Love Quote by Mary Astell

Astell’s line lands like a compliment and reveals itself as a trap. “Wise enough” sounds like praise until it curdles into indictment: the wisdom she’s naming is the learned cleverness of survival inside a rigged system. By making “Insurrection” the measure of unity, she sketches a political reality in miniature: women are kept apart, trained to compete for approval, and denied the institutions that turn grievance into collective action. Disunion isn’t a feminine flaw; it’s an engineered condition.

The real barb is in the sensuality of the metaphor. Chains aren’t only endured; they’re “becoming,” tailored, almost fashionable. Astell understands power’s most durable move is aesthetic: oppression that can be worn as virtue. In late 17th- and early 18th-century England, when marriage law collapsed a woman’s legal identity into her husband’s (coverture) and female education was treated as ornamental at best, “discern[ing]” the fit of one’s chains was a form of social intelligence. You read the room, you keep your status, you stay safe. That’s the point. The quote exposes how consent can be manufactured by narrowing the imaginable.

Her intent isn’t to sneer at women’s weakness so much as to diagnose the psychology of compliance: habituation dressed up as preference. The irony does tactical work. If you laugh at the image of “becoming” chains, you’ve already stepped outside the ideology that sells them. Astell, writing as one of the first English feminists, aims the blade at a culture that calls submission “love” and then congratulates women for feeling it.