Mary Astell

Pipsy podcast on äänsä. Onneksi kohta on taas luonas aika. Kotipitse nuudistuna ja talounailta löydät herkkuja joka nelkään. Valitse pitsa, rulla, kotsua, ne tai salattiin. Juoman kanssa 1310. Isoman nällään taututtaa meheva monster. Juoman kanssa 1510. Seuraa Himoasi. Ye! Tulosi kuvat kuukautisikiput. Nua rina. Etuin tai ne kynekologikäytyälle 27. voitijälle Nua rinaisille nyt vain 99 euroa. Terväöstäloossa olet kynekologin hyvin sekesissä. Viidenne ja kuudennen kerroksen välissä. Kun oita pestessä alkoi anteroa huimata, kun hänen välitön huomioissa kiinnittui tortillaan, jonka välissä on mun muassa paneroitua kanafiletteja hallowon. Huuh! Pärhanvälin, kanahalluomio tortillaan nyt vain, seitsi maviskummanda. He's wouldn't. He's not. He's not. He's not. He's not. He's not. Her father was a colmerchant, and her mother came from an old Catholic family, from the Newcastle area, and it was very much a kind of royalist, royalist culture. Mary herself would not have received a formal education, although she did seem to have access to a library in her parents' home. She clearly learned to read and write, didn't really age. She read the Bible. She read the Book of Common Prayer. But it seems like the most important person in her early life was her uncle, a man named Ralph Estell. He was a curator in a local church but had been educated at Cambridge. And it seems very likely that when it became clear that his niece was showing an intelligence and a joy in learning that he introduced her to many of the philosophical and theological ideas that would come to characterize her later life. It seems to be very fortunate for her. It seems to have been a very learned man. He was a learned man. I don't know that he was that impressive acclergem in there seems to be some indication that maybe he lost his living due to drunkenness. But again, the details are scarce. But certainly it's the case that she was an extraordinary woman. And we are very lucky indeed that she came across the ideas that she did at a young age, particularly the the plate-nosed ideas that are going to become very important for her. She had the social ideas as well. Didn't she address her? She thought that she was too as it were gentile, is it better than that? It slips my mind to work, I ain't going to the workplace. But she had too little money to have the daughter to marry. It wasn't simply a sort of social prejudice on her part, although she was extremely sensitive to issues of her own dignity both socially and spiritually. But yes, that's right. I mean, her family was downwardly mobile, let's say. Her father passed away when she was 12 and Uncle Ralph died the following year. And it seems that she became aware quite early on that due to debt and due to the precarity of her family situation. She seems to be quite a bold young woman, ain't she? She goes to the young woman she's 20, with where told a year's income in her pocket. And she has to make her own work. A few years later, five or six years later, she's being published and so on. Always living a mega life in Chelsea. Now, how did she make her way in London in those five or six connecting years? It was an extraordinary thing to do. It seems that she got the idea, having realized that she wasn't going to make a marriage appropriate to her social station given her lack of a dowry. She just picks up at the age of 21 and moves to London as a single woman. And, you know, so it's not clear what she thought she was going to do when she got there, but that she was going to try her luck. And unfortunately, she seems to have run out of money pretty quickly. And in a moment of desperation, she wrote to the Archbishop of Kendrabury, William Sandcroft, for support, which he did then provide. So apparently, he provided her both with financial support, but also more importantly with connections. So it's likely through Sandcroft that she met her printer, who, a Tory printer named Richard Wilkin, who would then become the publisher of all of her works. But it's worth saying that there seems to be no indication that she thought of making her living by her pen, if you will. That was not really. Although there were women writers, the idea that a respectable woman could make a living not only writing, but writing the sorts of genres that a style would eventually write. So philosophy, theology, and politics, that was just really not a sort of thinkable thing for a young woman of her social position. Mark Goldie, can you sketch the main political divide in England during Marja Stel's early life? Well, she begins publishing in 1694, and she's very prolific, writes books and treaties in pamphlets down to 1709. Now, these years are the first two decades after the revolution of 1688. So the restoration regime has been overthrown, overturned, and for the second time in the 17th century, the House of Stuart has been booted out. Charles I had been executed in 1649, and now his son, James II, had been driven into exile in 1688. And she's very hostile to both revolutions. She's deeply aware of the catastrophe of the civil wars, and she's deeply suspicious of those who seek regime change. She's. She's committed to a kind of royalism, add a kind of loyalty to the Church of England, which as Theresa's explained, had been devastating for the royalist classes, and for the Church of England, the destruction wrought by the Purislands during the Civil War period. But I think the reason that she is suspicious of regime change, and she's very hostile to the revolution of 1688, although she does partly come round to it when Queen Anne comes to the throne in 1702. But she's a steward. Because she's a steward, she's the daughter of James II, and she, Queen Anne, is committed to the Anglican Church. But I think the suspicion that she has of regime change is very interesting in the kind of. unstempted to say sociological analysis of the kinds of people who engage in rebellion. All through her writing