Mary Astell: Why Would a Smart Woman Think She's Stupid?

Imagine you’re a girl growing up in England in the 1690s. You’ve never been to school—girls weren’t allowed. The people around you keep saying things like: women are vain by nature, women can’t handle serious thinking, women are too emotional for philosophy or science. Your parents, your teachers (if you have any), the books you read, even the sermons you hear in church—they all tell you the same thing. After a while, you start to believe it. Of course you can’t think clearly. You’re a woman. That’s just how God made you.

But what if the problem isn’t your nature? What if the problem is that nobody taught you how to think?

This is the question Mary Astell asked in the 1690s, and her answer shook up a lot of people. Astell was a philosopher who noticed something strange: the arguments people used to prove women were naturally inferior were actually arguments about education, not about nature. And she had the philosophical tools to prove it.

The Big Puzzle: Where Do Bad Ideas Come From?

Astell started with a puzzle that might sound familiar. Think about something you used to believe but later realized was false. Maybe you thought the Earth was flat, or that adults always knew what they were doing, or that a certain friend was untrustworthy because someone told you so. How did that false belief get into your head? And once it was there, why was it so hard to get rid of?

Most philosophers before Astell had focused on how we know things—what makes a belief true. But Astell was more interested in how we get confused. She noticed that many of our worst beliefs don’t come from our own thinking at all. They come from what she called “the Tyrant Custom”—the unthinking habits of the society around us.

Here’s a weird thing about custom: it can make obviously false ideas feel completely natural. If everyone around you treats women as if they can’t do math, eventually you stop noticing that there’s no evidence for this. You just feel it’s true. And that feeling is powerful. Even if someone shows you proof that women can do math, part of you still resists because the old idea feels more real.

Astell wanted to know: how do we escape from ideas that feel natural but are actually false?

What’s Really Going On Inside Your Head

To answer this, Astell had to get clear about what a human being even is. Like many philosophers of her time, she believed that people are made of two completely different kinds of stuff: a mind and a body. The mind thinks and chooses. The body takes up space and has physical parts. These two things are mysteriously glued together in a way that nobody really understands. (Astell was honest about this—she said we “know and feel” the union between mind and body, but we can’t explain exactly how it works.)

This matters because if your mind is a thinking thing, then your ability to think isn’t determined by whether you have a male body or a female body. Your mind is your mind. But here’s the catch: your body can get in the way. If your body is tired, sick, or poorly trained, it “cramps and contracts the operations of the mind.” And if your society has trained you from childhood to use your mind for nothing but fashion and gossip, then your mind will be weak—not because it’s naturally weak, but because it never got exercised.

Astell compared this to physical strength. Everyone has muscles, but someone who never lifts anything will be weaker than someone who does. The same is true for thinking. Everyone has a mind, but someone who never practices serious thinking will be worse at it. And this isn’t because of any natural difference—it’s because of practice. Or lack of it.

Two Kinds of Thinking: Just and Capacious

Astell made a useful distinction here. She said there are two kinds of good thinking.

Just thinking is thinking clearly and correctly about whatever you do think about. It’s not about how much you know. It’s about how well you handle what you have. A person who thinks justly doesn’t jump to conclusions, doesn’t let emotions override reason, and doesn’t believe things just because someone in authority said them. She checks her ideas carefully and only accepts what she can actually see to be true.

Capacious thinking is about how much you know. It’s the kind of thinking that comes from reading lots of books, learning languages, studying history and science—having a big storehouse of knowledge to draw from.

Here’s the radical part of Astell’s argument: everyone can learn to think justly. It doesn’t take much time. It doesn’t require fancy books or private tutors. It’s a skill that any person can develop, no matter who they are. But capacious thinking takes time and resources. Not everyone can spend hours reading and studying.

So when someone says “ordinary people can’t think for themselves” or “women aren’t built for philosophy,” Astell would say: you’re confusing two different things. You’re saying that because someone lacks capacious thinking (lots of knowledge), they also lack just thinking (clear thinking). But those are separate abilities. A farmer’s wife who never went to school can still think justly—if she’s taught how. The real problem is that nobody bothers to teach her.

The Method: How to Escape Bad Ideas

Astell didn’t just identify the problem. She designed a solution. She proposed a kind of school—she called it a “Religious Retirement”—where women could learn to think clearly. But even if you couldn’t go to her school, she offered a method you could use on your own.

Her method has six rules. They might sound simple, but they’re harder than they look:

Know exactly what question you’re trying to answer. Don’t drift. Get clear on the terms.
Cut out irrelevant ideas. If an idea doesn’t connect to your question, set it aside.
Start with the simplest things first. Build up to harder questions gradually.
Don’t leave any part of your subject unexamined. Check everything.
Keep your subject in view the whole time. Don’t get distracted.
Don’t judge beyond what you can actually perceive. If you don’t know something for sure, don’t pretend you do.

The last rule is especially important for Astell’s project. Women in her society had been taught to believe things on authority—to trust what men told them without checking it themselves. Rule six says: don’t do that. Only believe what you can clearly see to be true. Question the authorities. Trust your own mind.

The Most Important Discovery: Love, God, and Why It Matters

Astell connected all of this to something bigger. She believed that every human mind has a “particle of divinity” in it—a spark of God. (This was a controversial idea. Some people thought only men had this spark. Astell said no: every human being does.) This spark is what makes us want truth and goodness. It’s what drives us to improve ourselves.

