Bibliographic record
Abstract
Mary Astell (b. 1666–d. 1731) is widely considered to be one of the earliest English feminists. She is best known for her prose works A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (Part 1, 1694; Part 2, 1697) and Some Reflections upon Marriage (1700). The first Proposal to the Ladies, subtitled “For the Advancement of their True and Greatest Interest. By a Lover of Her Sex,” is an eloquent appeal for the higher education of women in early modern England. The second part, “Wherein a Method is offered for the Improvement of their Minds,” extends a further plea to the ladies of quality, urging them to practice Cartesian rules for thinking in order to attain virtue and wisdom. In the Reflections, Astell provides a careful analysis of the most common causes of marital discontent in her time. To avoid such discontent, she suggests, women ought to be educated thoroughly so that they will choose their husbands wisely—or else not marry at all. In Astell’s heyday (c. 1694–1709), these works were greatly admired, and she was celebrated by leading literary figures, such as Daniel Defoe, John Evelyn, and Mary Chudleigh. Among 21st-century scholars, the consensus view is that Astell’s feminist ideas must be understood in the context of her wider political, philosophical, and religious principles. Recent commentators have interpreted Astell’s feminist writings in light of her support for the Tory political party, her Cartesian-Platonist philosophy, and her utter devotion to the Anglican religion. A substantial amount of work has been done on her political thought in relation to the radical Whig ideology of John Locke. More recently, scholars have delved deeper into Astell’s religio-philosophical writings, including her Letters Concerning the Love of God (with John Norris, 1695) and The Christian Religion, as Professed by a Daughter of the Church of England (1705). Scholars have also begun to appreciate Astell’s use of poetry, rhetoric, and figurative language more generally. Some have claimed her as a successor to John Milton, while others have credited her with influencing Samuel Richardson’s literary masterpiece, Clarissa. This article lists the principal overviews and biographies of Astell, as well as the standard editions of her works. It also covers five key areas of Astell scholarship: her feminist views (on education and marriage), her politics, her philosophy, her religion, and the literary aspects of her work.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.309 | 0.140 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; the direct Gemma label and the distilled Codex classifier agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".