politically is a distrust of those who use the rhetoric of liberty and equality. She thinks that on the whole, this is the rhetoric of disaffected aristocrats, who dangerously use populous techniques to get themselves back into power. -Who are hypocrites? -Who are hypocrites? Indeed hypocrites, and that's going to be a central theme, as I'm sure we'll see. So she criticises those who engineered the Wigs who engineered the revolution of 1688. She sees them now as syker fans of the New King William, and as people who are lining their pockets, and getting into power as a result of that revolution. They simply use the rhetoric. And she idolizes and idealizes the martyrs, as she sees it. -Mater Charles I. -What were her personal politics? Well, her personal politics are deep-died Tory, and High Anglican, very devout indeed. And I think that some of the criticisms that no doubt will come back to of her politics, of her feminism, may have something to do with the fact that her politics were Tory, in other words, that people were suspicious, not simply as it were from a misogynist point of view, but were suspicious of her because her plans for the education of women were going to be to create an Anglican woman who she would like to purge England of any alternatives to her vision for an Anglican England. So she stuck to that right of life. She was a very firm High Anglican, very firm Tory, and very firm Love for Charles I. -More or less right? -Absolutely right. Yes, that's right. - That was a new way of thinking around at the time in a stealth time, a new logic pioneered by Descartes. And this would be very important to it. Can you tell us about it? - Yes, so I think it's helpful to think about Marriastal as part of this new philosophical movement of the 17th century to think of Marriastal as a new philosopher like Francis Bacon, like Renee Descartes, like John Locke. And one of the hallmarks of this new philosophy was the thought that we didn't come to knowledge through what other people told us. We came to knowledge through what we ourselves could find out on the basis of the evidence of our reason and of our experience. So we come to know not through authority, but through our own minds. And Astel proposed this art of reason whereby human beings could, by virtue of their own, clear and distinct, complete ideas come to know God and virtue. And this was so important for Astel to establish that art of reason, not only, of course, because that's the only way you could come by true knowledge as opposed to opinion, but also because she wanted to give women an art of reason, and she wanted to prove that women were capable of reason. And this was particularly urgent for her and her view because there was, at the time, even amongst the greatest philosophers of her company, the view that women were defective in reason that they were ruled by their passions, they were subsumed by their bodies. And they needed, therefore, the reason and the rule of men to direct them. So Aristotle had said in this kind of foundational way that the male was by nature superior and the female inferior, that the one rules, the man rules, and the woman is ruled. Locke himself had said that in a marriage, a woman should submit to the jurisdiction of a man because he is able as well as stronger. And so what Astel is doing in providing women with the art of reason is pushing back against this and saying, we too are capable of exercising this God-given faculty. We too are capable of intellectual transcendence. - She was also very influenced by Descartes and his mind-body idea, the separation of mind and body, not separation, the disconnect between the two. Can you develop that for her? What did she take from that? - Yes. So unfortunately, as far as she was concerned, human beings were necessarily a combination of mind and body. The mind and the body had to be connected on this earth. But what she took from Descartes and what was also important in terms of her Platonism was that was her view that the mind and the body were distinct substances, that there was extended matter on the one hand and there was thinking substance on the other. And this thinking substance was immaterial and it was immortal and it was the substance of the soul of which women were equally to men possessed. And this is of course why I think she was very drawn to that Cartesian dualism, to the view that the mind and the body are distinct, because she needed to say, she wanted to say that women have minds too, that they have this reason that can be developed to the highest understanding. - Would you be correct to say she was a Christian Platonist and did that cause problems? - If I can come in on that, Theresa. It's an idea that's important for epistemology, absolutely and also for her ethics. So the idea that we are rational souls that are in effect an emanation of divine reason. And so ethically, astral seas, the human condition is one where in we as sort of individual particles of soul are trying through our reason to live ethical lives and find our way back to the creator. And so from the present perspective, perhaps Christian Platonism sounds a bit contradictory, but it was very much sort of the, we might even say dominant sort of philosophical theology of the moment, Estelle is very much of her era in having this sort of Platonist understanding of Christianity and really a sort of hierarchical vision of individual souls making their ways back up to God. - Theresa, what was wrong with marriage in Estelle's view? You've only got half an hour. (laughs) She publishes her really famous critique of marriage in initially in 1700 in a pamphlet called "Some Reflections Upon Marriage". And today it's by far her best known work. It's the most taught work certainly. But it's very important to be clear that when Estelle is critiquing marriage, she's not objecting to the institution of patriarchal marriage itself. She's very clear that she sees that