Note 23 — Chapter IV · Feminist and Anti-Feminist Tendencies among the English Augustans.

The above statement may at first sight seem rather too sweeping. But it is supported by the authority of Mary Astell (cf. page 90), who in her "Serious Proposal to the Ladies" remarks that it was generally considered quite unnecessary to waste money on the education of daughters. Most parents, she says, "took as much pains to beat girls away from knowledge as to beat boys towards it". She was quite aware that her scheme for the establishment of a nunnery in which the daughters of the aristocracy were to be saved from neglect must be shocking to the parents of her generation, who feared that such an education might in all probability corrupt their morals(!) and would certainly prevent them from marrying. In this lies the gist of all deliberate discouragement of female learning. The only object in a girl's life being to make a suitable match,—meaning a wealthy one,—it followed that everything was subordinated to this consideration. And it unfortunately happened that the men of the century preferred their partners in wedlock silly and ignorant, and consequently easy-going and submissive.

At one time Mary Astell's scheme came very near to realisation. The devout, intellectual and wealthy Lady Elizabeth Hastings became interested in it and declared herself willing to supply the necessary funds. But it so happened that Bishop Burnet heard of the plan and of the promised donation. A scheme for a rational education for girls struck this conservative churchman as so absurd that in his Anglican hatred of Catholicism he rather irrelevantly referred to it as "a popish project", using all his influence to divert Lady Elizabeth's charity, in which effort he was completely successful.