"But, alas! what poor Woman is ever taught that she should have a higher Design than to get her a Husband?"
About this Quote
Astell lands her point with a dagger wrapped in lace: the faux-sigh of "But, alas!" isn’t weakness, it’s strategy. She borrows the polite register women were expected to perform, then uses it to indict the education system that produced that performance in the first place. The question isn’t really a question. It’s a courtroom cross-examination aimed at a culture that pretends women naturally aspire to marriage, when in fact they’ve been trained to have no other ambition.
The phrasing "higher Design" is doing double work. It nods to the era’s religious vocabulary of providence and vocation, then quietly asks why women are denied the very idea of a calling. Astell doesn’t attack marriage as a private choice; she attacks marriage as a public policy disguised as romance. "Get her a Husband" reduces a life project to acquisition, as if the husband is a credential and the wife is the applicant. That economic subtext matters in a period when property, legal personhood, and social legitimacy ran through male guardianship.
Context sharpens the bite. Writing in late-Stuart England, Astell is pushing against a world where women’s formal education was scarce and their intellectual pursuits were treated as decorative at best, dangerous at worst. She crafts her critique in a socially survivable form: piety and propriety on the surface, radical redistribution of possibility underneath. The line endures because it exposes how aspiration can be engineered - and how oppression often arrives wearing the mask of common sense.
The phrasing "higher Design" is doing double work. It nods to the era’s religious vocabulary of providence and vocation, then quietly asks why women are denied the very idea of a calling. Astell doesn’t attack marriage as a private choice; she attacks marriage as a public policy disguised as romance. "Get her a Husband" reduces a life project to acquisition, as if the husband is a credential and the wife is the applicant. That economic subtext matters in a period when property, legal personhood, and social legitimacy ran through male guardianship.
Context sharpens the bite. Writing in late-Stuart England, Astell is pushing against a world where women’s formal education was scarce and their intellectual pursuits were treated as decorative at best, dangerous at worst. She crafts her critique in a socially survivable form: piety and propriety on the surface, radical redistribution of possibility underneath. The line endures because it exposes how aspiration can be engineered - and how oppression often arrives wearing the mask of common sense.
Quote Details
| Topic | Marriage |
|---|---|
| Source | Some Reflections Upon Marriage, Mary Astell, 1700 (pamphlet). Often cited from Astell's 1700 pamphlet on marriage where she critiques women's upbringing and the aim 'to get her a Husband.' |
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