Mary Astell was one of the foremost defenders of women in late seventeenth-century England. In a time when women were seen as intellectually deficient, she embraced Descartes' philosophy in support of arguments for the equal rational capacities of the sexes, and she used those arguments to oppose the inferior education bestowed upon women. For this reason, Astell is typically regarded as a Cartesian. Hilda Smith describes Astell as ‘a dedicated Cartesian, but one of a particularly religious bent’; Ruth Perry believes that ‘Cartesian rationalism was the very cornerstone of her feminism’; Margaret Atherton defends Astell's ‘Cartesian conception of reason’; and others emphasise that Descartes' account of subjectivity enables Astell to see the soul, rather than the body, as her true self. At first glance, then, the consensus opinion would appear to place Astell in opposition to modern feminist critics of Cartesianism who allege that Descartes' rationalist philosophy implicitly excludes women by idealising a conception of reason that is stereotypically masculine. If one accepts this view, then Astell's feminist arguments are somewhat limited: despite valorising female rationality, they depend upon a conceptual framework that precipitates women's exclusion from the intellectual sphere.

In this chapter, I show that Astell's feminism is clearly indebted to Descartes, but I also examine the ways in which her metaphysical views diverge from the ‘modern Cartesians’ of her time.