Editing and Introduction by Anjelo Yanez, Bre’Awna Sprinkle, KayLea Fife, and Raleigh Ellis
Anjelo Yanez, Bre’Awna Sprinkle, KayLea Fife, and Raleigh Ellis are undergraduate students at the University of Central Arkansas
Mary Astell’s A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694) is one of the earliest and most influential works of English feminist philosophy. Writing in a period when women were systematically turned down intellectual and divine instruction, Astell argues that women’s perceived insufficiency arise not from nature but from social conditioning and the defeat of their raising. She withstands that women own the same rational souls as men and therefore the same duty to pursue reason, virtue, and religious understanding. The text is both a critique of contemporary gender norms and a constructive blueprint for reform. Astell proposes the establishment of a women’s educational institution— a “Religious Retirement”— that would offer cognitive teaching, spiritual authority, and shared life without the distractions and deception of polite society. This retreat is visualized not as a convent in the catholic sense, which would alarm protestant readers, but as a protestant institute that prepares women for both thoughtful loyalty and active foundation. Astell combines meticulous canonical argument, moral philosophy, and social critique to insist that true christian piety requires the exercise of understanding, not submissive emotionalism. Her central claim—that women’s incomprehension is learned, not natural—anticipates later feminist thinkers such as Mary Wollstonecraft. Through this work, Astell seeks to raise women’s intellectual status, reform their righteous and religious practice, and challenge the cultural structures that keep them confined to trivial challenges. The Proposal remains an underlying text in the history of women’s education and early modern feminist notion. Throughout, the text sets up a sustained critique of the period’s gender ideology, condemning the trivial accomplishments encouraged in young women, the suppression of question and reason, and the joking diversions that fill their time when better intellectual resources are withheld. It treats women’s education not as an ornament but as a moral necessity, intimately tied to salvation, virtue, and the capacity to resist temptation. In doing so, the work anticipates enlightenment defenses of women’s rational equality and offers one of the earliest English proposals for a structured female education outside domestic settings.
Editorial Note
When reading and editing this excerpt, most, if not all, of the text was left in, with simple changes to the spelling of words and changes in grammar. The most common edit my group had to make was with capital letters, as the author had many words that did not require capital letters in the middle of sentences. We also changed words that would have an apostrophe instead of an “l.” Words like “shou’d” would turn into “should,” and words like “cou’d” would be “could.” Also, words that were shortened and not appropriate for text, like “tho” to “though.” Along with changing words, we also added simple connecting words to sentences to make the sentence flow in a manner that the readers could understand. For the structural aspect of this excerpt, we changed the font to Times New Roman, along with splitting up the first paragraph, as it was too long, into two paragraphs for easier readability. Other parts that were too long were also split up into respectable paragraphs. We also changed some of the italicized words, but kept most as they emphasized a word’s or a sentence’s importance. The first step in our approach was to use the spelling and grammar checkers and go through all the pages, fixing what was needed. Next, my team used the method where everyone got 2 and a half pages, and we each found 5 glossies and 5 footnotes, and edited our own parts. While we did have our own parts, if someone noticed an error in someone else’s part, they would fix it. All in all, we changed words, structures, and grammatical errors to modernize the text.