Mary Wollstonecraft · Politics
Before she vindicated the rights of woman, Wollstonecraft vindicated the rights of <em>men</em> - the very first published answer to Burke’s attack on the French Revolution, defending reason and natural rights against reverence for the past.
When Edmund Burke published his Reflections on the Revolution in France in November 1790 - the great conservative attack on the Revolution and on the whole doctrine of abstract natural rights - it provoked a storm of replies, of which Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man became the most famous. But the very first published answer to Burke came not from Paine but from Mary Wollstonecraft, whose A Vindication of the Rights of Men appeared within weeks of Burke’s book, in late 1790, more than a year before her more famous Vindication of the Rights of Woman. It was a remarkable feat: a woman, with no standing in the political establishment, was the first to take up her pen against the most celebrated statesman-philosopher of the age, and to do so with a force and clarity that announced the arrival of a major new voice.
The book was published anonymously in its first edition, and some readers assumed its author must be a man - until the second edition appeared with Wollstonecraft’s name on it, a bold public claim of authorship that itself made a statement. Here was a woman not merely participating in but leading the central political debate of the age, answering Burke before any of the men who would later join the fray. The Rights of Men established Wollstonecraft as a political thinker of the first rank and laid the philosophical foundation - the defense of reason and natural rights against inherited authority and reverence for the past - on which she would build her vindication of women. To understand how she came to write the founding text of feminism, one must begin here, with the woman who was first into the fray against Burke.
At the heart of Wollstonecraft’s quarrel with Burke was a fundamental disagreement about the standard by which institutions should be judged - the same disagreement that divided the whole age into revolutionary and conservative camps. Burke held that the accumulated wisdom of generations, embodied in inherited institutions, customs, and even ‘prejudices,’ deserved a deep presumption of respect, because it encoded the tested experience of the past in ways no individual reasoner could match or replace; he distrusted abstract reason applied to politics and revered what time had established. Wollstonecraft took the opposite view, the radical Enlightenment view: that reason is the only legitimate judge of any institution, that nothing deserves our obedience merely because it is old or established, and that whatever cannot justify itself at the bar of reason and justice has no rightful claim on us, however venerable.
This was not, for Wollstonecraft, a cold or destructive rationalism but a moral demand. She saw Burke’s reverence for the past as a way of shielding injustice from criticism - of defending the privileges of rank and property, the sufferings of the poor, and the subordination of the powerless by wrapping them in the sanctity of tradition and dismissing all challenge as dangerous abstraction. To say that an institution should be respected because it is ancient, she argued, is to say that the injustices of the past should be perpetuated in the present simply because they are old - to make the accident of history into the standard of right. Against this she set the claim that justice is timeless and universal, knowable by reason, and binding regardless of custom: that the question to ask of any institution is not ‘how old is it?’ but ‘is it just?’ And she charged that Burke’s real motive, beneath his eloquence about inherited wisdom, was the defense of existing power and privilege against the just claims of reason - a charge sharpened by her sense that Burke, who had earlier defended American liberty, now defended European reaction. The clash between reason and reverence as the judge of institutions is one of the permanent divisions of political thought, and Wollstonecraft entered it on the side of reason with a directness and moral passion that made her one of its great voices.
The deepest significance of A Vindication of the Rights of Men is that it contained, in embryo, the entire logic that would issue, fourteen months later, in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. In answering Burke, Wollstonecraft worked out and committed herself to a set of principles: that rights belong to all human beings as rational creatures, by nature and not by inheritance; that reason, not custom or rank, is the only legitimate judge of institutions; that inherited privilege and the reverence that protects it are enemies of justice; and that the corruption of character by dependence, luxury, and the substitution of feeling for reason degrades the human being. Each of these principles, developed against Burke’s defense of aristocratic and traditional society, pointed with irresistible logic toward a conclusion Wollstonecraft had not yet drawn but soon would: that these same principles, honestly applied, demanded the rights of women.
For if rights belong to all rational creatures by nature, then they belong to women, who are rational creatures. If reason and not custom is the judge of institutions, then the customary subordination of women must answer to reason, and cannot stand on tradition alone. If inherited privilege is unjust, then the privilege of men over women, inherited and customary as any aristocratic title, is equally suspect. And if the corruption of character by dependence and the cult of feeling is the great moral danger, then the situation of women - kept dependent, trained in sensibility rather than reason - is its clearest case. The move from the Rights of Men to the Rights of Woman was thus not a change of subject but the working-out of a single logic: Wollstonecraft took the radical principles she had deployed against Burke’s defense of aristocratic privilege and turned them upon the subordination of women, recognizing that the case against the tyranny of rank was also, by the same reasoning, the case against the tyranny of sex. Her feminism grew directly out of her democratic radicalism; the woman who first answered Burke in the name of the rights of men went on to demand, in the name of the very same rights, that those rights be extended at last to women. The two Vindications are one continuous argument, and to read the first is to watch the founding logic of feminism take shape in the crucible of the age’s greatest political debate.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Wollstonecraft’s first Vindication answered Burke. In your own words, why did she argue that inherited rank and reverence for the past were enemies of reason and justice?
Leads to Thomas Paine.
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