Life & Wisdom Quote by Mary Astell

Astell’s sentence looks like polite encouragement, but it’s a scalpel aimed at the social order. “Need not” is doing quiet, radical work: it implies choice where women were routinely denied it. She’s not begging for kindness or exception; she’s asserting a capacity that already exists and indicting a culture that trains women to settle for less.

The phrase “mean things” is a double-edged insult. It names the petty humiliations and narrowed ambitions assigned to women - ornamental education, marital bargaining, devotional busywork - and also shames the men and institutions offering them. Astell’s sting is that such “mean” work isn’t merely beneath women; it’s beneath any society that claims to value reason.

Then comes the conditional: “since (if they are not wanting to themselves).” That parenthetical is the quote’s psychological pressure point. She recognizes how oppression recruits its victims: women can be taught to police their own horizons, to confuse resignation with virtue. The line anticipates modern language about internalized limitation, but in a moral key: to be “wanting” is to fail oneself.

Context matters. Writing in late 17th- and early 18th-century England, Astell argued for women’s education and intellectual seriousness within a religious framework that her audience could not easily dismiss. She frames ambition as a duty, not a rebellion. The punch is rhetorical jiu-jitsu: she uses the era’s respect for “the best” - reason, virtue, excellence - to expose how irrational it is to waste half the population on “mean things.”