now, it makes a ton of sense if he had read some of Astell's work and elaborated on that, and elaborated and elaborated for 1200 pages and at some point, I will give everybody an update when I finally crossed the finish line on this novel and finish it I'll probably have a lot more gray hairs.

KIM: I don’t blame you. I mean, we have had a lot of extra stuff to read since we started this podcast. But I think I remember liking Clarissa, but you know how I re-read stuff? I don’t think I’m ever going to re-read that book.

AMY: No. It’s actually a really good book, but it could definitely be shorter.

KIM: Anyway, I hope you all loved learning about Mary Astell as much as we did. And basically, I just want to have another baby just so I can name him or her Astell. Someone out there, please name your kid Astell for me! 

AMY: Oh my god, Kim. That’s so you.

KIM: I know it is.

AMY: Do you remember when you used to dream of naming a child Waverly? This is like that… little Waverly and Astell. (Kim is very inspired by literature). Anway, next week we’ll be discussing another writer who was dedicated to the practice of living and writing, and in her case it was to further the goals of Black Radicalism. 

KIM: Oh my gosh, I love the episode, so I’m excited for everyone to hear it. We’ll be discussing Lorraine Hansberry. She's the author of one of the 20th century’s most important plays, A Raisin in the Sun. And with us is guest and biographer Dr. Soyica Diggs Colbert. 

AMY: Until then, feel free to review us wherever you listen to podcasts, because those five star reviews really help new listeners find us. 

KIM: Yes, and also, we just want to say that we LOVE hearing directly, from you, our listeners! Oh my gosh, thank you. Thank you!

AMY: And I just want to give a big shout-out to one of our listeners named Susan. She is a former English teacher and fellow Masterpiece Theater lover from Rhode Island who recently wrote to us. She said, “Thank you for all of your pods! I have been adding so many books and authors to my TBR list and shelves. My favorite episodes have been the ones on Amy Levy, Charmian Kittredge, Sui Sin Far, and Constance Fenimore Woolson.  Actually, I've enjoyed them all!  I just received the stories of Constance Fenimore Woolson yesterday.” Okay, so Susan, please write us back again and let us know what you think of Anne. I’m particularly interested to hear what you thought of the last third of the book, which gets kind of crazy.

KIM: And listeners, we also want you to follow Susan’s lead and drop us an email at info@lostladiesoflit.com whenever you feel like adding your own two cents about one of our episodes, weighing in on one of our author recommendations or even to point us in the direction of an author we might not know about. We’re all ears! And until our next episode, have a great week everybody!