ABSTRACT
Mary Astell's 'progressive' thinking about gender has long been understood to arise in part from her grafting of a philosophical modernity onto her High Church Tory and Platonized Anglicanism. She used not only her education proposal but also, scattered throughout her work, her aggressive wit, to ridicule gender asymmetry in which women were customarily trained. The rejection of equity manifested in Astell's works emerges, from her commitment to a vision of the Church of England, which articulated provisionally in Some Reflections upon Marriage, would reach its fullest articulation in her Christian Religion. In order to argue that an essential framework for her thinking is to be found in opposition between law and equity, she takes as an interpreter of Biblical material, a liberty characteristic of equity rather than law. Interpretive liberty might also be said to characterize Astell's strategy in A Fair Way with the Dissenters, where she argues not only against occasional conformity but against all religious dissent.
