Mary Astell

Josh Landy
Was Mary Astell England’s first feminist?

Ray Briggs
What did she say about truth, education, and virtue?

Josh Landy
Could she help us understand what it means to be a good friend?

Ray Briggs
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Josh Landy
…except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. We’re coming to you from the studios of KALW San Francisco Bay Area.

Josh Landy
Continuing conversations that begin at Philosophers Corner on the Stanford campus, where Ray teaches philosophy and I direct the philosophy and literature initiative.

Ray Briggs
Today, it’s the next episode in our “Wise Women” series, generously supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. We’re talking about the life and thought of Mary Astell.

Josh Landy
Oh yeah, she was an early feminist pioneer writing in England at the turn of the 18th century. She argued that women were men’s intellectual equals, and she encouraged women not to marry. And she proposed that they go to an only women’s school instead.

Ray Briggs
Yeah. And she defended her feminism with some really cool arguments—like to argue for women’s equality, she appealed to Cartesian dualism.

Josh Landy
Yeah, we were just talking about that, Cartesian dualism, in a recent episode on Elisabeth of Bohemia. That’s the idea that your mind is a completely separate substance from your body.

Ray Briggs
Yes, and Elizabeth was skeptical. She pushed back against Descartes in her Letters. But Astell believed in dualism, and she used it as a basis for her feminism. Sure, men’s and women’s bodies are different, she said, but their minds are fundamentally the same, equally rational and equally capable of intellectual virtue.

Josh Landy
That thought must have been a pretty radical view at the time. I mean, in those days, most women had far less access to education. And there were a bunch of male thinkers around saying they were ruled by their passions, not their reason, to focus on the cut of their clothes, and not enough on spiritual matters.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, and Astell had a lot a lot to say about that. She thought it was true that women were often vain and silly. But she blamed society, not their essential nature, everybody kept telling women that they were only valuable for being pretty and then criticize them for only caring about their looks. She said look, if you want women to care about important things, you have to educate them.

Josh Landy
She even tried to create a school to do exactly that. She had a book called A serious proposal to the ladies. And she described how a school like that would work, women would be living together in a retreat away from vain, insignificant men. And they’d study philosophy. They develop supportive friendships, and they’d cultivate their virtue together.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, she was hoping to find a wealthy patron who would sponsor all this, but unfortunately, she didn’t get the funding.

Josh Landy
Now, I know how she feels about that.

Ray Briggs
But she didn’t give up Josh, she wrote a part two, which explained a method for achieving virtue, even if you’re not able to attend a retreat or surround yourself with supportive friends.

Josh Landy
And if you follow her method, you can achieve virtue no matter who or where you are. You can cultivate your understanding. So, it starts taking charge of your will, showing you what’s really important to care about. So instead of worrying about the latest fashions, you’ll spend time studying the best books.

Ray Briggs
Exactly. She believed in women’s rational nature; she advocated for supportive female friendship. And she criticized sexist double standards. Sounds like she was really ahead of her time. Well, in some ways, oh, come on. She told women not to get married, so they wouldn’t have to be bossed around by their awful husbands.

Josh Landy
Yeah, but she also told them that they did get married, they just had to suck it up and accept their subordinate status. And she felt the same way towards the monarchy and the church. She said you had to obey them, even if their dictates were objectively wrong.

Ray Briggs
Wait, what ever happened to John Locke? Wasn’t he writing around the same time and saying that we have a right to rebel when our monarchs are tyrannical and arbitrary?

Josh Landy
Yeah, but Astell disagreed with him. She said you’ve got to obey God in the sky, king on the throne, and husband in the home. At least you can choose whether or not to get married!

Ray Briggs
Well, okay, that’s nice, I guess but I still don’t understand how all of Astell’s ideas go together. She thinks women are just as capable, full of rationality as men. She says in a lot of ways women might be even more virtuous than men. So why are husbands allowed to boss their wives around?

Josh Landy
Well, maybe our guest can sort that out. It’s Allauren Forbes, Professor of philosophy at McMaster University.

Ray Briggs
But she’s not the only person taking an interest in Astell these days. We sent our Roving Philosophical Reporter Holly J. McDede, to find out more about how Astell’s hometown has been honoring her. She files this report

Howay the Lasses
If all men born free, how is it that all women are born slaves?

Katie Tertell
My name is Katie Tertell, and I play the cello in the band Howay the Lasses. We’re really interested in kind of telling the stories of some more ordinary women as well as extraordinary women like Mary Astell.

A serious proposal…

Holly McDede
Howay the Lasses is based in New Castle in England, and this song is inspired by Mary Astell’s book, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies. The book argues for the intellectual equality between men and women.

Katie Tertell
Throughout the song, even though it’s kind of got this faster pulse, there’s kind of a lightness and kind of danciness to it.

Holly McDede
But underneath the powerful baseline is a richness to the string sound and the accordion.

Katie Tertell
That evokes kind of ambition, I would say, of like what somebody’s trying to overcome in this world where they aren’t heard and are able to express themselves fully to all society.

Holly McDede
The band writes songs about women of Northeast England—like Fiona Hill, a former official at the US National Security Council, Rachel Mary Parsons, the founder of the women’s Engineering Society, and the Newcastle women’s football team.

