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acquaintances to support the opening of a charity school. Her project was timely: between May 1699 and 1704, fifty-four schools had already been set up in London and Westminster; by 1729, there were 132 in this area, and many Th
    e 18th centur
    women were becoming deeply involved in their planning and management; and, gradually, in teaching.
    y
    Astell’s consistently and austerely negative attitudes towards men
    : Amaz
    and marriage undoubtedly limited her appeal for many women ons of th
    readers. But her great contribution to feminism was the way she urged women to take themselves seriously, to trust in their own e pen
    judgement, to make their own choices in life by developing their talents and educating themselves. Her own achievements, she insisted, were not in any way exceptional; she had ‘not the least Reason to imagine that her Understanding is any better than the rest of her Sex’. Any difference arose only from ‘her Application, her Disinterested and Unprejudic’d Love to Truth, and unswerving pursuit of it, notwithstanding all Discouragements, which is in every Womans Power’.
    It was only towards the end of the 18th century that other women would speak out as clearly and forcefully, or put forward a comparable, and as powerfully feminist, programme. But through the 18th century, the situation of women was changing, not always favourably. In an increasingly bourgeois society, fewer women were working alongside their husbands in family workshops or 29
    businesses. It was perhaps harder for women to live independently, supporting themselves; and, it has been suggested, it was much harder to find a husband without a dowry. At the same time, far more women were being educated, at least to read and write. All through the century, ‘conduct’ books were addressed directly to women, though they mostly recommended the ‘womanly’ virtues of meekness, piety, and charity, and all stressed the central importance of modesty, which was often used as a polite synonym for chastity.
    But more women themselves were also writing and publishing, and in many different genres; they were numerous enough, indeed, to annoy the great Dr Johnson, who took time out to mock the new
    ‘Amazons of the pen’.
    The greatest of these feminist ‘Amazons’ was Mary Wollstonecraft.
    Her Vindication of the Rights of Woman was published in 1792, and still speaks directly to us. But she was by no means alone. Catherine Macaulay, for example, was, like Wollstonecraft, a radical who responded thoughtfully to the Revolution in France. She had minism
    already published a many-volumed History of England when, in Fe
    1790, she wrote Letters on Education , arguing, as Wollstonecraft would do a little later, that women’s apparent weaknesses were not natural, but simply the product of mis-education. Macaulay also attacked the sexual double standard, insisting that a single sexual experience does not transform a virgin into a wanton. She firmly rejected the notion that women were ‘the mere property of the men’, with no right to dispose of their own persons.
    She certainly alarmed some readers; as one man remarked dismissively to a woman friend, ‘once in every age I would wish such a woman to appear, as proof that genius is not confined to sex . . .
    but . . . you’ll pardon me, we want no more than one Mrs. Macaulay’.
    Even a sympathetic reader like John Adams, the future American president, praised her, ambiguously, as ‘a Lady of masculine masterly understanding’. Mary Wollstonecraft knew Macaulay’s work, and sent her a copy of her own Vindication of the Rights of Men , along with a letter remarking that ‘you are the only female 30
    writer who I coincide in opinion with respecting the rank our sex ought to endeavour to attain in the world’. ‘I will not call hers a masculine understanding’, Wollstonecraft wrote, ‘because I admit not such an arrogant assumption of reason; but I contend that it was a sound one, and that her