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22Margaret FellStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2012.On the strength of her 1666 pamphlet, Womens Speaking Justified, the Quaker writer Margaret Fell has been hailed as a feminist pioneer. In this short tract, Fell puts forward several arguments in favour of women's preaching. She asserts the spiritual equality of the sexes, she appeals to female exempla in the Bible, and she reinterprets key scriptural passages that appear to endorse women's subordination to men. Some scholars, however, have questioned Fell's status as a feminist thinker. They po…Read more
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7Emasculating metaphor : whither the maleness of reason?In Lynda Burns (ed.), Feminist Alliances, Brill. pp. 91-108. 2006.
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1581Mary Astell on Virtuous FriendshipParergon: Journal of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies 26 (2): 65-86. 2009.According to some scholars, Mary Astell’s feminist programme is severely limited by its focus on self-improvement rather than wider social change. In response, I highlight the role of ‘virtuous friendship’ in Astell’s 1694 work, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies. Building on classical ideals and traditional Christian principles, Astell promotes the morally transformative power of virtuous friendship among women. By examining the significance of such friendship to Astell’s feminism, we can see tha…Read more
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632Liberty and the Right of Resistance: Women's Political Writings of the English Civil War EraIn Jacqueline Broad & Karen Green (eds.), Virtue, Liberty, and Toleration: Political Ideas of European Women, 1400-1800, Springer. pp. 77-94. 2007.
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908Adversaries or allies? Occasional thoughts on the Masham-Astell exchangeEighteenth-Century Thought 1 123-49. 2003.Against the backdrop of the English reception of Locke’s Essay, stands a little-known philosophical dispute between two seventeenth-century women writers: Mary Astell (1666-1731) and Damaris Cudworth Masham (1659-1708). On the basis of their brief but heated exchange, Astell and Masham are typically regarded as philosophical adversaries: Astell a disciple of the occasionalist John Norris, and Masham a devout Lockean. In this paper, I argue that although there are many respects in which Astell an…Read more
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28[REVIEW] The Equality of the Sexes: Three Feminist Texts of the Seventeenth CenturyBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 22 (3): 617-19. 2014.The seventeenth century witnessed the first publications that argued for the equality of men and women. Desmond M. Clarke presents new translations of the three most important ones, with excerpts from the authors' related writings, together with an extensive introduction to the religious and philosophical context within which they argued.
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89The Philosophy of Mary Astell: An Early Modern Theory of VirtueOxford University Press. 2015.Mary Astell is best known today as one of the earliest English feminists. This book sheds new light on her writings by interpreting her first and foremost as a moral philosopher—as someone committed to providing guidance on how best to live. The central claim of this work is that all the different strands of Astell’s thought—her epistemology, her metaphysics, her philosophy of the passions, her feminist vision, and her conservative political views—are best understood in light of her ethical obje…Read more
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680Women on Liberty in Early Modern EnglandPhilosophy Compass 9 (2): 112-122. 2014.Our modern ideals about liberty were forged in the great political and philosophical debates of the 17th and 18th centuries, but we seldom hear about women's contributions to those debates. This paper examines the ideas of early modern English women – namely Margaret Cavendish, Mary Astell, Mary Overton, ‘Eugenia’, Sarah Chapone and the civil war women petitioners – with respect to the classic political concepts of negative, positive and republican liberty. The author suggests that these writers…Read more
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541Mary Astell's Machiavellian moment? Politics and feminism in Moderation truly StatedIn Jo Wallwork & Paul Salzman (eds.), Early Modern Englishwomen Testing Ideas, Ashgate. pp. 9-23. 2011.In The Women of Grub Street (1998), Paula McDowell highlighted the fact that the overwhelming majority of women’s texts in early modern England were polemical or religio-political in nature rather than literary in content. Since that time, the study of early modern women’s political ideas has dramatically increased, and there have been a number of recent anthologies, modern editions, and critical analyses of female political writings. As a result of Patricia Springborg’s research, Mary Astell (…Read more
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47Cavendish redefinedBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 12 (4). 2004.This Article does not have an abstract
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672Astell, Cartesian Ethics, and the Critique of CustomIn William Kolbrener & Michal Michelson (eds.), Mary Astell: Reason, Gender, Faith, Ashgate. pp. 165-79. 2007.
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Areas of Specialization
17th/18th Century Philosophy |
Philosophy of Gender, Race, and Sexuality |
Areas of Interest
17th/18th Century Philosophy |
Philosophy of Gender, Race, and Sexuality |