Howay the Lasses
O Howay the Lasses, it’s long way overdue, the women the black and wives were playing in the tune.

Holly McDede
Mary Astell is signature Newcastle, born there in 1666. But even though Astell has been called England’s first feminist, Tertell says for a long time, she hadn’t heard of her.

Katie Tertell
She really was a feminist before the time, you know, and far before even the suffrage movement and things like that earlier in the 20th century, so she’s she lives so long ago, and yet I think her story, and her kind of activism really resonates today.

Holly McDede
And now more people are beginning to learn her name. ‘On International Women’s Day 2023’, Mary Astell got her own plaque outside Newcastle’s cathedral.

Claudine van Hensbergen
It was striking how few people in Newcastle had ever heard of Mary Astell or realized what an important contribution she made to the life of the nation on to intellectual culture.

Holly McDede
Claudine van Hensbergen is a professor of English literature at Northumbria University in Newcastle; she led the push for the plaque. Astell was born from a fairly affluent family of lawyers and coal merchants, and she received her education from her uncle Ralph, who worked for a time at what is now Newcastle cathedral.

Claudine van Hensbergen
She proposed that sort of schools or convent type establishment should be set up for women who didn’t want to get married, where they could live together, and build or the life of the mind and enter into companionship.

Holly McDede
Astell wrote about the Anglican faith and philosophical questions around religion. She also founded a charity school for girls in London. But after her death in 1731, much of her writing was forgotten.

Claudine van Hensbergen
The Victorians have a lot of blame for the way women writing especially just simply weren’t republished and reprinted throughout the 19th century.

Holly McDede
But since the 1980s, van Hensbergen says, scholars have been recovering pastels work. Visual reminders, like plaques, are also important.

Claudine van Hensbergen
It’s the same issue that comes up with having lots of statues of wealthy white men on our street, is that people just believe what they see.

Howay the Lasses
You were your mother’s only child.

Holly McDede
Howay the Lasses performed live during the unveiling of the Newcastle Cathedral plaque. And they continue to sing about other influential women, like Mary Eleanor Bowes, one of the early pioneers of women’s right to divorce.

Howay the Lasses
You left your childhood days behind.

Holly McDede
And Janet Taylor, inventor of the mariner’s calculator.

Howay the Lasses
Surely more should be made of your life’s work and labor. The great Mrs. Taylor, inventor and patron, the guardian angel of many a sailor at sea.

Holly McDede
And of course, the Female Muffin Man.

Howay the Lasses
Captain John knew Emily in spite of her disguise. They told each other of their plight and married in two days.

Holly McDede
More women to bring to the forefront, and more plaques to unveil.

Howay the Lasses
Miss Emily of Newcastle, the Female Muffin Man.

Holly McDede
For Philosophy Talk, I’m Holly. McDede.

Josh Landy
Thanks for that mellifluous report, Holly. I’m Josh Landy, with me is my Stanford colleague Ray Briggs, and today we’re thinking about the first English feminist, Mary Astell.

Ray Briggs
We’re joined now by Allauren Forbes. She’s professor of philosophy at McMaster University and author of the Oxford bibliography on Mary Astell, as well as several articles on Astell. Allauren, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Allauren Forbes
Thank you so much for having me.

Josh Landy
So Allauren, you’re an Astell scholar—how’d you first get interested in her work?

Allauren Forbes
So when I was first starting out in my PhD, I went in thinking I was going to study Aristotle and do very serious canonical, you know, classical philosophers. But then I took this class on early modern women, and the first person we read was Astell, and she’s just so spicy and sassy. It was just delightful. And I thought, this is definitely something that I can spend the rest of my life thinking about.

Ray Briggs
So earlier, Josh, and I were trying to figure out how to square Astell’s feminism with her beliefs that wives should obey their husbands like subjects are supposed to obey their monarchs. Can you help us figure that aspect of her work out?

Allauren Forbes
So one of the things that Astell says is that we should submit to those who have rule over us. But one of the things that makes that a little bit more interesting and feminist, especially in her time period, is that she says that, well, maybe sometimes people have rule over us that is illegitimate, or that isn’t fitting in the right kind of way. So sometimes we have husbands who are irrational or tyrannical or morally bad. And even if they have rule over us, we don’t necessarily owe them submission or obedience in an unquestioning way. Even God doesn’t require unquestioned obedience. So why should a husband, good or bad?

Ray Briggs
So if I’m subject to an authority who starts abusing their power, what kinds of recourse does she think are okay for me to take and what kinds are not legitimate?

Allauren Forbes
So she doesn’t think that we can get divorced in circumstances like this, that would be against her personal and political and theological commitments. But she does think that there are two options available to us. So one is that we can retreat into our own minds. And even if we’re stuck in really difficult physical circumstances, in bad marriages, for example, we can still work on our rational thinking, we can still think for ourselves, we can study great books, we can have great ideas. The other thing that we can do is use this as an opportunity for our own moral growth. So even when we are faced with enemies or terrible people, they can occasion us to develop our own virtues and understanding even when they’re doing perhaps unkind things to us.