But here’s the thing: you can’t just want truth. You have to actually get it. And getting truth requires disciplined thinking. So a person who never learns to think clearly is cut off from their own deepest nature. They’re like a bird that never learns to fly.

This is why Astell thought education wasn’t just nice to have. It was a moral and spiritual necessity. If you don’t learn to think, you can’t know God properly. You can’t know yourself properly. You can’t love well. And you can’t truly be free.

What This Means for Friendship

Astell’s ideas about love and friendship are worth a closer look. She thought there were two kinds of love.

Desire is the love we feel for something that completes us. We desire God because God gives us what we need. But we shouldn’t desire other people in that way—because no human being can complete another human being. That’s asking too much.

Benevolence is the love of wishing someone well, without expecting anything back. This is the kind of love we should have for each other. True friendship, for Astell, doesn’t depend on what you can get from the other person. It’s pure goodwill.

This might sound obvious, but think about how radical it was for her time. Most people thought women couldn’t really be friends with each other—they were too competitive, too shallow, too emotional. Astell said no: women can have deep, spiritual friendships based on mutual respect and shared pursuit of truth. In fact, that kind of friendship is essential for their growth as rational beings.

What’s Still Unresolved

Astell’s arguments are powerful, but they left some big questions hanging.

First, if bad ideas come from society, how do we know which ideas are bad? Astell seemed to think we could just “see” the truth by clearing away confusion. But what if our society has shaped us so deeply that we can’t tell the difference between what’s true and what just feels true? Philosophers still argue about this.

Second, Astell was fighting for the education of women like herself—gentry women in England. But she didn’t really talk about the women who were poorer than her, or the women of different races who were enslaved by people in her own social circle. Was her philosophy meant for everyone, or only for some? This is a hard question that scholars still debate.

Third, if thinking clearly is so important, what about people who genuinely can’t think clearly—because of illness, disability, or just being very young? Does Astell’s system have a place for them?

These aren’t gotcha questions. They’re real puzzles that grow out of Astell’s work, and they’re still alive today.

The Takeaway

Mary Astell noticed something that many people still miss: the difference between being incapable of thinking and never having been taught to think. It’s an easy mistake to make. When you see someone who can’t do something, it’s natural to assume they’re just not built for it. But often, what looks like a natural limitation is really just a lack of practice and training.

Astell’s philosophy is a reminder that your mind is yours. It’s not determined by your body, your gender, your social class, or what everyone else says about you. But having a mind isn’t enough. You have to actually use it—carefully, honestly, and with discipline. That’s hard work. But it’s the only way to be truly free.

Appendix: Key Terms

Term	What it does in this debate
Custom	The unthinking habits of society that make false ideas feel natural
Just thinking	Thinking clearly and correctly, regardless of how much you know
Capacious thinking	Thinking that draws on a large storehouse of knowledge
Particle of divinity	The spark of God that Astell believed exists in every human mind
Desire	Love for something that completes you (properly directed toward God)
Benevolence	Love that wishes someone well without expecting anything in return
Mind-body union	The mysterious connection between your thinking mind and your physical body
Prejudice	A belief you hold because you absorbed it from your society, not because you examined it

Appendix: Key People

Mary Astell (1666–1731) – An English philosopher who never married, never went to university (women weren’t allowed), and taught herself philosophy by reading whatever she could get her hands on. She argued that women’s apparent intellectual inferiority was caused by bad education, not by nature.
René Descartes (1596–1650) – A French philosopher who argued that the mind and body are completely different kinds of things. Astell used his ideas but adapted them for her own purposes.
John Norris (1657–1712) – An English philosopher who corresponded with Astell. They disagreed about whether God directly causes everything that happens to us, or whether physical objects have their own power to affect us.
John Locke (1632–1704) – A very famous English philosopher who thought that ordinary people—especially women and laborers—couldn’t really think for themselves and should just follow authority. Astell disagreed with him on this point.

Appendix: Things to Think About

Astell says that just thinking (clear thinking) is available to everyone, but capacious thinking (lots of knowledge) takes time and resources. Is this distinction real? Or does having lots of knowledge actually help you think more clearly? Could it sometimes get in the way?
If you grew up in a society that constantly told you something false about yourself (like “people like you aren’t good at math”), how would you even know it was false? How would you start to question it? What if everyone you trusted believed it?
Astell thought that loving God was the key to everything else in life. But what if you don’t believe in God? Does her philosophy still work? Or does it fall apart without that foundation?
Astell was fighting for the education of wealthy English women. But those same women were often involved in colonialism and slavery. Does that make her philosophy less valuable? Or can ideas be good even when the people who have them aren’t perfect?

Appendix: Where This Shows Up

Arguments about education today – When people say “some kids just aren’t college material,” they’re making the same kind of mistake Astell identified: confusing lack of training with lack of ability.
Implicit bias research – Modern psychology has shown that people absorb unconscious prejudices from their society, even when they consciously reject them. This is exactly what Astell was talking about with the “Tyrant Custom.”
The confidence gap – Studies show that women and girls often underestimate their own abilities, even when they perform just as well as men and boys. Astell predicted this 300 years ago: she said that when you’re told your whole life that you’re bad at something, you start to believe it, and that belief holds you back.
Fake news and misinformation – Astell’s method for checking whether an idea is true (Rule 6: don’t believe what you can’t see clearly) is exactly the skill that’s needed to resist misinformation today.