Love & Passion Quote by Mary Astell

Fair-mindedness, Astell suggests, is not a warm feeling but a discipline: you have to be "forc'd" into admitting an uncomfortable symmetry. In an era that treated male authority as nature itself, she pulls a neat rhetorical switch. She doesn’t plead for women’s virtue or exceptionalism; she demands a standard of judgment that can survive contact with evidence. The sting is in the grammar: justice requires coercion because our default setting is bias, and bias in her world overwhelmingly ran one way.

The line also smuggles in a proto-feminist tactic that still feels contemporary: refusing the trap of moral purity. Astell isn’t arguing that women are always right, only that men aren’t. That move matters. It blocks the easy caricature of the feminist as a partisan for women no matter what, and it anticipates the modern complaint that equality advocates are "anti-men". Her point is colder and more devastating: if you’re committed to justice, you must grant women the same range of human error men already enjoy.

Context sharpens it. Writing in late 17th- and early 18th-century England, Astell pushed for women’s education and critiqued marriage as a power structure, not just a romance plot. This sentence performs that critique in miniature. By making impartiality the price of entry to being "just", she exposes how much social order depends on selective credulity: men get to be individuals; women get to be a sex.