FEMINISM

The stable male dominated society of Great Britain in the middle third of the eighteenth century offered little opportunity for women to play an active role in political, economic, or social affairs. It also seemed to offer little encouragement to the ideas now gathered under the term feminism: the movement for civil and political equality of women and men, and the opportunity of self-determination and autonomy for women. Society assumed that women were subservient to men, that their natural destiny was marriage, and that, therefore, women needed only minimal education. The feminism of the late seventeenth century which had found its fullest expression in the works of Mary Astell had, by the seventeen thirties, an old-fashioned tone. Astell's feminism, founded in A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694) and Some Reflections Upon Marriage (1700), grew from her religious convictions; if woman's soul was as good as man's, her mind was equally good and made of the same reason, to love God2....