Josh Landy
So it’s sort of a version of Voltaire’s cultivate your garden, right? You can be in a bad situation, either at home or in your country. But retreat to your personal space, retreat to the sanctuary. Have your mind and do what you can to cultivate your own virtue, but the limit is no divorce from your husband, and no revolution for the monarch. Does that seem about right?

Allauren Forbes
Yes, it does. She does not say that she’s trying to foment rebellion of women. She says that for the most part, women are clever enough to love their chains. But she does suggest that even if there is this rule, it might be illegitimate. But there’s not a lot of things that we can do about that, unfortunately.

Ray Briggs
So one of the things that I like about Astell’s period, and I don’t figure out how she gets it, is that people are starting to try to hold the authorities accountable and make them stop behaving so badly. So retreating to my mind doesn’t obviously do that. And cultivating my own garden doesn’t obviously do that. Does she give me any ways to hold people accountable when they’re being jerks, but also in charge?

Allauren Forbes
Not in the way that would be satisfying to us now, for Astell, the thing that matters most is not this life, but the next so the best in first. So, the best thing we can do is, you know, the best revenge is a life well lived. And for her it’s the best revenge is an afterlife well lived, like the best thing that we can do is become reasonable, rational, virtuous, and then we are going to have a great afterlife, even if the tyrants who are doing terrible things to us are, even if they’re doing stuff to us now. We’re gonna be free of them in the long term.

Josh Landy
And they’re gonna be in other place in the afterlife.

Allauren Forbes
Yeah, exactly. We won’t be hanging out.

Josh Landy
No, we won’t be hanging out. You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re thinking about 18th century feminist Mary Astell with Allauren Forbes from McMaster University.

Ray Briggs
Is it your friend’s job to make you a better person? How do you push back against harmful customs? is self-esteem possible in a world that’s designed to bring you down?

Josh Landy
Freedom and friendship in the work of Mary Astell—along with your comments and questions when Philosophy Talk continues.

Lucy Ellis
I can tell that we are gonna be friends.

Josh Landy
If you and I are going to be friends, will that make each of us more virtuous? I’m Josh Landy and this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs, and we’re thinking about Mary Astell with Allauren Forbes from McMaster University. It’s the next episode in our Wise Women series, which is supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Josh Landy
Got questions about the first English feminist? Email us comments@philosophytalk.org, or comment on our website. And while you’re there, you can also become a subscriber and find your path in a library of nearly 600 episodes.

Ray Briggs
So Allauren, earlier we were talking about Astell’s view on marriage. And she said that if you got married, you had to obey your husband. But she also didn’t think you had to or necessarily should get married, and she didn’t get married herself. So, what did she think was the right way to think about the decision concerning whether to get married in the first place.

Allauren Forbes
So she thinks that you need to go into this decision, knowing what it is that you’re getting yourself into, because the exit conditions are very dire, which is to say it’s just death. That’s the only exit condition. So, she said that one thing we can do is just never get married, and set up an alternate version of our lives, social structures, and in that case, friendship will be a really important part of it. And she says that if you are going to get married, what you absolutely have to do is have your friends help you pick your husband.

Josh Landy
It’s a very interesting thing about the way in which friendship shows up. I like what you just said about this alternative structure, crucially involving friendship. And she says about true friends that they’re purposely designed by Heaven to unite. It’s like you have a soulmate friend, it does friendship for Astell almost start to look like the good version of love.

Allauren Forbes
Absolutely, a friendship was enormously important to Astell both theoretically and personally. So, one thing that friendship can do is provide you with the kind of economic support that marriage would normally have provided to women in her time period. And so, in this case, like friendship is super important because it provides this practical element. But as you say, it also seems to have this kind of soulmate kind of quality to it for her, where you have this opportunity to have this divinely inspired relationship where you can help each other become better versions of yourselves and live better, freer, more happy lives.

Ray Briggs
So how do friends help each other become better versions of themselves?

Allauren Forbes
There are a couple of ways in which friends do this. So, one is by providing admonishment or correction. So, if I am making a mistake, then my friend will say, hey, Allauren, like you should not be doing that this is not helpful for the kind of thing that you want to do. And they’ll show me the right path that I maybe can’t see for myself. But another thing that friends can do is they can see us and provide recognition in deep and meaningful ways that we don’t always have available to ourselves. So, if we’re in circumstances where people have terrible views about our nature, as women as people of color, as both friends can see us through the prejudices or customs of the society, and provide affirmation that we do matter that we should be respected that we have value and meaning and hope for what is to come. And sometimes we can’t see this about ourselves, because we’re just too close.

Ray Briggs
That sounds very important and kind of like my view of friendship as well. But I still doesn’t seem to think that everybody you hang out with is necessarily your friend. So, she says all this stuff about how you have to be virtuous to be a friend to anybody. And then also, this thing about admonishment some of the people I hang out with, don’t provide me with admonishment. So, where do you like, yes, men or yes, women and enemies fit into Astell’s ontology of friends?

Allauren Forbes
I think Astell would say that those are false friends, there are pretend friends. And she thinks that that’s a really dangerous kind of relationship, because we can be fooled into thinking that these people really have our best interests in mind when they don’t. So, she wants to be very careful about who counts as a real friend.