there is a divine foundation and indeed a scriptural foundation for the idea that in a marriage the husband is the head of the wife. And so wives do she thinks, she thinks, oh, there are husbands, duties of absolute, if also rational obedience. But the issue she identifies comes out of what Hannah was saying. It's what distinguishes marriage from the other hierarchical institutions to which Estelle is firmly committed is the idea that women are meant to enter into marriage freely as equals. Right, they must consent to the marriage contract. But how free can that consent really be if there are simply no other options for women in English society? And more particularly if women have been denied the education that they need in order to be able to develop their reason, so as to be able to rationally evaluate the proposals that are made them. So a big theme of Reflections on Marriage is the prevalence of unequal marriages in Estelle's view. Marriages where wives excel their husbands, not only intellectually, but also ethically, where husbands take advantage of women in effect as fortune seekers. And the fact that women have basically been abandoned by society as prey to these predatory men. But there's also a deeper point. And I think it's one that we're gonna come back to and prevents all her writing is the idea that something has gone very deeply wrong in a society where marriage is seen as the be all and end all for half of humankind. So women are raised to think that marriage is the purpose for which they're made, which in effect teaches them to think of themselves as being made to be servants, to men. As Hannah said, being taught that they are naturally inferior. And so she has this great line in Reflections on Marriage in which she compares a woman who has contracted herself as a wife to a man who has contracted himself to keep hogs. Right? She says, "Because God made all things for himself and a rational mind is too noble a being to be made for the sake and service of any creature, the service she at at any time becomes obliged to pay a man is only a business by the buy. Just as it may be any man's business and duty to keep hogs, he was not made for this. But if he hires himself out to such an employment, he ought conscientiously to perform it." Mark Goldie, how are her views on marriage related to her views on politics? She's very keen to connect her thought on marriage to that of politics. And one of the central themes of her writing is a constant drawing of parallels between the state and the family. And this goes back very much to the remark we made earlier about her exposure of the hypocrisy of weak thought. She's a brilliant ironist, a brilliant satirist or a ventriloquizer of the ideas of others. Indeed, it's sometimes quite difficult to know what her own position is because she's so busy voicing as it were, views of her opponents. And her central theme, particularly in the 1700 and 6th preface that she adds to her reflections on marriage, it's quite short as you'd expect from a preface. But it contains all her, if you like, most quoteable quotes, where she wants to say that if you, men, people think that in politics and in the state, it's right to overthrow arbitrary rule and tyrants. Why isn't it right to do so in marriage and in the family? If it's right to get rid of one tyrant in a monarch, what about the 100,000 tyrants over wives, over women in marriage? If absolute monarch is wicked in the state, why is acceptable in the family? She repeatedly drives that home. How long did it go down? [LAUGHTER] Could I just underscore one aspect that she particularly takes in that preface? She is a reader of Locke, and she has, I think, a very ambiguous view of Locke, the great philosopher of the moment, who just died in 1794. But she picked up one of his obscure works, the paraphrases on the epistles of St. Paul, published just after Locke's death. And there she finds Locke commenting on that passage in St. Paul's epistle to the Corinthians, which says women should be covered in church. Even my own mother's generation still kept their hats or their headscarves on in church, and she tussed the wantonness of women who did not do so. But in that, it locks account of that passage. He says that Christianity makes no difference to the natural inferiority of women, the natural superiority. of men. And Astel is outraged by that. She sees it not only as hypocritical from the great teacher of natural equality, but as a betrayal. Locke talks constantly in his great political work about natural equality. So how can he possibly attribute naturalness to the relationship of the sexes? So Mary Astel has this extremely famous, ask this extremely famous question, which is that if all men are born free, how is it that all women are born slaves? And this is an incredibly rich question that I think repays kind of deep unpacking. So first of all, as Marcus said, what she's doing is she's calling out the rank hypocrisy of these kind of supposedly enlightenment philosophers who go on about how all men are born free and that they're not and that they are legitimate in resisting tyrants. And yet they are subjecting women to the very slavery that they condemn on their own terms. But of course, the kind of deeper point in a way is that actually men didn't think that men were born free. Astel, sorry, Astel didn't think that men were born free. She is a Tory, as has been said, and she doesn't think that it's right to resist a tyrant just as it's not right. In fact, she doesn't understand the category of count, just as it's not right to resist a husband. There's no room for resistance in her philosophy. But I think that there is a kind of deeper third layer to this idea of hers, which is that Astel is captivated, I think, by the theory of unfreed him that she finds in someone like Locke. She does think she is very concerned by the peculiar horror of what it means to live subject to the arbitrary will