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unable to see any way forward. In 1688, Th
    desperate because she was ‘not able to get a liflyhood’, she wrote to e 18th centur
    William Sancroft, Archbishop of Canterbury, asking for help: For since GOD has given Women as well as Men intelligent Souls, y: Amaz
    how should they be forbidden to improve them? Since he has not denied us the faculty of Thinking, why should we not (at least in ons of th
    gratitude to him) employ our Thoughts on himself their noblest Object, and not unworthily bestow them on Trifles and Gaities and e pen
    secular Affairs?
    Archbishop Sancroft, obviously impressed by her intelligence, and piety, responded with money, but, more importantly, with contacts.
    Before long, Mary Astell had come to know a circle of intelligent women, who became her life-long friends, sympathizing with and supporting her ideas. By 1694, she had written and published her first book, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies , urging other women to take themselves seriously: they must learn to think for themselves, work to develop their own minds and skills, rather than always deferring to masculine judgement. One of her books was entitled Thoughts on Education ; her work was pioneering, genuinely seminal – and it remains interesting because of her stress on the urgent necessity for women to be properly educated. Girls, she argued, must be taught to think for themselves, to judge clearly and 27
    sensibly, rather than waste all their time in acquiring graceful social skills and accomplishments.
    We value them [men] too much and our selves too little, if we place any part of our desert in their Opinion, and don’t think our selves capable of Nobler Things than the pitiful Conquest of some worthless Heart.
    Astell always wrote clearly and sharply, often with an edge of wit:
    ‘your glass will not do you half so much service as a serious reflection on your own Minds’.
    Astell’s analysis was certainly timely. Some modern historians have argued that the Reformation, and especially the closure of many convents, had actually made it harder for English women to get any kind of education. But women, Astell argued, were just as capable as men; all they lacked was a rigorous training that would ‘cultivate and improve them’. She generously supported other women, minism
    warmly praising, for example, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Fe
    collection of correspondence and travel writing, Turkish Letters : Let her own Sex at least do her Justice . . . let us freely own the Superiority of the Sublime Genius as I do in the sincerity of my Soul, pleas’d that a Woman triumphs, and proud to follow in her train.
    But ‘what poor Woman is ever taught that she should have a higher Design than to get her a Husband?’ she asked in her 1700 book Some Reflections Upon Marriage . She admitted, rather reluctantly, that marriage was necessary to propagate the species, but insisted that a wife is all too often simply ‘a Man’s Upper Servant’. Any woman who ‘does not practice Passive Obedience to the utmost will never be acceptable to such an absolute Sovereign as a Husband’, she warned. She had sketched her own ideal in her first book: a secular convent, where women could live together, retired from the world, in happy and studious innocence, ‘such a paradise as your mother Eve forfeited’. Adam would have no place in this Eden. In 28
    Some Reflections , she developed the suggestion in greater and more practical detail, arguing the need for women’s colleges that would provide them, whatever their future, with a thorough education.
    Perhaps even more important to her, these colleges would also help unmarried women; they might, in fact, offer some women the choice of a life that was not dependent upon men.
    As she became better known, Astell was often the target of mockery and crude lampoons: she eventually stopped writing, but was able to use her influence in very effective ways. In 1709, he persuaded some of her wealthier Chelsea