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 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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