of a husband. And if I might just quote a little from her to evince the kind of horror of this situation, she says, to be yoked for life, to a disagreeable person and temper, to have folly and ignorance tyrannize over wit and sense, to be contradicted in everything one says and does and bore down not by reason, but authority. It's not just the brutality, the violence that is permitted under early modern marriage that Astel saw upset by it's, but it's sort of, it's the gaslighting, it's the idea that one should call brutality love and folly wisdom. Tareza, what, she saw the solution to most of these problems as education, particularly of course the education of women. So what role did the pursuit of education for women play in her life? Again, as Hannah emphasized, Astel is at pains to say that there's no difference between the intellect of a woman and that of a man, there's no difference between the soul of a woman and that of a man. And so there's no difference in the role that education-- She was revolution at the time. Absolutely. And she really does drive down into its most radical implication. She suggests there really isn't any difference in the purpose of education for a woman as for education for a man. And so we've talked about her views on marriage, but actually the first pamphlet she publishes, and certainly the one that's most famous during her own lifetime, is a serious proposal to the ladies for the advancement of their true and greatest interests, which is published initially in 1694 and it goes through multiple editions. And basically in this pamphlet, Astel is making her own proposal to the ladies. I mean the contrast there with the marriage proposal is important and explicit. The idea is that women need to have alternatives to marriage, right? Because Hannah brought out in that wonderful quotation, she's so in touch with the suffering of women in an unequal marriage. So there has to be a place for these unmarried women to go, but in the England of her day, their treated is simply superfluous, right? Astel herself had the experience of being a superfluous woman, a sort of problem for her relations. So her idea that she defends in this treatise is that there should be independent women's academies or colleges where the daughters of well-to-do families who did not want to get married or did not have the opportunity to get married would basically put their dowries into an endowment for a learned society. She calls it a religious retirement. At one point in the pamphlet, she actually describes it as a monastery, which perhaps was not the most strategic thing she could have said. But the point there is that she's drawing attention to the problem that women face in Protestant societies in particular. With the abolition of the monasteries, with the abolition of convents, there really is no alternative for a woman but to make an unequal match. What relationship would this have? Her ideas on marriage and education, with her ideas on God. She's very much part of broad traditions of Anglican and more broadly Christian spirituality, and a great deal of her writing is comprised of exaltations to piety and to virtue. She's deeply ascetic. She's very puritanical with a small p. She dislikes capital p puritons. That's to say the dissenters who broke away from the Church of England. But she's puritanical in her dislike of or fear of the realm of passion of the appetites. She speaks of the just as many Christian writers had in the previous periods, spoken of the body as a sepulcher, something that is merely a distraction, something that bears us down. At the same time, I think there's an ambiguity and ambivalence about her attitude to the passions which we might come back to. Because I think there's a strain of mystical Christianity there, which also takes some sources from the Stoics, the notion that we should reeducate our passions. We should reconstruct our passions. So we come to have a passionate desire for the things that we ought to desire. It's our understandings that we should educate so that we then have a will towards the love of God. Can I come in on that? Just to piggyback on what Marcus said just there, I think that that sense of passion is really important because oftentimes in scholarly treatments of Astle, we can sort of treat her as a little too mystical, a little too otherworldly. But this is a woman who feels passionately. She has a love for her fellow women and the need to improve their condition. She signs a serious proposal, a lover of her sex. So there's this real sense that her passion for other women, her passionate friendship with other women really is driving her to intervene in a realm which is really not her sphere in the public realm and publicly in print. And so I don't think we should lose sight of her own passionate ambition to make the world a better place for her and her sisters. Anna, is she husband called the first feminist? Does that stand up? Well, obviously we have to be very careful about anachronism and retrojecting our own concepts back onto the 17th century. And the word feminism of course doesn't come into existence until the 19th century. It was invented by a Frenchman, feminism, but of course just because a word doesn't exist in the 17th century, doesn't mean that the concept doesn't. And it seems to me that if you take the view that feminism is the belief that women as a class are oppressed and that that's wrong, then I think that we can call a still a feminist. It seems to me that she had a very rich, thick understanding, a structural understanding of the ways in which women were oppressed, not just through a kind of violence and force and clear government, but also through language and ideas and norms and stereotypes. And she absolutely was kind of interested in resisting that in the academy for women that Theresa has talked about. And I also think it's really important to think about Estelle as a feminist because feminism