Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) attacks aristocracy and advocates republicanism. 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. 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. Wollstonecraft attacked not only monarchy and hereditary privilege but also the language that Burke used to defend and elevate it. Wollstonecraft was unique in her attack on Burke's gendered language. 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. Influenced by Enlightenment thinkers, she believed in progress and derides Burke for relying on tradition and custom. She argues for rationality. 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.
Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) est une philosophe, écrivaine et féministe britannique, considérée comme l’une des pionnières du mouvement pour les droits des femmes. Issue d’un milieu modeste, elle travaille comme gouvernante, enseignante et traductrice avant de s’imposer comme une figure majeure des Lumières. Son œuvre la plus célèbre, *A Vindication of the Rights of Woman* (1792), pose les bases d’une réflexion sur l’égalité entre les sexes et l’accès des femmes à l’éducation et à la raison. Sa vie, marquée par des engagements radicaux et des choix personnels audacieux, a souvent éclipsé son héritage intellectuel, pourtant fondateur pour les féminismes ultérieurs.
