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distinct sociological group and one that was completely excluded from
the tenets and principles of the new society . The seventeenth-century
feminists were middle-class women who argued their case in explicit
relation to the massive change in society that came about with the end
of feudalism and the beginning of capitalism. As the new bourgeois
man held the torch up against absolutist tyranny and argued for
freedom and equality , the new bourgeois woman wondered why she
was being left out .
Writing on marriage in the year seventeen hundred , Mary Astell
asked :
and:
If Absolute Sovereignty be not necessary in a State how comes it to
be so in a Family? or if in a Family why not in a State ; since no
reason can be alleg'd for the one that will not hold more strongly
for the other,
if
a/I Men are born free,
how is it that all Women are born slaves?
As they must be if the being subjected
to
the
inconstant, un–
certain, unknown, arbitrary WzJI
of Men , be the perfect Condition
of Slavery?
How could men proclaim social change and a new equality in the
eyes of the Lord and consistently ignore one half of the population ?
It
is
to
the values of the revolutionary society and against those of the old
that the feminists appealed. The old society was represented by
arbitrary rule, superstition, irrational custom, and pointless pedantry
of argument. More problematic were the continued use of two other–
wise rightly respected sources-Aristotle and the Bible .
Aristotle 's contribution to the debate on the starus of women can
be summarized by his comment : " . . . and woman is, as it were, an
impotent male, for it is through a certain incapacity that the female is
female . ' , The arguments the women made against this were organized
around a thorough refutation of any
natural
inferiority : there was no
physical, " bodily " difference in men 's and women 's minds (it was left
to
the nineteenth century to try and prove there was a physiological,
racial and sexual defect here) . The power of reason was the mark of
mankind's superiority over the beasts. If women were deficient in this
