A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in a Letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke; Occasioned by His Reflections on
the Revolution in France (1790)
This is a political pamphlet, written by the eighteenth-century British feminist Mary
Wollstonecraft, which attacks aristocracy and advocates republicanism. Wollstonecraft's was the first response in a pamphlet
war sparked by the publication of Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), a defence of constitutional
monarchy, aristocracy, and the Church of England.
Wollstonecraft attacked not only hereditary privilege, but also the
rhetoric that Burke used to defend it. Most of Burke's detractors deplored what
they viewed as his theatrical pity for Marie
Antoinette, but Wollstonecraft was unique
in her denunciation of Burke's gendered language. By redefining the sublime and the beautiful, terms first established by Burke himself in A Philosophical Enquiry into the
Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1756), she undermined his rhetoric as well as his argument. In her
first unabashedly feminist critique, which Wollstonecraft scholar Claudia Johnson
describes as unsurpassed in its argumentative force,[1] Wollstonecraft indicts Burke's justification of an unequal society
founded on the passivity of women.
In her arguments for republican virtue, Wollstonecraft invokes an emerging
middle-class ethos in opposition to what she views as the vice-ridden
aristocratic code of manners. Driven by an Enlightenment belief in progress, she derides Burke for relying on tradition and
custom. She describes an idyllic country life in which each family has a farm
sufficient for its needs. Wollstonecraft contrasts her utopian picture of society, drawn with what she claims is genuine feeling, with
Burke's false theatrical tableaux.
The Rights of Men was successful: it was reviewed by every major
periodical of the day and the first edition sold out in three weeks. However,
upon the publication of the second edition (the first to carry Wollstonecraft's
name on the title page), the reviews began to evaluate the text not only as a
political pamphlet but also as the work of a female writer. They contrasted
Wollstonecraft's "passion" with Burke's "reason" and spoke
condescendingly of the text and its female author. This analysis of the Rights
of Men prevailed until the 1970s, when feminist scholars began to
read Wollstonecraft's texts with more care and called attention to their
intellectualism.
URL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Vindication_of_the_Rights_of_Men