wollstonecraft a vindication of the rights of men

The Rights of Men was Wollstonecraft's first overtly political work, as well as her first feminist work as Wollstonecraft scholar Claudia L.Johnson contends, 'it seems that in the act of writing the later portions of Rights of Men she discovered the subject that would preoccupy her for the rest of her career.' It was this text that made her a well-known writer. Influenced by Enlightenment thinkers, she believed in progress and derides Burke for relying on tradition and custom.

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. Wollstonecraft was unique in her attack on Burke's gendered language. Wollstonecraft attacked not only monarchy and hereditary privilege but also the language that Burke used to defend and elevate it. Hers was the first response in a pamphlet war that subsequently became known as the Revolution Controversy, in which Thomas Paine's Rights of Man (1792) became the rallying cry for reformers and radicals. It was published in response to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), which was a defence of constitutional monarchy, aristocracy, and the Church of England, and an attack on Wollstonecraft's friend, the Rev Richard Price.

Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) attacks aristocracy and advocates republicanism. LibriVox recording of Vindication Of The Rights Of Men, In A Letter To The Right Honourable Edmund Burke Occasioned By His Reflections On The Revolution In France by Mary Wollstonecraft.

Wollstonecraft a vindication of the rights of men