Love Quote by Mary Astell

Obedience, Astell implies, is not a virtue in itself; it is a contract with terms. Her line snaps at the pious assumption that a wife’s promise to “Obey” is automatically moral because it’s traditional. If love and honor aren’t possible - if the marriage offers neither affection nor respect - then obedience stops being devotion and starts looking like perjury: a vow made in bad faith to prop up someone else’s authority.

The sting is in the word “promising.” Astell drags marriage out of the fog of sacrament and into the daylight of ethical agency. Promises require consent, and consent requires intelligibility: you can’t responsibly pledge obedience to a person who has not earned honor or cultivated love. That’s not romantic idealism; it’s a pointed challenge to a system that expects women to underwrite male power with their conscience. The subtext is almost legalistic: a coerced or irrational vow is void.

Context does the rest. Writing in late 17th- and early 18th-century England, Astell is often read as a proto-feminist critic of marriage as a kind of domesticated absolutism, a miniature monarchy inside the home. Her rhetorical move is clever: she doesn’t reject morality or religion; she weaponizes them. If obedience is demanded as a blanket duty, she asks, what happens when the man is dishonorable? The quote forces the era’s moral logic to confront its own loophole: a society obsessed with female virtue leaves women only one truly “virtuous” option - to refuse the vow when the marriage cannot meet the minimum conditions of mutual regard.