“Educational space(s) and female communities in Margaret Cavendish’s The Female Academy and Mary Astell’s A Serious Proposal to the Ladies Part 1”

The essay interrogates the rise of women’s debate on a better access to knowledge in seventeenth century England by focusing on Margaret Cavendish’s A Female Academy (1662) and Mary Astell’s A Serious Proposal to the Ladies Part 1 (1694). I argue that both texts show that Astell and Cavendish perceived education as the means whereby equality between the two sexes, though hard to obtain, could be achieved, also suggesting that women’s critical thinking could better improve only when women are liberated from the influence and presence of men, thus literally separated in an all-female setting. In Cavendish’s and in Mary Astell’s works, despite the evident differences – a female academy for Cavendish and, as we will see, a religious retirement for Astell –, the role of space is of paramount importance since both writers perceive and represent it as physical and symbolic at the same time. I contend that they both understood that to improve women’s education, it was essential not only to envisage the existence of an intellectual all-female community, but to imagine this community located in a specific, thus visible and real, place.