According to the accepted tradition in Austen's England, women belonged in the private sector. They were wives, mothers, housekeepers, domestic servants and maiden aunts.
According to most of Austen's contemporaries, men and women were naturally different in capacity.

Women were, by nature:

• Soft
• Passive
• Weak (physically and mentally)

• In need of strong guidance throughout their lives.

 

Hence, Miss Taylor is gone and we have only Mrs. Weston and throughout the works we hear references to "Mrs. John" and "Mrs. Charles."
 
This attitude was wonderfully summed up by Sir George Savile, Marquis of Halifax, in his Advice To A Daughter (1688):

This is far before Austen, but according to Lawrence Stone in his THE FAMILY, SEX AND MARRIAGE IN ENGLAND 1500-1800, Lord Halifax's Advice to a Daughter...

was continually republished throughout the eighteenth century, running to seventeen editions in English before 1791...[His counsels are those] of resignation and despair, and yet they were widely read and approved of in aristocratic circles until nearly the end of the eighteenth century.
 

The world ...is somewhat unequal and our sex seemeth to play the tyrant in distinguishing partially for ourselves, by making that in the utmost degree criminal in the woman which in a man passeth under a much gentler censure.

But if in this it lieth under any disadvantage, you are more than recompensed by having the honour of families in your keeping...this power the world hath lodged in you can hardly fail to restrain the severity of an ill husband and to improve the kindness and esteem of a good one. This being so, remember that next to the danger of committing the fault yourself the greatest is that of seeing it in your husband. Do not seem to look or hear that way: if he is a man of sense he will reclaim himself, the folly of it is of itself sufficient to cure him; if he is not so, he will be provoked but not reformed. To expostulate in these cases looketh like declaring war, and preparing reprisals, which to a thinking husband would be a dangerous reflection. Besides...such an indecent complaint makes a wife more ridiculous than the injury that provoketh her to it

You must first lay it down for a foundation in general, that there is inequality in the sexes, and that for the better economy of the world the men, who were to be the lawgivers, had the larger share of reason bestowed upon them; by which means your sex is the better prepared for the compliance that is necessary for the better performance of those duties which seem to be most properly assigned to it. This looks a little uncourtly at the first appearance, but upon examination it will be found that Nature is so far from being unjust to you that she is partial on your side...You have more strength in your looks than we have in our laws, and more power by your tears than we have by our arguments.

There was no formal, organized feminist movement at this period, but there were "voices in the wilderness."¨. I've some names to look at: Aphra Behn and Delariviere Manley, also Catherine Trotter, and Elisabeth Elsob (a linguist).  But here I want to point out

Two major voices in opposition

Mary Astell¡Xabout 100 years earlier than Austen

An influential writer who argued for allowing women to join "colleges" that were separated from men (more like a Roman Catholic convent but Anglican in nature) in order for them to be educated in the same materials as men.

Although she's much earlier than Austen, her ideas hadn't gone away.

Mary Wollstonecraft

Her The Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) complemented as well as challenged Paine¡¦s Vindication of the Rights of Men (1791). She wanted women to be free to have careers (hence be educated) and wanted to do away with marriage, which she saw as legalized prostitution. She saw women as whole beings, uniting the qualities society saw as polarized: rationality and feeling, career and motherhood.

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Austen herself was very well read, but we don't have any proof she read these to writers. But going through a list of the allusions to other authors sprinkled throughout her own writings¡Xletters and poetry included¡Xone is struck with the volume of her reading. She appeared well-versed in the novelists of her time (and slightly beforehand) including Richardson, Defoe, Inchbald, Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth as well as the more popular poets Cowper, Byron, Scott. There are a number of plays included, mostly from the Restoration period and the 18^th century, but of course Shakespeare (whom, she says, is "a part of an Englishman's constitution" in Mansfield Park.) She has a good sprinkling of contemporary history as well. Not surprising, there are a number of references to Samuel Johnson. One can see his rational writing appealing to Austen.
 

