A penniless gentlewoman with an epic intellect, Mary Astell astounded the literati in 1694 when she wrote a ground-breaking feminist pamphlet entitled A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, which put forward the radical concept of a women’s college a good 200 years before such a thing came to pass.

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Her powerful polemics inspired the women who read them to value their minds and to look beyond marriage and motherhood as the sum total of their worth. Her rational, coherent arguments that women were the intellectual equal of men earned her a place in history as the first English feminist.