Quote by Mary Astell: “If all men are born free, how is it that all women are born slaves?”

This is a devastating logical trap: if freedom is a natural right, as Enlightenment philosophers claimed, then why does it stop at gender? Astell exposes the hypocrisy of men who champion liberty in politics while maintaining absolute authority at home.

Astell wrote Some Reflections upon Marriage in 1700, a period when Locke's theories of natural freedom and the social contract were reshaping political thought. She applied those same arguments to the institution of marriage, exposing how the language of freedom excluded women entirely.

English philosopher and proto-feminist writer who argued for women's education and rational equality nearly a century before Wollstonecraft. Her 1694 work A Serious Proposal to the Ladies advocated for women's colleges and challenged the assumption that women were intellectually inferior.