Who are the good women in Austen?   Jane Bennett  Elizabeth Bennet  Emma Woodhouse (she grows to it with the help of those around her)  Jane Fairfax  Fanny Price  Elinor Dashwood  Anne Elliot	The "bad"   women in Austen?   Mrs. Bennett  Lydia Bennett  Marianne Dashwood  Elizabeth Eliot  Mary Crawford  Mrs. Norris  Maria Bertram  Mrs. Dashwood  Lady Bertram
Who are basically useless?   Lady Middleton  Mrs. Palmer  Fanny Dashwood (Mrs. John)  Mary Musgrove  Julia Bertram  Harriet Smith  Isabella Knightley	There's hope!   (younger women who are able to go under the guidance of an elder sister/husband)  Mary and Catherine Bennett  Henrietta and Louisa Musgrove

At first glance:

There is no answer!

Austen was of course, a woman of her time, who definitely saw women as living in a different sphere from men. We see Anne Elliot agreeing that there is a difference between men and women. But she wanted to see women develop themselves to their fullest ability, and not become the silly creatures that Wollstonecraft describes in her writings.
 

"We never can expect to prove anything upon such a point [the differences between the sexes]. It is a difference of opinion which does not admit proof. We each begin probably with a little bias towards our own sex, and upon that bias build every circumstance in favor of it which has occurred within our own circle."¨
 --  From Persuasion.
 

Persuasion is a unique book in many ways. But it is her last book, and I think her most vocal statement on the nature of women. Maybe because Anne Elliot is older than most Austen heroines (she's 27).
 
We see a rejection of male values:

In a pivotal scene in Persuasion we see Anne Elliot and Captain Harding discussing the nature of women and men, and Harding offers to bring in authors from the past as authorities, and he notes, before she can, "perhaps you will say, these were all written by men."
  ¨

"Perhaps I shall -- Yes, yes, if you please, no references to examples in books. Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything."

In Persuasion we see an admirable woman who openly states the case that women are strong rational creatures. This is Mrs. Croft, who has spent much of her married life living aboard ships with her husband. When her brother, Capt. Wentworth, makes some idle remarks about women being too genteel for on board ship, she roundly argues with him in front of company. First she tells him that he's talking idly then she goes on with:
 

"But I hate to hear you talking so, like a fine gentleman, and as if women were all fine ladies, instead of rational creatures. We none of us expect to be in smooth water all our days."
 

While with her husband, she feared nothing and the only time she fancied herself unwell was when she was left on shore with her husband far away.
 

"I lived in perpetual fright at that time, and had all manner of imaginary complaints from not knowing what to do with myself, or when I should hear form him next; but as long as we could be together, nothing ever ailed me, and I never met with the smallest inconvenience."
 
 

Austen doesn't say much about women's formal education, but women exhibit intellectual persuits.

The "good" women are well read and accomplished, and their accomplishments are the external manifestation of internal development:

• Emma acknowleges that Jane Fairfax is the better pianist, but she doesn't like to dwell on it since she is basically jealous of her. Emma knows her own shortcomings, which is why we can put her in the "good woman" category.

• Anne Elliot speaks Italian

• Elinor Dashwood painting

• Lady Middleton in Sense and Sensibility "had celebrated her marriage by giving up music, although by her mother's account she had played extremely well, and by her own was very fond of it",

• And Mrs. Elton in Emma fears that her musical skills will deteriorate as have those of several married women she knows.

In Pride and Prejudice, Darcy makes the remark that besides the accomplishments, a woman "must yet add something more substantial, in the improvement of her mind by extensive reading".

And Austen makes fun of the opposite opinion in Northanger Abbey with her mock-editorial comment (on Catherine Morland during the walk from Bath to Beechen Cliff) that:
 

"Where people wish to attach [others to them], they should always be ignorant. To come with a well-informed mind is to come with an inability of administering to the vanity of others which a sensible person would always wish to avoid. A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.

The advantages of folly in a beautiful girl have already been set forth by the capital pen of a sister author [Fanny Burney in Camilla]; -- and to her treatment of the subject I will only add in justice to men, that though to the larger and more trifling part of the sex, imbecility in females is a great enhancement of their personal charms, there is a portion of them too reasonable and too well-informed themselves to desire anything more in woman than ignorance."
 

She was heartily ashamed of her ignorance. A misplaced shame. Where people wish to attach, they should always be ignorant. To come with a well-informed mind is to come with an inability of administering to the vanity of others, which a sensible person would always wish to avoid. A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.