Abstract
This chapter argues that Mary Astell’s Christian Religion as Profess’d by a Daughter of the Church of England (1705) was central to her feminist ideas, rather than limiting them—a position taken by most scholars, and especially by those who term her a conservative. Astell was totally devoted to the importance of reason and its link to faith and religious belief. Her primary motivation was reason’s guarantee of an independent and thoughtful Christianity for women. This acceptance of the centrality of reason and its links to faith seems to contradict her dedication to a scripturally-directed religion, and one under the control of political and religious governors. But in many ways it allowed her to develop a feminism not found in others. She stressed equality and independence, granting little standing to men to direct women’s religion and only granted authority to God’s anointed leaders of church and state. Such an analysis allowed her to adopt a conservative political stance while assuming a quite radical one as regarding women’s relationship to men. And in this work, which primarily addressed proper Christian principles, she introduced views compatible with her more central feminist texts, namely the Serious Proposal and Reflections upon Marriage. By focusing on the mind, individual agency, and unjust patriarchal values, she was able to pursue both a strong critique of the status quo and to hone in precisely on the status of women, in ways not before accomplished.
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- 1.
Mary Astell, Mary Astell’s Political Writings, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, ed. Patricia Springborg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Patricia Springborg, Mary Astell: Theorist of Freedom from Domination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Ruth Perry, The Celebrated Mary Astell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Mary Astell: Reason, Gender, Faith, ed. William Kolbrener and Michal Michelson (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishers, 2007). Springborg sees the failure to appreciate Astell’s feminism through a broader political prism linked to the assumption of inherent progress: ‘Astell, as a High Church Tory, presents, or appears to present, a paradox for modern feminist thought. My purpose here is to try to show that this paradox has its source in our own presuppositions and a Whiggish progressivism that imputes to historical actors assumptions that could only be the product of the historical processes in which they participated.’ (Springborg, Theorist of Freedom from Domination, xiii) While I agree with Springborg about contemporary misreadings of Astell, I would link it less to Whiggish progressiveness and more to an adherence to ‘feminisms’ that are more apt to emerge from contemporary theory and to highlight differences among women where Astell idealized their commonality, particularly their capacity for intellectual seriousness—something of limited interest to current day feminists.
- 2.
Mary Astell, The Christian Religion, as Profess’d by a Daughter of the Church of England (London: Printed by S. H. for R. Wilkin, 1705).
- 3.
Mary Astell, The Christian Religion, 1730, ‘Advertisement,’ n.p.
- 4.
Springborg and I agree totally on this fundamental characteristic of Mary Astell; she writes: Astell was ‘a woman intellectual who was considerably influential in her day but who subsequently dropped out of the canon’ (Springborg, Theorist of Freedom from Domination, xiv).
- 5.
Astell, Christian Religion (1705), 19.
- 6.
Christopher Hill, Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England (NY: Schocken Books, 1964), 443–481. Hill documents the husband’s duty over his domestic flock in a range of Puritan tracts and sermons, quoting from a member of the Westminster Assembly who intoned that ‘Domestic and family worship is a necessary duty’ and from a sermon offered before Parliament in 1641: ‘First reform your own families and then you will be the fitter to reform the family of God. Let the master reform his servant, the father his child, the husband his wife’ (Edmund Calamy, Englands Looking-Glasse (1642), 31 in Hill, Society and Puritanism, 444–45). And, as he notes in this chapter, the household among the Puritans was not alone the lowest form of government but was for them also ‘the lowest unit in the hierarchy of discipline’ rather than the parish (Hill, Society and Puritanism, 443). While many subsequent historians, such as Phyllis Mack in Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in 17th-Century England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), have documented women’s stronger voice when speaking religiously but greater hesitation when taking on their society and male compatriots, perhaps the most perceptive analysis of the gender limitations of the religious and political left is Ann Hughes’s essay, ‘Gender and Politics in Leveller Literature,’ in Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England, ed. Susan Amussen and Mark Kishlansky (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1995) in which she demonstrates that the household and its male head embodied Leveller demands for a greater religious and political voice, rather than an individualism that might have included women. Astell, Christian Religion, 10.
- 7.
Astell, Christian Religion (1705), 5.
- 8.
Ibid.
- 9.
Ibid.
- 10.
Ibid., 6.
- 11.
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London: The Hogarth Press, 1929), 42.
- 12.
Astell, Christian Religion (1705), 171.
- 13.
Ibid., 22–23.
- 14.
Ibid., 9.
- 15.
Ibid.
- 16.
Ibid, 10.
- 17.
Ibid., 33.
- 18.
Ibid., 34.
- 19.
Ibid., 35.
- 20.
Ibid., 35–36.
- 21.
Ibid., 36–37.
- 22.
Ibid., 37.
- 23.
Ibid. This statement, along with similar comments throughout the work, document her strong resistance to conformity or adherence to custom while at the same time advocating obedience to authority; it is one of the reasons she can espouse conservative political loyalties while pushing women to move aggressively in pursuing their independence and intelligence.
