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writings – ‘the best Remains’. But she might have been better admired (the poet implies) had she conformed to the rest of her sex, who complacently enjoyed their allotment of ‘Fruitful Wombs but Barren Brains’. 13
    The mention of university in The Gentlewoman’s Companion is significant. It reveals the common perception during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that many young men at Oxford and Cambridge wasted both time and money by going there. Mrs Woolley cannot seriously have imagined that women would benefit from going themselves. But the idea may have sewn a rogue seed in the fertile mind of another contemporary agitator, Mary Astell.
    Miss Astell (1666–1731) was the first writer to blame her sex for their own ignorance. No wonder the world thinks women weak, she complains in A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694/7), when they settle so easily for silliness. ‘How can you be content to be in the World like Tulips in a Garden, to make a fine shew and be good for nothing; have all your Glories set in the Grave, or perhaps much sooner?’ she demands. ‘The Soul is rich and would, if well cultivated, produce a noble Harvest.’ 14 All that is needed is application, and a little peace and quiet.
    Astell proposes a safe, isolated place where women can gather together and be taught to understand, criticize, and perhaps even change the world in which they live. Not like the Bluestockings’ ‘Colledge’, which was too preoccupied with wittiness and fashion, and too public; more like a convent for lay sisters, where the mind is as important as the soul.
    Daniel Defoe took up the idea, after reading the Serious Proposal . His contribution to the debate on women’s education has rather slipped through the net, hidden as it is in an early, obscure work, An Essay Upon Projects (1697), but it is well worth notice. Defoe’s Essay is a little like Mrs Makin’s,in that it bewails contemporary attitudes to women’s moral and mental capacity. He, too, thinks it pitiful that women are denied the advantages of learning, yet blamed for their ignorance. What does it say about a nation’s leaders, he asks, that they deny God’s grace of education to the mothers of their sons? And what right has the clergy to encourage brutishness in the souls of half their congregation? Besides, he continues (somewhat lubriciously), a well-educated woman is ‘all Softness and Sweetness, Peace, Love, Wit, and Delight’.
    On the other hand, Suppose her to be the very same Woman, and rob her of the Benefit of Education, and it follows thus…
    Her Wit, for want of Teaching, makes her Impertinent and Talkative.
    Her Knowledge, for want of Judgement and Experience, makes her Fanciful and Whimsical… And from these she degenerates to be Turbulent, Clamorous, Noisy, Nasty, and the Devil. 15
    To avoid such domestic disaster, which has been recurring each generation since Eve, Defoe proposes the establishment of an ‘Academy for Women’. Like Astell’s, it would be isolated, carefully structured both architecturally and educationally, with a wide curriculum, and its own rules and regulations. But there would be nothing of the nunnery about it: no vows of celibacy would be required, and no guards at the doors; no spies. The students would be free to come and go, free to learn . An Act of Parliament would be passed, that whenever they chose to attend, no man would be allowed to enter – not even their husbands – so they could study in privacy and undisturbed (shades of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own ).
    After implying that Eve was not evil after all, just uneducated, Defoe closes the work with the following paragraph:
    I need not enlarge on the Loss the Defect of Education is to the Sex, nor argue the Benefit of the contrary Practice; ’tis a thing will be more easily granted than remedied: this Chapter is but an Essay at the thing, and I refer the Practice to those Happy Days, if ever they shall be, when men shall be