SOURCE: Smith, Hilda L. “‘All Men and Both Sexes’: Concepts of Men's Development, Women's Education, and Feminism in the Seventeenth Century.” In Man, God, and Nature in the Enlightenment, edited by Donald C. Mell, Jr., Theodore E. D. Braun, and Lucia M. Palmer, pp. 75-84. East Lansing, Mich.: Colleagues Press, 1988.

In the excerpt that follows, Smith provides an overview of contemporary education philosophies as exemplified in the works of Astell, noting that early feminists such as Astell recognized that lack of education was a root cause of women's exclusion from equal opportunities.

In the seventeenth century, both works about education and the institutions based on these works were predicated upon the developmental stages of young males. Contemporary feminists, such as the Duchess of Newcastle, Bathsua Makin, and especially Mary Astell, when criticizing these writings and institutions for the exclusion of women, noted their broader implications for justifying and...