What if the Door Was Never the Point? Astell, Cavendish, and the Making of Women’s Intellectual Worlds
By Rena Ryu, WWP Research Fellow When the architecture of knowledge is gendered, gaining access to knowledge is not necessarily considered the same as gaining intellectual authority. Many historical examples show that a woman can enter a space of learning and still be expected to bow her head to its rules, hierarchies, and definitions of “legitimate” knowledge. Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World (1666) and Mary Astell’s A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694) dually confront this problem, but they imagine…