In this episode of She Wrote Too, we discuss a book that doesn’t shout, doesn’t rant, and doesn’t ask politely either. In 1694, Mary Astell published a slim, elegant, and quietly radical text called A Serious Proposal to the Ladies. She proposes that women should be allowed to think. Not to charm.Not merely to endure. Not to be good company or good wives. Her suggestion was that they use their minds well - to be educated, reflective, intellectually alive, and taken seriously as rational beings. When you consider the state of society in the late seventeenth century, this was a fairly explosive suggestion. What makes A Serious Proposal to the Ladies so fascinating isn’t just that Mary Astell is arguing for women’s education, though that alone would be remarkable enough. It’s how she does it. Astell doesn’t present herself as angry, unruly, or unreasonable. Instead, she uses the very tools women were told they lacked: logic, theology, philosophy, and a beautifully controlled clarity of thought. She writes as if it is entirely obvious that women have minds and that those minds deserve care, discipline, and nourishment. She asks, calmly why women are so often criticised for being frivolous, vain, or foolish when they are deliberately denied the education that would allow them to be anything else. In other words, she doesn’t say that women are inferior. She says that women have been made inferior and that this has been done by design. What is quietly radical about Mary Astell is that she never once asks permission for this argument. She doesn’t frame it as a radical experiment or a dangerous novelty. She simply assumes that women matter and then builds her case from there. Reading her now, more than three hundred years later, you can feel just how modern her thinking is. All this and yet, she was a High Church Conservative-thinker. How did she reconcile this? A Serious Proposal to the Ladies isn’t just a historical curiosity. It’s a reminder that women have been articulating these ideas clearly, intelligently, and courageously for centuries. So many of those voices were sidelined, softened, or simply forgotten. Same old s**t, different millenia. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shewrotetoo.substack.com
