 Until the 1970s, the Rights of Men was typically considered disorganized, incoherent, illogical, and redolent with ad hominem attacks (such as the suggestion that Burke would have promoted the crucifixion of Christ if he were a Jew). It had been touted as an example of "feminine" emotion tilting at "masculine" reason. However, since the 1970s scholars have challenged this view, arguing that Wollstonecraft employed 18th-century modes of writing, such as the digression, to great rhetorical effect. More importantly, as scholar Mitzi Myers argues, "Wollstonecraft is virtually alone among those who answered Burke in eschewing a narrowly political approach for a wide-ranging critique of the foundation of the Reflections." Wollstonecraft makes a primarily moral argument; her "polemic is not a confutation of Burke's political theories, but an exposure of the cruel inequities which those theories presuppose." Wollstonecraft's style was also a deliberate choice, enabling her to respond to Burke's Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful as well as to Reflections.
