- Lived:
- 1666–1731 · Newcastle upon Tyne, then Chelsea, London
- Tradition:
- English early-modern rationalism — Cartesian metaphysics turned into the first systematic feminist philosophy in English, by a High-Church Tory
- The Big Idea:
- Minds have no sex. Women's "inferiority" is manufactured by custom and bad education — and any man who preaches liberty in the state while ruling like an absolute monarch at home has contradicted himself.
- In their words:
- "If all Men are born free, how is it that all Women are born Slaves?"
- If you remember one thing:
- The most radical question ever asked about marriage in English came from a poor, pious, fiercely conservative spinster who defended kings and bishops with one hand and demolished male supremacy with the other.