Josh Landy
That makes a lot of sense to me, Lauren, but I’m still sort of hung up on something which Ray just said, that somehow, these friends, the good friends, the true friends that we hang out with, are supposed to already be very virtuous, right? So, Astell has this line, which is: “known for being fit for this” meaning friendship, “who is not adorned with every other virtue.” So, if you don’t already have every other virtue, you’re not going to be a good friend. But on the other hand, it’s supposed to also be the case that friendship makes you virtuous. So that’s something of a puzzle I had about Astell, how do those two things go together?

Allauren Forbes
Yeah, that’s a really good point, I think that puzzle has caused a lot of tension and trying to figure out what’s going on with her view of friendship. So, my explanation is that there’s two levels of friendship. So, there’s one level of real friendship, which are sort of our general friends, our social group, people we spend time with that we have like a positive meaningful relationship with, but not like our best friends, not the people that we would go to, if we were trying to bury a body or something like that, like, like a sort of general kind of friendship. And that kind of friendship, you don’t have to be perfectly virtuous for we’re all in this together in her Academy for women, her Women’s College, we’re all trying to be better versions of ourselves. So, we’re helping each other but not in like a deep way. At the second level, our best friends are soul friends, these are the people that are helping us be the best versions of ourselves to enjoy the perfect virtues that we’ve cultivated through education and through general friendship.

Ray Briggs
I like this two-tier picture, because it suggests that maybe, if you’re not so great, yet, you can ratchet up to being great through these general friendships, and then maybe be somebody’s sort of really deep friend as you get more virtuous. And I think I still saw this too, as something that women should be trying to do is just get more virtuous. So, what else do I need besides friends to do that? Well, having friends that are wealthy and can support you, so you don’t have to get married, it’s a good start.

Allauren Forbes
So one way to think about this special level of friendship is as an alternative to marriage altogether. And not just for economic reasons. But for the kind of deep recognition, all reasons that this is a person who sees you and provides you with the emotional support that you need. Aside from friendship, or perhaps going along with friendship, we also need education. So, we need to become rational before we can become good before we are able to be good friends to other people.

Ray Briggs
Great, so I should just go to school and maybe learn a bunch of languages and study a bunch of subjects is that is that how we get an education?

Allauren Forbes
I mean, I don’t think she’d be opposed to it, because there was no formal education for women in her time. So, I think she’d be happy with anything at the start. But for her, the thing that matters most about education is developing our understanding. So, filling our souls with a useful stock of knowledge is what she says. So that’s going to be probably reading Descartes, as she suggests, but also, it’s going to be avoiding certain kinds of things that reinforce bad cultural prejudices or customs. Like she doesn’t think very highly of like romance novels, for example.

Josh Landy
Okay, well, you know, she and I can disagree about that. That’s okay. But let’s come back to Descartes. That’s really interesting, right? So obviously, she herself is a big fan of Descartes. Presumably, yes, she would, you know, if she’d been able to found an all-female school college retreat, that Descartes would have been on the syllabus. One of the things I find particularly interesting in her relationship to Descartes is that she reads him as a kind of philosophical reason for feminism, which I think is kind of brilliant. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Allauren Forbes
So one of the advantages to Cartesian Dualism from a feminist perspective in the 17th and early 18th century is that it divides the body and the mind in a way that allows us to prioritize the mind or in the Cartesian and acetylene picture of the soul. And this is the thing that really is truly us that really matters, the thing that is given to us by God, most importantly, and that’s where our reason lies. And that’s what makes us fundamentally equal across genders. And the body is this accidental thing. So even though there are physical differences between men and women, so she says that men might be stronger than women, but that doesn’t make them better or more important or having more value in the ways that really matter.

Ray Briggs
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about the first English feminist Mary Astell with Allauren Forbes from McMaster University. So, we’ve got a question from Dan via email. Dan writes, Astell distinguishes between two kinds of indestructible objects, minds and fundamental particles. Bodies emerge from particles and they’re diverse and corruptible configurations. Minds are pointless indestructibles. How can immaterial souls be produced if they’re not a combination of anything else?

Allauren Forbes
Great question, Dan. Thank you so much for sending that. So, minds can be produced in this way, because they are given to us by God. So, because Astell is borrowing from Descartes and his metaphysics is a kind of dualism, she wants to say that this is something that is given to us by God. And so, it isn’t something that grows the way that a body does. So, this this is the core of her explanation that this is something that God can do with his enormous power that us mere mortals can do for ourselves.

Josh Landy
And this this sort of theological focus of Astell, I think another thing that’s fascinating to me, is also a rationale for her feminism, right? Because, of course, it’s very tempting to associate Christianity of that period, with relatively, how should we actually say us nicely differential treatments of men and women? polite? Yeah, but, but she’s sort of she’s building a philosophical defensive feminism on Descartes. And meanwhile, she’s building a theological defensive feminism. On the thing, you just said that God gave you a mind, whether you’re a man or a woman, and so don’t you have a mind which is a terrible thing to waste. Does that seem right to you? Is she building both a philosophical and a theological rationale for feminism?

