Life & Wisdom Quote by Mary Astell

Astell weaponizes a single word - slavery - to expose a culture that treats oppression as a moral outrage when it’s politically convenient and a holy institution when it props up male power. The sentence is built like a trap. She opens with a plain, almost naive question, then stacks the verbs in pairs: "condemn'd and strove against" versus "applauded... necessary... sacred". That escalation matters. She’s not just pointing out hypocrisy; she’s showing how domination doesn’t survive on force alone. It recruits praise, arguments about "necessity", and finally religion to launder coercion into virtue.

The immediate context is late 17th- and early 18th-century England, where political writers fiercely debated "slavery" as a metaphor for tyranny - especially in the wake of the Civil War settlement and the Glorious Revolution. Whigs loved to cast themselves as enemies of "slavery" when criticizing absolutist monarchy. Astell turns that fashionable rhetoric back on its users: if you can recognize slavery in the public sphere, why go silent when it governs the private one?

Her target is marriage as then structured: coverture reduced wives’ legal identity, property rights, and autonomy. The subtext is daringly modern: freedom is not a costume you wear in pamphlets and remove at home. By phrasing the challenge as an inconsistency rather than a manifesto, Astell makes resistance harder to dismiss. It’s not radical theory; it’s the moral arithmetic of a society caught contradicting itself.