Education Quote by Mary Astell

Astell opens by borrowing the smug voice of her opponents, then quietly detonates it. “Men of more wit than wisdom” is a razor: she concedes their cleverness only to expose it as a substitute for judgment. Wit, in the late 17th-century male literary world, is currency; Astell implies it’s also camouflage. The real engine, she adds, is “perhaps more malice than either” - misogyny dressed up as insight, cruelty laundered through epigram.

The sentence is built like a courtroom objection. She cites the charge (“women are naturally incapable of acting prudently”) and tightens the noose with its companion slander (“necessarily determined to folly”), letting the absolutism speak for itself. “Naturally” and “necessarily” are doing ideological work: they turn a social arrangement into destiny, making exclusion from education and power look like biology. Astell’s “I must by no means grant it” is understated on purpose. She doesn’t beg permission to disagree; she refuses the premise as if it were a procedural error.

Context sharpens the stakes. Writing in an England where women’s formal learning was curtailed and marriage functioned as an economic and legal trap, Astell targets the circular logic that blames women for the consequences of their confinement. If prudence is trained through education and practice, denying women both and then declaring them imprudent is less observation than setup.

Her strategy is also protective. By criticizing “men” as a class while praising “wit,” she needles patriarchal culture without sounding merely reactive. It’s a polemical finesse: meet the era’s rhetorical standards, then use them to indict the era’s assumptions.