Esraa Wasel

In Some Reflections Upon Marriage, Mary Astell issues a famous challenge: “If all Men are born free, how is it that all Women are born slaves?” This comment has occasioned a debate over whether Astell thinks that marriage is a form of slavery. Some (e.g., Joan Kinnaird and Patricia Springborg) argue that Astell’s comment is rhetorical or ironic, a subversive stratagem designed to expose to ridicule the tenets of contractarian liberalism. Others (e.g., Jacqueline Broad) argue that Astell adopts Locke’s account of slavery as the state of subjection to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown arbitrary will of another, and that in this sense wives are indeed the slaves of their husbands, and wrongfully so. In contradistinction to both of these interpretations, we argue that, according to Astell, there are two kinds of slavery, bodily and mental; that a wife is, by divine institution and hence permissibly, the bodily slave of her husband; and that, although mental slavery would indeed be wrongful, it is, by the very nature of the case, impossible for a wife to be her husband’s mental slave.