Mary Astell Quotes: Sources, Meanings & Themes
Browse quotations by Mary Astell with named works, context notes, meanings and recurring themes.
Source identified1
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“A rational mind will be employ’d, it will never be satisfy’d in doing nothing, and if you neglect to furnish it with good materials, ’tis like to take up with such as come to hand.”
Meaning & context
Astell argues that the mind naturally seeks occupation, so denying people serious intellectual material does not make the mind inactive; it leaves it to whatever material happens to be available.
Source details
A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Part I, printed page 56 in the represented 1697 two-part edition, Project Gutenberg #54984. Astell writes that a rational mind will be employed while arguing that women denied serious intellectual education may be driven toward inferior materials. Original spelling is retained; the passage belongs to her explicitly religious and educational proposal, not contemporary educational-outcome research.
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“If all Men are born Free, how is it that all Women are born Slaves?”
Meaning & context
Astell turns the language of natural freedom back on a social order that treats women as naturally subordinate, exposing a contradiction between political liberty and domestic domination.
Source details
Some Reflections Upon Marriage, Appendix in the fourth-edition text represented by Project Gutenberg #61143. The edition states that the preceding edition’s extended Preface was moved to the end as an Appendix; there Astell asks, “If all Men are born Free, how is it that all Women are born Slaves?” while challenging claims of natural male supremacy. It is early-modern feminist political-religious polemic, not a literal equation of every form of historical slavery.
Source identified3
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“If God had not intended that women should use their reason, He would not have given them any, for He does nothing in vain.”
Meaning & context
Within her Christian framework, Astell argues that women’s capacity for reason implies a responsibility to exercise it rather than surrender judgment to others.
Source details
The Christian Religion, as Profess'd by a Daughter of the Church of England (1705), opening section, first-edition Google Books scan, around p. 6 before the p. 7 heading represented in the scan’s contents. The first edition uses period spelling/capitalization (“Women shou’d use their Reason … wou’d”), while the frozen catalog record modernizes those forms. Astell’s argument is explicitly Christian and concerns women’s rational agency in religion; it is not a modern empirical finding.