is not just an idea, it's not just a fad that was invented in the 19th century. It is rooted in the real experiences of women's lives. It is a response to the reality of sexism and a patriarchy. In Estelle's case, it is a response to a legal situation in which wives, the identity of wives was covered, was owned by their husbands in which wives could not own their own property. Even the gifts that the husband gave his wife were his. A husband was permitted at this time to beat his wife within reason. It is not simply the slavery of marriage, it's the slavery of ignorance. It's education that will empower women. It wouldn't have crossed her mind to call for votes for women. And after all, hardly any men had votes at that time. She doesn't call for women's entry into the professions. She focuses on education. And I think if you looked at many of the feminists of the 18th century, Wielst and Kraft is the most famous. They differ hugely politically, but they have a huge focus upon education. That is the source of empowerment to educate women. Is there any sense in which she was trying to get. She moved in a rather select circle down in Charlsea. She began to know aristocratic women who cultivated hers and sponsored her. That was the word used at the time. And she mixed with them and so on. And she was very abrasive and made her own circle. Was there any way in which she was trying to get these ideas out to a wider larger public? Absolutely. I mean, so as we've said, I mean what's extraordinary about Astel is perhaps not so much her interest in women's education. It's not so much her particular philosophy, although she innovates in interesting ways. It's the fact that she published and not only did she publish, she was hugely popular. She has a wide reading audience, her works go through multiple editions and that's what's really extraordinary. She has this knack, not only for irony, for humor, for writing in a way that makes us laugh today, but also with a real sense of the publicist eye of sort of framing an argument in a way that is irresistibly compelling even as it's repulsive to many of her readers. And I just say that in terms of her feminism, I think it is right to apply that label to her, but it's also just we're seeing that the kinds of arguments she was making about the natural equality of this sexes were really innovative and new. I mean, there's a long history of what we call feminist writings, but it's very much focused on arguing that the best of women are equal to if not superior the best of men. So we might think of this as a kind of platonic feminism. There's a kind of history of extraordinary women who have been truly extraordinary and we see this in Christine de Besson and a lot of the other sort of early feminists, but it's not interesting that she's not offering us a catalog of great ladies, right? She thinks that that's sort of beneath her dignity as well. What she's arguing is, look, women on the whole are equal to men on the whole. There are no natural relations of inferiority or superiority of subjection, authority, whatever between them. And that, I think, is the real, real innovation in the really important argument. Mark, can you, briskly, tell us in what way she was erratic and what was a conservative, a high-touric conservative? Well, she's both at the same time, and practically everyone who's written anything on Astell has had to struggle with what seems a paradox to many people who are modern secular liberals. Here is a high-tory Anglican and yet one who is an abrasive feminist and very explicitly so. But we've seen that in fact that she's very much a modernist in terms of her philosophy. She is greatly enabled by her, Hannah explain, by the overthrow of Aristotelian assumptions about the natural differences of men and women. And that, in that respect, she's a thoroughgoing modernist of her time. I think that there's a class element, where I say that we should bring in. She's always a, has a situation of precarities. It's now fashionable to say she's on the margins of the Gentry. And I just like quickly to draw attention to her last pamphlet of 1709, which is a brilliant attack upon the Earl of Sharsprice defense of comedy and satire and wit. Now Sharsprice makes the point that is often made in our societies that a free society is one that allows for satire and cartoons and making fun of those in power. But he particularly wanted to make fun of religion because he disliked powerful churches and zany religious radicals. But she takes very much against that. She dislikes the ridiculing of what ordinary people hold dear, their religious beliefs. And again, she dislikes the thought that these people wouldn't allow ridicule and contempt from their own servants. So it's a kind of critique of the smugness of liberal elites, of male liberal elites. Hannah, can you tell us what other thinkers thought of her in her time? Well, she put the cat amongst the pigeons in a most spectacular way, I think. So, and she, the response to her was very varied. As we've already heard from Teresa, she had this very close circle of aristocratic women friends who adored her and and then you can see subsequent women admiring her and drawing on her. For example, Sarah Shapoan famously wrote the heart about the hardships of the English laws in relation to wives in the 18th century. But she was also mocked and pilloried and hated. So Gilbert Burnett, for example, attacked her so-called monastery for being papished, Richard Steele, pilloried her in the spectator, saying that she was proposing a nunnery for virgins. And also she was plagiarized arguably. I mean, people were, I mean, so Daniel Defoe, for example, he said he had the idea first, but he put her idea for her an academy of women out there and so did Bishop Barkley actually in his the ladies library. He borrowed a lot of her ideas from the serious proposal. So she was highly celebrated. She was highly controversial. Teresa, how