  In this last respect, Fell and her fellow Quakers anticipate the ideas and arguments of later seventeenth-century feminists, such as Mary Astell and Damaris Masham. These later women build on the basic Protestant insight that a woman’s salvation depends upon herself alone and her own independent capacity for reflection on her beliefs. They call on women to avoid blind obedience to human religious authority and they assert a woman’s capacity to discern moral and religious truths for herself. But their arguments are also based on an egalitarian concept of reason—or the idea that men and women have the same natural capacity for rational judgment—and not the idea that women are spiritually equal to men by virtue of a supernatural light. It is reason, according to Astell and Masham, that is the “Candle of the Lord” in all human beings. They therefore emphasize that in order to attain everlasting happiness through virtue, women must be properly educated in order to improve their rational faculties. In later centuries, these part-secular, part-religious ideas about reason and education would evolve into calls for social and political equality for women.