Daniel Defoe An Essay On Projects

She has worked as a college composition instructor and ESL tutor.She holds a Master of Arts in English from Mills College in Oakland.

She has worked as a college composition instructor and ESL tutor.She holds a Master of Arts in English from Mills College in Oakland.

Defoe anticipates 19th-century pro-feminist arguments by the likes of John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor when he points out that sexist stereotypes act as self-fulfilling prophecies.

He proposes that the justification for denying women education — their supposed intellectual inferiority — is actually a result of denying women education.

He goes on to write that women are a gift from God and therefore denying them education is an act of almost blasphemous ingratitude.

Defoe’s argument is not formally theological; it invokes religion for rhetorical flair.

Defoe uses religious references to establish his own credibility and moral high ground.

He states that God made women capable of learning and that none of God’s creation is unnecessary.Daniel Defoe was born Daniel Foe in 1660 in London, the son of a butcher (he began to use “Defoe” more frequently beginning in 1696).Defoe became a merchant but went bankrupt in 1692 and left the world of business in 1703.Defoe mentions women’s souls as evidence of their fundamental equality to men before God — not as items requiring improvement.He recognizes there is a concern that women out and about in the world put their personal safety and virtue at risk, but he deems a school modeled on a nunnery to be oppressive.Even after completing novels, Defoe was regarded with suspicion by some higher-class authors.Perhaps because he suffered from prejudice himself, Defoe dedicated an essay, “Academy for Women,” to promoting educational equality.By presenting himself as advocating God’s will rather than his own, Defoe raises the stakes of the issue in the minds of his Christian readership. If you’re going “to make such a bold assertion, That all the world are mistaken…,” you need some incontestable authority backing you up.Defoe never argues against religion overall, but he does pointedly object to the plan laid out by his contemporary, Mary Astell, who envisioned women’s education taking place in seminaries.(1697) was the first volume published by Daniel Defoe.[1] It begins with a portrait of his time as a "Projecting Age"[2] and subsequently illustrates plans for the economic and social improvement of England,[3] including an early proposal for a national insurance scheme. As the son of a butcher in 17th-century England, he grew up without the advantages of wealth and education that other writers enjoyed.