Allauren Forbes
Absolutely, her theology is a really important part of her feminist project. So, she says that God gives us rational, intelligible and independently motivating reasons to believe in him and to adopt the kinds of values that she says that we ought to adopt. And so, she thinks that God is giving this to men and women, that this is something that is part of his project for us, and that we can see and recognize and value correctly that this is something that is true for all of us, irrespective of physical differences.

Ray Briggs
So one thing that’s hard for me in my 21st century perspective to get my head around, is the way that I still thinks both, we are all equal in some way, like the Cartesians say, We all equally have minds that are valuable. But also, we’re not all equal. So, there are authority relationships that she thinks are legitimate and ordained by God, and that we just have to respect even among humans. And also, she doesn’t think we’re all equally clever. There’s this quote from A Serious Proposal to the Ladies: “We may in some, though not in an equal measure, be instruments of God’s glory, blessings to this world and capable of eternal blessedness to come.” And she quite clearly thinks some people are more talented than others. So is there a way to kind of briefly encapsulate, like how we both are and are not equal in these ways.

Allauren Forbes
Yeah, so Astell thinks that some hierarchies are divinely instituted, and it’s not actually in tension with the quality. So, quality in the sense that we’re all rational souls, that’s going to be true across social and political and even divinely ordained hierarchies. But for practical reasons, God has given us the systems according to a style that helps us organize ourselves and live an orderly life having a an easy having elected is in opposition to a kind of chaos. But part of what that means is that for her people who have greater socio-political positions or power, people who are in these higher hierarchical positions, they have greater opportunities to be better versions of themselves, and therefore greater obligations to be better versions of themselves. So, it’s not in fact, a disadvantage to be at the bottom of a hierarchy, it means that we have a lot less responsibility than the people that we’re supposed to be reporting to.

Josh Landy
Yeah, that’s why I’ve never been a Dean. But yeah, there’s another aspect of her theory of variation that I find kind of beautiful. I mean, obviously, they’re part of a theory of variation as to within hierarchies. But there’s another part that’s just kind of a horizontal panoply kind of cornucopia, which I really love, right? Like this idea that human life would be kind of miserable if they weren’t community, but for to have community, you need variation, nee people to be different. But if people are different then each of us can only appreciate some of God’s works. And so, God needed to create a whole bunch of minds, each of which can appreciate part of His creation. I just think that’s kind of beautiful. I don’t know that maybe I’m being Pollyanna-ish, but it feels like a kind of a celebration of difference to me. Is that it, am I being too Pollyanna-ish?

Allauren Forbes
I don’t think so. Now, I mean, she values community enormously. It’s really important part of her social and political and epistemic view. So, I think that’s a beautiful capturing of her view.

Ray Briggs
So I kind of love that too. You know, some of us are gifted at music and some of us are gifted at languages and that and we should all develop our talents. I love that. So, there are some things that are still things we shouldn’t bother with. And I’m kind of curious about where you draw those lines. So, she doesn’t think that I should particularly care about fashion, for instance. And she’s also not super excited about food, or like fancy food. And she’s not super excited about cramming languages into your head for the sake of cramming languages into your head instead of for the sake of understanding French philosophy. Anyway, distinguish between a legitimate objective academic interest and something that’s just frippery.

Allauren Forbes
I think that her distinction is what is going to make us better versions of ourselves, what is going to be useful knowledge? And what is going to make us more virtuous versions of ourselves. So, I guess part of the answer is that languages are supposed to be in service of something, it isn’t about showing off what kinds of skills you have to impress people at a dinner party, it’s about being able to do certain things, acquiring skills that are meaningful and valuable to the rest of your life.

Ray Briggs
So in context, is this about Astell sort of observing people around her just learning words for the sake of showing off how cool they are, instead of doing anything with their linguistic learning?

Allauren Forbes
I think so. A lot of her concerns are about performativity. So, people are showing off in order to impress people in order to secure a partner or secure a spouse, or in order to obtain a kind of illicit version of esteem, like for people to think that they’re great when there’s not substance to back it up.

Josh Landy
And how do you encourage people to do better? I mean, if you’re, if you’re Astell, you know, these people are having a lovely life, going to dinner parties showing off getting adulation? And what are the things that they think they want? How would you go about convincing them to live differently?

Allauren Forbes
Yeah, I think she knows it’s a tough sell. So, part of the this big part of the first part of the series proposal, so one of the things that she says when she’s addressing women trying to get them to stop thinking about beauty and fashion and start thinking about things that really, really matter. She says, How can you be content to be in the world like tulips in a garden to make a fine show and be good for nothing? As wonderful as it is for people to be like, Oh, you’re so beautiful, oh, I can’t stop looking at you. Oh, these languages, that’s so great. What really matters is what kind of people we are at the core of it our souls, our minds. And if as great as it feels to get esteem for stuff that is superficial, and that passes, that’s not going to help us not really, and so she has to convince people of their true interests. And part of that is like pulling back the curtain. And part of it is I guess, needling them along the way.

Ray Briggs
There’s this great line that I just have to quote where she says, “She who truly loves herself will never waste that money on a decaying carcass, which if prudently dispersed, would procure her an eternal mansion.”

