that women are quite capable of learning if only men will not put hindrances in their way. Even so the girls’ curriculum of her day does not seem to have been as meagre as is often assumed. She tells us that when the boys go to grammar schools the girls are sent ‘to boarding-schools or other places to learn needlework, dancing, singing, music, drawing, painting, and other accomplishments ... and French, which is now very fashionable.’ This description which would almost have served at the beginning of our own century, is not as gloomy as Defoe’s, written at about the same time. Girls, he tells us, learned ‘to stitch and sew and make baubles. They are taught to read indeed, and perhaps to write their names or so, and this is the height of a woman’s education.’[5] Both agree in condemning its narrowness. Defoe cannot believe that ‘God Almighty ever made them such glorious creatures, and furnished them with such charms, so agreeable and delightful to mankind, with souls capable of the same accomplishment with men, and all to be only stewards of our houses, cooks, and slaves.’ Mary Astell maintains that ‘according to the rate that young women are educated, according to the way their time is spent, they are destined to folly and impertinence, to say no worse.’ She protests, as Mrs. Makins had done before her,[6] against the new fashion of ignorant women, and implores her sisters to help bring back the good old times, and take a lesson from the ladies of the previous century. Both Defoe and Mary Astell recommend the same project, the establishment of women’s colleges, thus anticipating our own times by more than a century and a half. Defoe’s colleges would have been superior boarding-schools, one in every county and about ten for the city of London; Mary Astell’s plan was to combine religious and intellectual aims. She contemplated ‘a seminary to stock the kingdom with pious and prudent ladies, whose good example, it is to be hoped, will so influence the rest of their sex, that women may no longer pass for those little, useless, and impertinent animals which the ill conduct of too many has caused them to be mistaken for.’[7] But it must also try to ‘expel that cloud of ignorance which custom has involved us in, to furnish our minds with a stock of solid and useful knowledge, that the souls of women may no longer be the only unadorned and neglected things.’ Nothing came of either project; they belong to the domain of unfulfilled dreams.