Mary Astell Quotes

A woman indeed can’t properly be said to choose, all that is allowed her, is to refuse or accept what is offered.

But if marriage be such a blessed state, how comes it, may you say, that there are so few happy marriages? Now in answer to this, is it not to be wondered that so few succeed, we should rather be surprized to find so many do, considering how imprudently men engage, the motive they act by, and the very strange conduct they observe throughout.

If all men are born free, how is it that all women are born slaves? as they must be if the being subjected to the inconsistent, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary will of men, be the perfect condition of slavery? and if the essence of freedom consists, as our masters say it does, in having a standing rule to live by? And why is slavery so much condemned and strove against in one case, and so highly applauded, and held so necessary and so sacred in another ?

If absolute sovereignty be not necessary in a State, how comes it to be so in a family ?

Fetters of gold are still fetters, and the softest lining can never make them so easy as liberty.

Women are from their very Infancy debarred those advantages, with the want of which they are afterwards reproached, and nursed up in those vices which will hereafter be upbraided to them. So partial are men as to expect brick where they afford no straw.