seriously has she been taken since her time? Since her high time? As Hannah brought out, so she was celebrated in her own day. She was notorious. She was loved. She was reviled. But what's really extraordinary again is just the speed with which she seems to have been forgotten. So at her death in 1731, she was mourned by her lady friends. But there was really much public memory of her in her writing. So her first biographer is a, is actually a corset maker, named George Ballard in the 1740s. But even Ballard had a really difficult time finding information about her. And I think there's a couple things to say about, I mean, one thing to say about that is simply the kind of the questions of women's education, the sort of questions that had motivated Estelle during her day had somewhat died down. There's also a sense in which Estelle herself had retreated from public life. She had turned her attentions in later life, not to publishing, but to running a charity school in Chelsea. But for whatever, but for whatever reason, what we find then is that, you know, she's, there's a brief biography of her in the 1740s. But then after that, she really is forgotten until the 20th century. And so there's a single monograph, I think, about her in the early 20th century. And then finally, it's not until the rise of academic feminism and women's studies in the 1970s and 80s that we begin to have a scholarly interest in her in earnest. Mark, do we have any, any notes, any indication of the way she thought things had gone since in the second part of her lifetime when she eventually stopped publishing? What she pleased with the way things had developed on it, she thinks she'd had no influence. She during the reign of Queen Anne, she had considerable confidence. And in fact, the closing remarks of her 1706 preface are extremely hopeful for a time when half a humankind will be able to fulfill their potentiality. But strange thing is she goes silent in 1709 and we're not clear why, though, she does set up a charity school for young girls in Chelsea. And we don't have that time writing and then I'm trying to subtract nine from thirty one anyway. And that all that time silent. So it's not quite right to say it, she went completely silent. I mean, so she reissues several of her pamphlets and she writes a new preface actually to Bartlemi Fair in 1722. So she's not completely gone, but there is really a sense that with the death of Queen Anne, this kind of providential moment where it was possible for women to assume the public stage, really has gone out and that's reflected then in the way that she lives her life. To read her remarks, the first new modern interest in her was the turn of the 20th century. And at that time, a lot of colleges were being created for women in Cambridge and in Oxford and North America. And that naturally focused attention on her views on education. And although she did not intend by any stretch to create an Oxford or Cambridge College, she does wait, make one fascinating remark where she points out that some of the foundresses of colleges and Oxford and Cambridge, some of these colleges had been founded by women such as Elizabeth DeClaire. And that struck a chord at the beginning of the 20th century. And of course Virginia Woolford is precisely taken by this idea that Marcus just articulated and in three guineas, she does say that Mary Astle was the one who saw how important it is for women to be transformed through education and she commends her for her proposal for a college for women. Well that leads on to the final question of what is three of you. What impact has she had in recent years? I think if I may, so as we've said, she is much more taught now than she was. I mean I think we can safely say that Astle is now remembered and has been integrated into the curriculum, not only in the history of philosophy but in the history of political thought. But I think that there still is a problem for those who want to read and teach Astle. There is a problem with those who want to take her seriously and it's precisely the idea that there's a kind of contradiction or paradox if you will, will between her feminism on the one hand and her conservatism on the other. And so what I want to argue in my own work on Astle is to say you know there's not, there's not a contradiction, there's not a paradox. So what we have here is an original mind who's thinking in a coherent way and it's our duty as readers and teachers to do our best with it. And I think she has quite a lot to say actually to our highly partisan age. I mean she was a partisan polemicist who took part in the fray, who came up with ideas about inclusion for women in a partisan discourse. And I think there's just, you know, it's really the right time to think with Astle. It's just a kind of question if we're going to be able to take her seriously on her own terms. My own hope is that actually studying her will give a leg up to some of the other women writers at the time. There's almost a danger in pouring too much attention onto her with good reason because she's so prolific and so challenging. But there are a lot of other interesting women writers of the 17th century. Lucy Hutchinson is a Republican writer at the Civil War. And in Astle's own time, there's Damaris Masham, there's Catherine Coburn, who are both philosophers. If that Masham engages country. Dicts Astell, both of them were weeks, and I think it's perhaps time that we look at the Republican and the weak tradition of feminist writing in the 17th century. Yes, I think building on what Mark has just said, it wasn't the key, the point is that the canon hasn't seen women writers, and the more we're looking, the more we're finding that there wasn't just Astell, but there's an array of women writers. And I think that Mary Astell speaks particularly powerfully to us now because of this extraordinarily rich and thick understanding that she has of gender. That's