Life & Wisdom Quote by Mary Astell

Astell slips a stiletto into the corset of respectable society: if marriage required genuine virtue and honor, humanity would practically go extinct. The line works because it masquerades as a cool demographic observation while indicting the men who dominate the institution. She doesn’t argue that marriage is bad; she argues that the moral qualifications men claim to embody are so rare that the whole system runs on fraud, appetite, and lowered standards.

The subtext is bracingly modern. Marriage, in her world, is sold as a sacrament and a civilizing contract, but Astell points to its real fuel: power and necessity. Women often marry for survival; men marry with near-automatic social authority intact. So “strict Vertue and Honour” becomes a trap phrase: the standard sounds noble, yet its hypothetical application exposes how little those virtues are actually demanded of men. The joke lands because it’s not really a joke. It’s a statistical insult dressed in polite grammar.

Context matters. Writing in late Stuart/early Georgian England, Astell is one of the first English feminist polemicists, suspicious of a marriage market that treats women as property and calls it providence. The capitalized “Marry,” “Men,” “World” reads like the period’s formal emphasis, but it also heightens the satire: these grand categories collapse under the small fact of male behavior. She makes population itself a measure of hypocrisy: plenty of people exist, therefore plenty of marriages proceed without honor. That’s the barb, and it still pricks.