- Lived:
- 1659–1708 · Cambridge, London, and the manor of Oates in Essex, England
- Tradition:
- English early modern philosophy — a Cambridge Platonist's daughter armed with Locke's empiricism
- The Big Idea:
- Virtue requires understanding — you cannot reliably do right if you've never been taught the reasons for right — and a society that deliberately starves women's reason therefore corrupts its own morals at the source.
- In their words:
- "Women have Souls to be sav'd as well as Men."
- If you remember one thing:
- From a country house in Essex, a woman with failing eyesight and no university behind her published two books of philosophy, hosted John Locke for the last thirteen years of his life, and made Leibniz defend his entire system by post — and for two centuries her books were filed under a man's name.