Allauren Forbes
Absolutely, yeah. We’re all just like waiting for the time to come. Right. So, we have to really care about the thing that matters, because we don’t know we don’t know what’s going to happen, but we do know that it’s gonna end.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about 18th century feminist Mary Astell with Allauren Forbes from McMaster University.

Ray Briggs
What would Mary Estella have to say about the status of women today? Would she be happy with all the progress we’ve made? Or would she be horrified by all the frivolous makeup tutorials on social media?

Josh Landy
Two steps forward one step back—plus commentary from Ian Shoales the Sixty-Second Philosopher, when Philosophy Talk continues.

Chicago Women’s Liberation Band
‘But I’m a women and I’ll be damned if I can’t do as I please.’

Josh Landy
Can women find freedom only by not getting married? I’m Josh Landy, and this is Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs. Our guest is Allauren Forbes from McMaster University, and we’re thinking about the first English feminist, Mary Astell as part of our series “Wise Women,” supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. You can find all the episodes in the series at philosophytalk.org/wise-women.

Josh Landy
So Allauren, what would Mary Astell think about social media? If she were alive today? Do you think she’d be an influencer?

Allauren Forbes
I absolutely do, but not like a fashion influencer. I think she’d be a political influencer. She was a pamphleteer, writing all kinds of spicy things in her own time. So, I think she’d be on Twitter, sending fiery tweets all the time.

Ray Briggs
So she didn’t just write about women’s education. She had sort of opinions about whether we ought to overthrow our rulers. She had opinions about ambition. Do you have a favorite Astell political opinion to give us?

Allauren Forbes
Yes. So, I think my favorite Astell opinion comes from her political pamphlet called moderation truly stated. So, the core of her view there her is that she’s engaging in the occasional conformity debate. And she is very much against occasional conformist. Wait, what’s an occasional conformist? An occasional conformist is someone who occasionally takes communion in the Anglican Church in order to be able to serve in the government. So, she doesn’t like this kind of political practice that people like Locke were advocating for in her day, because she thinks that it smacks of hypocrisy and lacking in like moral and political principles.

Ray Briggs
So this is basically the equivalent of going to church because it gets you a community but not really believing in God or doing any serious religious practice. Is that the idea?

Allauren Forbes
So she objects to it for theological reasons, as they say, but also for political ones, because whoever is going to be running, the government needs to be there for the right reasons to do the right thing. And she thinks that if someone is occasionally engaging in this religious practice, that means that they don’t really believe things. And if they don’t really believe things that they say, or do that, how can the rest of us trust them?

Josh Landy
So fortunately, hypocrisy has disappeared completely from the political landscape today. So, we don’t have to worry about that. But I’m sort of wondering, what kinds of you know, what, how should we if we dropped her through time, you know, landed her in 2023? You know, what, she’d be happy to see the progress that feminism has made more rights for women? Would she be happy to see that women can get divorced? Probably not. You don’t have to get married? A lot of people are not choosing to get married? But I don’t know. Or maybe she’d be interested in the protests that are happening, or maybe she’d disapprove of the protests. Where do you think she’d come down on life in 2023?

Allauren Forbes
I think she would find it a mixed bag, to be honest. On the one hand, I think she’d be thrilled to see women engaging in higher education, I think she would be thrilled to see that women are doing all kinds of things that wish she could only imagine in her own time. So, living a full life without ever getting married and not having to worry so much about how they’re going to support themselves like she did, taking all kinds of classes and you know, filling their minds with stocks of useful knowledge. But I also think that she would be deeply disturbed by the focus on beauty and approbation on the internet, through like Instagram and things like that, I think she would find that really disturbing.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, so that does seem very on brand for her. I have kind of a question about friendship, going back to our previous conversation, Astell doesn’t really have much of a place for friendship between men and women, I think because she thinks men are lousy friends. She just describes them as flattering you for the cut of your dress, and then making fun of you for caring about the cut of your dress. And why would you want to be friends with such a person? Is there more scope these days? Or would Astell think there was more scope these days for friendship between men and women?

Allauren Forbes
I do think that so in the latter part of her sort of larger political work, some reflections on marriage, she suggests that a good marriage, if such a thing as possible, would be founded on friendship between a man and a woman, even though this isn’t something that she treats as a life possibility in most of her works. So, if the case is that we live in a different time with the different political possibilities, and men and women couldn’t be a little bit more equal the way that friends are, I think that she might think that that’s possible in a way that wasn’t true in the 18th century.

Josh Landy
And what about the kinds of “friendship” that we have over social media? I mean, obviously, this this is just speculation, but I’m curious what you think she might make of the persona that people create for themselves in social media? Of course, people were creating persona back in her day to do you think she would think, okay, social media, that provides us with the opportunity for additional friendships? And some of those friendships could be real virtue friendships, soulmate friendships? Or would you say, oh, gosh, no, this I mean, it’s just doomed. You’re just bound to do the wrong thing. Focus on externals. Post your Instagram pictures of how cute you look in that new clothing you bought? What do you think? Where would she come down?

