“If God had not intended that women should use their reason, He would not have given them any, for He does nothing in vain.”
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.