A Vindication of the Rights of Men

Mary Wollstonecraft answered Edmund Burke within weeks, and hers was the first substantial reply in print to his defense of the French monarchy and the old order standing behind it. She writes as a letter, hot and unpolished, and goes straight at what Burke had made beautiful: inherited property, inherited rank, the pageantry of a court, all of it resting on people whose poverty he never pauses to look at. She turns his own theory of the sublime against him, noting how readily he weeps for a queen and not for tenants or for the enslaved. The first edition was anonymous; the second carried her name and made her a public figure. Two years later came A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Free PDF and EPUB editions are available for download.