to say she does not think that what women are, how they behave in the world, is a function of their nature for the most part, but rather she has this amazingly capacious understanding of custom, of nurture, of power, of violence, of the way in which these forces shape the way that women and men are, and to go back to Theresa's thought about pigs. The idea that this fundamental idea, that just because a man looks after a pig, it doesn't mean that he was made for that, and so it's for women, just because a woman might spend her time in the kitchen, it doesn't mean that she's made for that. In terms of philosophy though, she was in the time of lock and day card, was she considered to be anywhere near the equal or in that class? How was she ready to not regard? Well, there's always a problem with how we treat women in the history of philosophy. For an number of reasons, one is that they didn't tend to produce philosophical treatises in the way that we recognise today, or if we want to work women's voices into the curriculum, we do so by putting them in conversation with some great man. And so this is very much how she's been treated with respect to philosophy and also with respect to political philosophy. So no, I don't think that she was treated taken seriously as a philosopher in her own day. I mean, indeed she was mocked again for her kind of platonic excesses. I mean, Domeris Masham, who again is a woman writing in criticism of Astel, sort of accuses her of ecstices in a way that's just unfilisophical. So again, it's a way of how do we take these women seriously without reducing them to kind of inferior or minor conversation partners with great men, sort of reading them obsessively as responding to lock or whomever, but at the same time taking all parts of their views into the picture. Well, thank you all very much. That was Trippic, Roman Hanodosan, Theresa Beigeum, and Mark Goldey. Next week we'll be talking about Jura, Albrecht Jura, the great German printmaker. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. So I think a question that you didn't ask me was about what she thought of liberty. And of course, she didn't think that men were born free and she didn't think that women with wives were free in relation to their husbands, but where she did think that true freedom lay and was possible was in their mind. And so I think something that we didn't necessarily explore in relation to her treatment of marriage is that even if you found yourself in an unhappy, unequal marriage subject to a tyrannical husband, that there was still a way in which you could take refuge in the freedom and the solace of your mind. And this of course is a kind of Christian, stoic, defensive slavery in a way, which is to say, don't worry if your body is enslaved because your mind might still be free. Yeah, I would build on that and say there's much more to say about her, again, her ethics and her idea of rational obedience really is kind of the crowning virtue that there's a kind of one can one can enjoy a sense of one's own superiority in submitting and set us to and suffering unjust rule. And this really comes across in the reflections on marriage, the sense that you know that the wife who knows herself to be superior to her husband can take a kind of comfort in that. But I also just, so I do have a poem that I can tell you. No, you tell me. No, you tell me. No, you tell me. No, you tell me. Do you think it really. Well, we can't. We can't. We can't. We can't. We can't. We can't. We can't. We can't. We can't. No, we can't. It's interesting. So we think of Astel as a pamphleteer, as a plemesis. But her first, her earliest writing is poetry and we know this because she dedicated a collection of it to Archbishop, Archbishop Sandcraft. And so it exists among his papers. But so she has this one poem that was written when she was about 17 or 18 and it's entitled "Embition". So just read a bit of it. What's this that with such vigor fills my breast? Like the first mover, it finds no rest. Their sophistry I can control who falsely say women have no soul. My o' greatness I disdain to bow to thee thou art below even lowly me. Short-winded fame shall not transmit my name that the next stage may censure it. This I'm ambitious of no pains will spare to have a higher mansion there where all our kings here let me be great. Oh my God. Great in humility. Which I just think so perfectly captures not only her sense of humor and of irony, but also again, just even as an 18 year old, she's really wrestling with her place in the world as a superfluous woman and trying to find a way to channel her ambition. But it's also just interesting because she's never apologetic for that ambition. I mean, if we think about the discourse of ambition of the day, I mean ambition had been the original sin of Eve, right? Eve's ambition to have divine knowledge or immortality is what causes the fall of man. But a cell never makes any apologies for the fact that she's so ambitious, right? She just, and I just think it's really extraordinary. I've got a question for Hannah and Theresa. It's about the contrast between the attitude to rationalism of Astell and of contemporary or some contemporary feminists. We've stressed the debt of Astell to Cartesian dualism and her sense of liberation through thinking about the separation between reason and the passions, reason and the body, and the way in which reason women are as rational as men and so on. And yet some strands of contemporary feminism virtually turn that on its head and critique what they regard as an enlightenment male concepts of reason as distorting of the human self and wanting to re-engage with the passionate sense of the human self. If you like a return to Aristotle's sense of the integrate itself of body and mind. And there seems to be a real tension between those different strands of feminism. And I'd be glad to hear what you thought about that. Yep. Well, I mean I