Mary Astell was born in Newcastle upon Tyne on November 12, 1666. Her father, Peter Astell, was a gentleman and a member of the Hostmen, the town's influential guild of coal merchants; he died in 1678. Her uncle Ralph Astell, a Cambridge-educated clergyman, probably taught her. Sometime after 1684 she moved to London and settled in Chelsea, where Archbishop Sancroft helped her with money and introductions and a circle of women, among them Lady Catherine Jones, Lady Ann Coventry and Lady Elizabeth Hastings, became her patrons.
Her first book, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694, with a second part in 1697), argued that women, like men, are rational beings whose minds need education and spiritual discipline to develop. It proposed what the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes as "an all-female academic institute, where like-minded scholars of a similar age and social status might live and study together for a number of years," a religious retirement for women who wished neither to marry nor to take vows. The plan was never carried out. In Letters Concerning the Love of God (1695) she corresponded in print with the philosopher John Norris.
In Some Reflections upon Marriage (1700), the preface added to the 1706 edition turned the Whigs' language of liberty back on the household: "if absolute Sovereignty be not necessary in a State, how comes it to be so in a Family?" and "If all Men are born Free, how is it that all Women are born Slaves?" The same text still counseled a wife to be "intirely Submissive" once she had chosen a husband, and disclaimed any wish "to stir up Sedition of any sort." Her target was the inconsistency of her opponents; her own politics held, in the IEP's summary, that subjects are never justified in active resistance to the crown, even a tyrannical one.
She wrote as a High Church Tory. Three pamphlets of 1704, among them Moderation Truly Stated and A Fair Way with the Dissenters and Their Patrons, opposed occasional conformity, the practice by which Dissenters took Anglican communion to qualify for office, and she upheld the doctrine of passive obedience. The Christian Religion, As Profess'd by a Daughter of the Church of England followed in 1705. In 1709 a charity school for girls that she had planned opened in Chelsea, for the daughters of pensioners at Chelsea Hospital. She published no new work after that year, and she died in Chelsea in 1731, after surgery for breast cancer.
Mary Astell is associated with Religious Conservative. See the archetype