  Whatever the remaining legacy of Cartesian women in France, Astell remains an important interpreter and proponent of Descartes’s epistemological method, a method she explicitly endorses as the basis for supporting the education of, and philosophical inquiry by, women. In her two-part 1694 and 1697 A Serious Proposal to the Ladies: Wherein a Method is offer’d for the Improvement of their Minds, Astell urges that meditation (in Descartes’s sense of that term) avails itself to all who apply themselves to it with dedication. She admits that those (women or labourers, for instance) whose circumstances do not permit them to contemplate truth may at first find such contemplation unfruitful. However, she proposes reading, discoursing, and serious meditation as remedies to this situation. While Astell rejects the view that some people’s embodiment make them more suited for practical than intellectual pursuits, she acknowledges that some reasoners’ animal spirits may incline them to volatility of thought; she therefore counsels reasoners to withdraw their minds from their bodies and the material world. Alice Sowaal identifies in Astell three central rationalist themes: “an emphasis of the mind over the body; a theory of innate ideas as the origin of knowledge; and a methodology that leads the novice from confusion to clarity” (Sowaal). Astell bolsters her Cartesian method with a theological argument that God would not create naturally defective rational beings, and hence that all human beings are capable of rational thought. If women are at first unable to reason well, it is the result of their circumstances and not their nature, she argues. Astell thus both draws on Descartes and anticipates Wollstonecraft.