page_title: A Vindication of the Rights of Men
section_title: Reception and legacy
hierarchical_section_title: A Vindication of the Rights of Men / Reception and legacy
caption_attribution_description: Autograph letter signed by Mary Wollstonecraft to Catharine Macaulay, December 16 or 23, 1790; draft of Macaulay’s reply on verso NYPL, The Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle "In the only known correspondence between Mary Wollstonecraft to Catharine Macaulay Graham, Wollstonecraft wrote that she respected the elder writer “because she contends for laurels whilst most of her sex only seek for flowers.” Wollstonecraft’s letter accompanied her pamphlet vindicating “the rights of men” against the conservative politician Edmund Burke’s eloquent attack on the Revolution. Graham’s reply is drafted on the back of Wollstonecraft’s letter, and apparently she sent her letter to Wollstonecraft along with a copy of an earlier pamphlet intervention of her own contra Burke. The two appear never to have met, however, and Catharine Macaulay Graham died six months later." (New York Public Library)
context_page_description: 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 is a political pamphlet, written by the 18th-century British liberal 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, a defense 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 love of Burke's gendered language. By saying 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, she kept his rhetoric as well as his argument.
context_section_description: The Rights of Men was successful, its price contributing in no small measure: at one shilling and sixpence it was half the price of Burke's book. After the first edition sold out, Wollstonecraft agreed to have her name printed on the title page of the second. It was her first extensive work as "a self-supporting professional and self-proclaimed intellectual", as scholar Mary Poovey writes, and:
  took the form that most people would have considered the least appropriate for a woman—the political disquisition. Requiring knowledge of government (in which women had no share), analytical ability (of which women theoretically had little), and the ambition to participate directly in contemporary events (of which women were supposed to have none), political disquisition was in every sense a masculine domain.
  Commentaries from the time note this; Horace Walpole, for example, called her a "hyena in petticoats" for attacking Marie Antoinette. William Godwin, her future husband, described the book as illogical and ungrammatical; in his Memoirs of Wollstonecraft, he dedicated only a paragraph to a discussion of the content of the work, calling it "intemperate".
  All the major periodicals of the day reviewed the Rights of Men. The Analytical Review agreed with Wollstonecraft's arguments and praised her "lively and animated remarks". The Monthly Review was also sympathetic, but it pointed out faults in her writing. The Critical Review, the "sworn foe" of the  Analytical Review, however, wrote in December 1790, after discovering that the author was a woman:
  It has been observed in an old play, that minds have no sex; and in truth we did not discover this Defender of the Rights of Man to be a Woman. The second edition, however, which often reveals secrets, has attributed this pamphlet to Mrs. Wollstonecraft, and if she assumes the disguise of a man, she must not be surprised that she is not treated with the civility and respect that she would have received in her own person. As the article was written before we saw the second edition, we have presented an acknowledgement of this kind to the necessary alterations. It would not have been sufficient to have corrected merely verbal errors: a Lady should have been addressed with more respect. [emphasis in original]
  The Gentleman's Magazine followed suit, criticizing the book's logic and "its absurd presumption that men will be happier if free", as well as Wollstonecraft's own presumption in writing on topics outside of her proper domain, commenting "the rights of men asserted by a fair lady! The age of chivalry cannot be over, or the sexes have changed their ground." However, the Rights of Men put Wollstonecraft on the map as a writer; from this point forward in her career, she was well known.
  Wollstonecraft sent a copy of the book to the historian Catharine Macaulay, whom she greatly admired. Macaulay wrote back that she was "still more highly pleased that this publication which I have so greatly admired from its pathos & sentiment should have been written by a woman and thus to see my opinion of the powers and talents of the sex in your pen so early verified." William Roscoe, a Liverpool lawyer, writer, and patron of the arts, liked the book so much that he included Wollstonecraft in his satirical poem The Life, Death, and Wonderful Achievements of Edmund Burke:
  And lo! an amazon stept out,
  
    One WOLLSTONECRAFT her name,
  
  Resolv'd to stop his mad career,
  
    Whatever chance became.
  While most of the early reviewers of the Rights of Men, as well as most of Wollstonecraft's early biographers, criticized the work's emotionalism, and juxtaposed it with Burke's masterpiece of logic, there has been a recent re-evaluation of her text. Since the 1970s, critics who have looked more closely at both her work and Burke's, have come to the conclusion that they share many rhetorical similarities, and that the masculine/logic and feminine/emotion binaries are unsupportable. Most Wollstonecraft scholars now recognize it was this work that radicalized Wollstonecraft and directed her future writings, particula
caption: Letter sent by Wollstonecraft to Catharine Macaulay along with a copy of the Rights of Men
exif: {"Image ImageDescription": "This image is the property of The New York Public Library.  For each use, you must contact: \r\rThe New York Public Library, Photographic Services & Permissions, Room 103, 476 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10018; 212-930-0091, fax: 212-930-0533, email: permissions@nypl.org.  \r\rUsing an image from The New York Public Library for publication without payment of use fees and official written permission is strictly prohibited.", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop 7.0", "Image DateTime": "2005:03:29 10:21:36", "Image ExifOffset": "588", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "726", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "4763", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "520", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "613"}