- 24.
Ibid., 44–45.
- 25.
Ibid., 45–46.
- 26.
Ibid., 391; 408.
- 27.
Scholarship on Astell currently seems in flux, especially following Springborg’s 2005 work. As she claims, literary scholars, historians and political theorists have each pursued distinct questions and perspectives in grappling with Astell’s work. Springborg’s 2005 analysis seeks to extract, in her defense against Astell’s critics, what she sees as central to her thought. In doing so, Springborg makes a clear case for a more unified analysis of Mary Astell as a thinker in order to demonstrate that her feminist, religious, and political thought (which have been treated by others as unconnected or contradictory) emerge from a single set of values. There are similarities to my chapter in Mary Astell: Reason, Gender Faith, namely, ‘“Cry up Liberty”: The Political Context for Mary Astell’s Feminism.’ This collection contains a wide range of treatments, primarily from literary scholars, which leads to encountering the subject from myriad directions. Yet one can develop a view of a ‘single’ Astell by realizing that gender (or rather women) always came first for her, and next came an amalgam of reason and faith. She was not always as clear as she could have been in delineating differences (or similarities) between the last two terms or clarifying their relationship, and maybe that was because Astell sought to do the impossible.
- 28.
Astell begins this confrontation with Sect. V which begins on page 294 and is entitled Appendix; there is no separate appendix that addresses Tillotson’s work.
- 29.
Astell, Christian Religion (1730), 296–97.
- 30.
Ibid., 297–98.
- 31.
Ibid., 303.
- 32.
Ibid., 305–07.
- 33.
Ibid., 307.
- 34.
Ibid., 308–309; John Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity, As delivered in the Scriptures, Second Edition (London: Printed for Awsham and John Churchil, 1696).
- 35.
Astell, Christian Religion (1730), 309–310.
- 36.
Ibid., 310.
- 37.
Ibid., 310–314.
- 38.
Ibid., 326; 328.
- 39.
Ibid., 330–33.
- 40.
Ibid., 334–36.
- 41.
Ibid., 337.
- 42.
Ibid., 338–339.
- 43.
In Tillotson’s collected works, there is no sermon with this exact title; rather, his sermons normally take their titles from a particular scripture. Astell often used descriptive phrases for full titles. Tillotson has four sermons linked to the theme, ‘the word made flesh,’ and the first is entitled: ‘John 1:14, “The word was made flesh, and dwelt among us and we beheld his glory; the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.”’ This is listed as sermon forty-three and the three following sermons are on the same topic. (A Table of the Texts, The Works of the most reverend Dr. John Tillotson…containing fifty-four sermons and discourses on several occasions…All that were published by his Grace himself, The Second Edition, London: Printed for B. Aylmer and W. Rogers, 1699). While Astell would have disputed Tillotson over his toleration of low church values, still she would have been in agreement with his many sermons on the necessity of following scripture and Christ’s model for the love of others, and she would have agreed totally with a letter he wrote to Lord John Russell before his execution, namely Arch-Bishop Tillotson’s Vindication of passive-obedience and non-resistance in his letter to the Lord Russel, 1683.
- 44.
Astell, Christian Religion (1730), 339.
- 45.
Ibid., 341–43.
- 46.
Ibid., 346–50.
- 47.
Pateman, Sexual Contract, 41–51; Pateman’s classic study is based on the prior sexual subordination of women within the family as crucial to forming men into public, independent citizens. For a discussion of women’s parliamentary citizenship during the early modern period see my ‘Women as Sexton and Electors: King’s Bench and Precedent for Women’s Citizenship,’ Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition, ed. Hilda L. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 324–343.
- 48.
For reference to Christopher Hill’s discussion of the enhanced religious authority of the husband, see note 6.
- 49.
Lucy Hutchinson, Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, with the fragment of an autobiography of Mrs. Hutchinson, edited with an introduction by James Sutherland (London: Oxford University Press, 1973); the most recent edition of, and commentary on, Hutchinson’s writings is David Norbrook’s Order and Disorder/Lucy Hutchinson (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001).
- 50.
There are two caveats to my contentions regarding religion: Patricia Crawford has argued that there was a rough democracy in votes taken in sectarian congregations (although there is limited evidence for this), and the Anglican Church did have the coercive power of the state behind their requirements to attend Anglican services, even though the average sectarian (and women even more so than men) seldom faced such penalties. Thus while Astell was a political and religious conservative as the term is broadly used, it is questionable whether she was so in terms of the institutions and sets of ideas that most effectively limited women’s independence, either political or religious, or for that matter, intellectual.
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Smith, H.L. (2019). The Radical Nature of Mary Astell’s Christian Feminism. In: O’Neill, E., Lascano, M.P. (eds) Feminist History of Philosophy: The Recovery and Evaluation of Women’s Philosophical Thought. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18118-5_14
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