Allauren Forbes
So she conducted many of her own relationships and friendships through letters. So, I think that she has to on a principled basis, I think she would have to say that that would be in theory, fine. I think what she would really care about is the substance of the friendship rather than the means by which it occurred. So, if you are, you know, internet friends with someone halfway around the world, you never meet in person, but you have the kind of substantial relationship that makes you a better version of yourself, makes you freer, I think that she would be in favor of that.

Ray Briggs
I have a question about sort of social media and beauty, which we were talking about a little earlier. So, I agree that she would not approve of, say, makeup tutorials that tell you how to look cuter for your friends. Certainly, if there’s the expectation that that’s the important thing that you’re supposed to be doing. But I’m kind of curious about beauty as an aspect of just things that can be shared now by contemporary technological means that maybe couldn’t in Astell’s day, they can share beautiful nature photographs or cute animal photographs on social media. Is that kind of beauty substantially different from the kind of beauty in a makeup tutorial?

Allauren Forbes
I think Astell would say yes. So, she thinks very poorly of outward beauty when she’s talking about like the feminine form and the kinds of dresses or makeup tutorials or something like that, that someone might do. But she values enormously inward beauty, the beauty of our souls. And I think that insofar as you know, cute cat videos, or beautiful pictures that nature can make us think and reflect on things that really matter. I think she would be in favor of that, as a kind of beauty that is shared and experienced across time and space.

Ray Briggs
I know have a question kind of pushing back in favor of makeup tutorials, because not all makeup tutorials are created equal or for the same purpose. So, makeup can be this beautiful form of artistic expression as well. I have kind of a maybe a vice for watching makeup tutorials where, you know, the person draws a thing that looks like a mask coming off their face or a snake coming out of their eye. I just think that’s really cool. And I don’t think it’s really cool, because I think that they look hot. I think it’s cool because they have this skill that is interesting and shows me new things about the world and human faces. Couldn’t that be a way for makeup to be compatible with virtue?

Allauren Forbes
I really want to say yes.

Ray Briggs
Would Astell tell me that my vices are alright?

Allauren Forbes
So I want to say that Astell would on further reflection say that this is fine and compatible with virtue because when this wasn’t something that she obviously had access to in her own time. Her problem with beauty was that it’s part of this like myth that is told about women to make them focus on the body rather than on their minds, in part to make them easier to control. But that’s not what’s going on in the kind of makeup tutorial that you’re talking about. That’s about artistic expression, and skill. And I think that Astell is very much in favor of that as a kind of stock of useful knowledge. So, I’ll revise my answer on her behalf.

Josh Landy
So this is where I find this aspect of her philosophy. Really interesting, this question about the way in which women should think about themselves as opposed to the way in which they have been conditioned to think about themselves. And one of the ways that she puts it is quite an intriguing formulation is self-love. An excellent principle when true, is the worst and most mischievous when mistaken. And I’d love for you to unpack that, if you would, what does it mean that there’s a good way and a bad way of loving oneself.

Allauren Forbes
So a bad way of loving ourselves is to be vain or prideful to be too concerned with how we look or the wrong things that really matter about a person. That’s a kind of self-love that is corrupt, both morally and epistemically. But a good kind of self-love is the kind where we look at our characters and who we really are, and what kinds of things that we do the kinds of friendships that we engage in, and value ourselves correctly, on the right basis in the right way.

Ray Briggs
So we’ve talked a lot about choosing good friends, and about how to think about ourselves. I also want to know more about how to be a good friend, particularly because as still is so critical of men’s capacity to be friends at all. What should we be doing to avoid telling people that the wrong things matter about them?

Allauren Forbes
We should be honest, and we should avoid flattery, for example. So, one of the things that goes wrong in the relationships that Astell is observing between men and women is that men are flattering women. And it’s not because they really think themselves to be subordinate, flattering, someone’s superior to them. It’s because they’re trying to control what kinds of things they can know about themselves and the world that they’re in. So, a good friend, is an honest friend, someone who tells us what it really is that tells us the hard truths about ourselves, even when we don’t want to hear them. And someone who loves and supports us in our projects, who affirms us as being valuable, independent of what kinds of prejudices there might be about the groups to which we belong.

Josh Landy
So it’s a kind of a two-sided honesty, right? There’s an honesty, a kind of critical honesty when we’re going astray. But then there’s also a kind of supportive honesty, when we’re making a mistake about ourselves and thinking especially in the case of women, thinking about ourselves as mere bodies or as mere objects of male interest, you know, valuable only for their looks and, and clothing, externals in general, does that seem about right? It’s kind of never, you know, honesty straight down the middle. You know, if a woman is being too critical of herself, you bolster her. But if she’s not being critical enough, you as a good friend come in and say, hey, you’re making a mistake.

Allauren Forbes
Absolutely. Astell is all about tough love.

Josh Landy
Allauren, this has been an enlightening and very friendly conversation. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Allauren Forbes
Thank you for having me.

Josh Landy
Our guest has been a Allauren Forbes, professor of philosophy at McMaster University, and author of many articles, including the Oxford bibliography on Mary Astell. So, Ray, what are you thinking now?

Ray Briggs
I’m thinking that still has been just really fun to read. She is spicy and exactly the way that Allauren says. And a lot of her works are just available for free on Project Gutenberg. So, I really encourage our readers check them out.