think she, I mean from her point of view, I mean obviously she thinks that enlightenment reason has just not yet reached enlightenment. I mean so all of the kind of problems that feminists, the subsequent feminist critics, have leveled at enlightenment reason is precisely because they hadn't yet taken away the terrible sophisticated myths before their eyes. I mean look, hadn't got there yet. So I think that I do think there's a way in which she might be aligned with contemporary feminist critiques of reason in a sense that she's precisely showing the ways in which enlightenment reason was defective. I agree with that. And but it is, I mean Mark your right to suggest that in some contemporary feminism there is a kind of rejection of reason even in the sense that reason itself is a kind of construction of white European masculinity. And so always holds on to that idea that no the exercise of reason is the appropriate activity of a rational creature. And it's always liberty. But you have to prove that you have to ask everybody to take it for granted that we are rational creatures. Yeah. Well, so it's actually interesting in her philosophical magnum opus, the Christian religion as professed by a daughter of the Church of England. Again, she has such excellent titles. She defines mankind not as a rational creature, but as a religious creature. Right. So she has this sense of the place of reason as being about orienting ourselves towards our creator and honoring him, sort of making progress towards him in virtue. And for her, I think it really was just, I mean, she's such a pious person. And she had such a strong sense of her own ambition as her own ambition is orienting her towards something, a purpose for which she was made that I think that she, you know, it leads her to be critical of the institutions under which she lives, but not, not critical of the wonders that that reason could work. I'm curious about that. I'm a little bit of a tangent to what they're saying. If yours is a. I just say Teresa's right to emphasize that reason, although she's a strong rationalist, reason is not for secular or her. We tend to think that rationalism is somehow secular reaction against the religious traditions, but she speaks of reason as being a particle of the divinity. If you use your reason, then you are literally getting in touch with the divine that God has created reason. Reason is as much a part of revelation as the word of the gospel and the Bible is. It's one way in which God reveals Himself through our reason. Absolutely. And this is what's so offensive to mash them and lock again the sort of ecstatic sense of reason. You know, it's always often appealing to the metaphor of angels, right? And it's not simply a metaphor. Angels are very real for her as they were for many in this Platonist cosmology. And so she describes her "sirathic soul." She describes her female friends as her "sirathic sisters." Right? There really is. again, this mystical dimension that we are at risk of losing if we want to just tell this story about the rise of reason. Can I make my turn to what I've done? Please do. No, I just think it struck me and I think it has to be as surprising and problematic the way in which Mary Estelle invokes the status of a slave on behalf of aristocratic white women living in Chelsea. And that when there were chattel slaves from Africa walking the streets of London at the time, and of course subsequent feminists have, subsequent black feminists have precisely looked on an amazement at the way in which white feminists have gone on about marriage slavery and thought you have no idea. Yeah, no, the only time I found, you know, we have some references to slavery in her ladders, but the one sort of extended treatment of it again is in the Christian religion, and it's Estelle imagining herself as a slave in northern Africa who comes to know of Christianity through enslaved Christians off the Barbary coast and through the exercise of reason and the reading of scripture works her way to an understanding of the Church of England as the true church. So again, I don't think that's quite exculpatory. I think it just reaffirms Hannah's point that she is extremely, you know, on the one hand she's incredibly sort of questioning and skeptical and broad-minded about the way she's critical of the institutions under which she lives. But again, on the other hand, she's extremely narrow in her understanding of the relevance. Thank you. I'm very, very grateful to see you. I'm very much enjoyed. I enjoyed it a lot. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillitzon. Before you go, I'm Miles, the producer of a brand new podcast for Radio 4 called Tricky. This is how it works. Four people from across the UK meet up and without a presenter breathing down their necks, talk about issues they really care about. This fuck is quite complicated for a lot of people and it's okay to be against it but not to, you know, shame someone because of their profession. Across the series we'll hear anger, shock and even the odd laugh. Another thing that really gets to me is when people say, "I know what we need to do. I know what black people shut up." You don't like that's the thing. That's not how it works. Nobody knows if you knew you would have done it. Discover more conversations like this by searching Tricky on BBC Sound. The crew of NASA's Artemis 2 mission have returned home safely after successfully completing their groundbreaking voyage around the moon. Splashed out confirmed. Humans are back in the business of going to the moon. But while the mission is over, the Artemis space program is just getting started. 13 minutes, the BBC Space Podcast is looking back on their epic journey and discovering what the future holds for the Artemis space program. Just imagine what we as humans can do next. 13 minutes presents Artemis 2 from the BBC World Service. Listen now wherever you get your BBC podcasts. [MUSIC]