ABSTRACT
Mary Wollstonecraft was an eighteenth-century English political theorist who is most well known for two political pamphlets, both of which were published in the single most significant public intellectual debate around the French Revolution in Britain (Cobban 1950). Commonly known as the Revolution Controversy, this debate began with Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) to which Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) was the first reply. Rights of Men set the tone for the republican defense of the rights of men against hereditary monarchical rule, leading the outpour of pamphlets that followed it. First published anonymously at an historical moment when women did not take up their pens to write political disquisitions, Rights of Men was assumed to have been written by a male author. The immediate widespread warm reception to this first Vindication allowed Wollstonecraft, in a second edition, to disclose her own name as author and, with that, the fact that she was a woman (Gunther-Canada 2001). Though it was eventually overshadowed by Thomas Paine’s reply to Burke with his own Rights of Man (1791–1792), the initial enthusiastic response to Wollstonecraft’s Rights of Men created the conditions in which Wollstonecraft might have a place at the center of political debate in order, for the first time in history, to 248publish a book-length figuration and defense of the rights of women to participate in republican political community. With the publication of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Wollstonecraft broke out of the domesticating mold that constrained women and prevented them from publicly participating in mainstream political debate in order to claim her rights to citizenship. Although she could not have known it at the time, it was precisely in this sense that Wollstonecraft met the prediction that she had made in a letter to her youngest sister that she would be “the first of a new genus” (Wardle 1979, 164).
