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it could only be as a result of their lack of educational and social
opportunities for improving their minds .
Considerable ingenuity was spent reinterpreting the assumed
mysogyny of the Bible . Mary Astell demonstrated that St. Paul in
crucial passages was arguing not literally but allegorically , yet beneath
the sophistication of her own argument there is a simple appeal to the
new commonsensical aspect of reason: " For the Earthly
Adam 's
being
Form 'd
before
Eve ,
seems as little to prove her Natural Subjection
to
him, as the Living Creatures, Fishes, Birds and Beasts being Form'd
before them both , proves that Mankind must be subject to these
Animals ."
The feminists ask for the equal status that they insist any reason–
able person must grant they should have by right of all the professed
values of the society . As the anonymous author of "An Essay in
Defence of the Female Sex" writes in her dedication to Princess Ann of
Denmark : "I have only endeavour' d to reduce the Sexes to a Level, and
by Arguments to raise Ours to an Equality at the most with Men. " The
arguments for equality are still valid in all democratic societies and few
of these feminist demands for equRI rights (mainly to education and
professional employment) have been adequately met . But the de–
mands for equality are permeated with something more radical still.
I will select three aspects of the seventeenth-century feminists '
arguments that make it clear this was the beginning of political
feminism: first, in rejecting women as naturally different from men
they are forced to define women as a distinct
social
group with its own
socially defined characteristics; second, as a result of this they see that
men
as a social group
oppress women as a social group-they are not
against men as such but against the social power of men , women 's
oppression as they put it being due to' 'the Usurpation ofMen , and the
Tyranny ofCustom " ; and finally , while they want to be let into men 's
privileged sphere they also want men to learn something from women ;
though they wouldn't have used exactly these terms the feminization
of men is as important as the masculinization of women- they do not
undervalue female powers only their abuse. In the quotation from the
anonymous author that I have just cited we should note that there are
two clauses: she wants to be equal to men
and
her arguments have
endeavored "to reduce the Sexes to a LeveL" There is a current
Chinese slogan that says " anything a man can do a woman can do ,
