Life & Wisdom Quote by Mary Astell

Astell’s sentence is a scalpel disguised as a sigh. She opens with “pity,” but it’s the cold kind: a moral diagnosis aimed at people trained to strut in petty arenas while surrendering the very ground where their dignity should be nonnegotiable. The irony is structural. Those “apt to over-rate themselves in smaller matters” can be loud about trifles, yet “where it most concerns them to know” their value, they go quiet. That contrast isn’t just observation; it’s indictment.

The target, in Astell’s world, is unmistakable: women socialized to treat self-regard as vanity, then punished for lacking it when it comes to marriage, education, and intellectual life. “Stand upon their Value” is doing heavy lifting here. It’s the language of commerce and negotiation, smuggled into a moral sentence: know your worth, demand its price, stop underselling. Astell is arguing that the problem isn’t female incapacity but cultivated “insensibility” - a numbness learned through custom, religion, and polite culture. You can hear her anger at a system that teaches women to be confident about decorum and appearance, then docile about autonomy.

The phrasing “where it most concerns them” tightens the screw: this isn’t abstract self-esteem, it’s survival-level valuation. Astell’s intent is reformist and strategic. Instead of pleading for sympathy, she pressures her readers into recognizing a humiliating paradox: society lets women practice confidence only in arenas that don’t threaten male authority. The line lands because it turns self-knowledge into a political act.