Josh Landy
Totally agree, and we’ll put a link to that and links to everything else we’ve mentioned today on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you can also become a subscriber and spice up your listening in our library of nearly 600 episodes.

Ray Briggs
And if you have a question that wasn’t addressed in today’s show, we’d love to hear from you. Send it to us at comments@philosophytalk.,org and we may feature it on the blog.

Josh Landy
Now a man who gives a whole new meaning to fast friendship—it’s Ian Shoales the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ian Shoales… To some modern eyes, Mary Astell is on the outskirts of feminism, like Phyllis Schlafly, say, who sneered at feminism, even as she deployed it! Mary Astell is problematic, yet lauded for the firstness of her feminism, historically. She wanted to set up communes for women to learn! Today that would happen in a yurt, with yoga, and lesbians. Back then, it was a manor in the Lake District, probably, where enthusiasm, and sexuality were left at the door. She was very conservative. So, she is revered, yet frowned upon. That comes from the way feminism is seen today, culturally, because of the male gaze, no doubt, which still frowns at most things around here, to be honest. But also, the way feminism looks at its own positions, as fraught as 1922 Russians gathering in a dacha previously owned by the Romanovs. Women don’t do purges, but there are certainly degrees of cred, including being a lesbian, with bisexuality slipping in and out of correctness. Conservatives are either appalled or titillated, depending on the gender doing the gazing. Now trans has thrown everybody for a loop. Certain cisgen feminist women don’t want to extend full membership. They have the same objection as Proud Boys to the presence of trans in the ladies room. A kind of tautology: a woman is a woman who is a woman. Centuries before all this, Mary Astell was a Tory woman, a devout Christian, fine with men in charge as long as they kept their cigars in their pockets, and at least pretended to pay attention to women. A little sidebar here, I was watching reruns of Banacek, a mystery series from the early 1970’s. He was a freelance insurance investigator of outlandish thefts, played by George Peppard, so he was kind of a sexist pig in that guy-in-a-turtleneck Rat Pack kind of way. Ms. Magazine feminism was in the air though, indicated by the women guest stars around whom he swanned. Stephanie Powers, Jessica Walter. Who flirted with Banacek shamelessly, even as they chided him for his chauvinism, because he had vintage cars and he didn’t smoke cigars, just those little cigarillos, remember those? Like what Clint Eastwood pretended to smoke in Fistful of Dollars? Anyway, a more innocent time, and yet still sleazy, Playboy’s swan song, pre-Penthouse, pre-Hustler, before the Internet wiped them all out. But none of that sexist girl next door stuff for Banaceck. This was sexist corporate woman next door stuff. So anyway, centuries ago Mary Astell was at the very beginning of that professional woman juggernaut, working within the patriarchy, writing pamphlets, exchanging letters, most famously advocating for women living together in learning dorms, like a secular convent, or a women’s college. Her feminism was pretty basic. Men have souls. Women have souls. If women have souls, like men, don’t we also have brains? As a matter of fact, get out of the way, please, and we’ll educate ourselves. As with anything gender related today, this got the fellas all worked up. She got mocked in The Tatler. A magazine helmed by Joseph Addison, kind of the Twitter of the day. No less a than Jonathan Swift, writing as Issac Bickerstaff in The Tatler, invented an “assembly of nuns,” headed by a woman named “Madonella,” who planned to live together in a restful garden of lilies, flowers, arbors, and vegetables. A quick talking man called “Rake” got her to let him and his friends into this garden. They pretended to be interested in what the women were saying, and before you know it, they were having sex, and giving birth, instead of learning, I guess, as God intended. This tomfoolery was part of a backlash against Mary Astell, among other feminist buddings, like the Bluestockings, Mary Shelley. The fellas labelled them Platonic Ladies- not the philosophical but the high school platonic, that is, no sex. Swift called his heroine Madonella, as kind of crack, because gals together are a nunnery, ipso facto. It would be almost clever now, a crack at Madonna, another problematic feminist role model. It could almost pass for a Ben Shapiro joke, if Ben Shapiro had a sense of humor, and knew what women were. Joking! Madonella is kind of a cool name, really. If Taylor Swift went to Harvard. Except Reese Witherspoon made that movie already. How long is the road from Jonathan Swift to Taylor Swift, and where to next? If we have a soul, we have a brain. But do we have a soul, England? The question remains, even here in the colonies. I gotta go.

Josh Landy
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW Local Public Radio’s San Francisco Bay area and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, copyright 2023.

Ray Briggs
Our executive producer is Ben Treff, Senior producer is Devon Strolovitch. Laura McGuire is our Director of free Research.

Josh Landy
thanks also to Merle Kessler and Angela Johnson.

Ray Briggs
Support for Philosophy Talk comes from various groups at Stanford University and from the subscribers to our online community of thinker’s support for this episode, and all the episodes in our Wise Women series comes from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Josh Landy
The views expressed or (mis-expressed) on this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or of our other funders

Ray Briggs
not even when they’re true and reasonable.

Josh Landy
The conversation continues on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you too can become a subscriber to our library of more than 500 episodes. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. Thank you for listening.

Josh Landy
And thank you for thinking.