“Nothing but a Union with God”: Queer Religiosity in Mary Astell’s A Serious Proposal to the Ladies

Abstract

Throughout her career, Mary Astell repeatedly exhorted her female readers to abandon secular pursuits and focus on spiritual affairs. Despite popular assumptions that these religious commitments constrained her feminist principles, Astell’s religious ideology is, in fact, the most radical articulation of Astell’s liberatory vision for women. This chapter argues that Astell’s proposed all-female retreat engenders a “queer religiosity” in which women’s relationship with God replaces romantic and sexual connections with men, thus entirely undermining the entrenched cultural impacts of heteropatriarchy and compulsory sexuality.