Geertje Bol

Historians of political thought have done important and insightful work on women’s history of political thought. This scholarship has proliferated since the mid to late twentieth century and has focused largely on the feminist aspects of their thought. Although this was at first a necessary and crucial correction of prior neglect, I argue that by now this has turned into an overcorrection. By turning to the early reception and rediscovery of two eighteenth-century English female political thinkers, Mary Astell (1666–1731) and Catharine Macaulay (1731–1791), I show that this feminist focus can stand in the way of inclusion by obscuring other important aspects of women’s political thought. I also contend that the feminist focus implies an unfair double standard where women – as opposed to canonical men – are thought of as worthy of inclusion only if they espoused or anticipated ideas that would seem agreeable from a present perspective. This leads to the paradoxical conclusion that, if we want to do justice to the feminist aim of comprehensive inclusion of past female thinkers, we must learn to look beyond women’s feminist thought in history and to embrace their afeminist and even anti-feminist thought.

In 1704, Mary Astell, known by many scholars as the “first English feminist,” published Moderation Truly Stated, her contribution to the national debate over “occasional conformity.” This was the practice of periodic participation in the sacraments of the Church of England—above all, taking communion—in order to become eligible for public office. This practice was defended as an exercise of the virtue of “moderation,” viewed as the opposite of zeal and associated with politeness and reasonableness. In this article I recover Astell’s critique on this new notion of moderation, as well as her own alternative conception of the virtue of moderation as scripture moderation, which she envisioned as zeal and indifference towards the right ends. My aim is threefold. First, to explore the dangers of conceiving of moderation as an “antidote to zeal,” which Astell argued would be detrimental to truth, salvation, and moral progress. Second, to demonstrate that her own conception of moderation as zeal and indifference towards the right ends was a radical subversion of the discourse on moderation at the time. Third, to shed light on the role of the Occasional Conformity debate in the transformation of moderation from a Christian virtue of temperance and control into a “modern” virtue construed as politeness and opposed to zeal, which was to become dominant in eighteenth-century England.