ABSTRACT
The Enlightenment ideals of the French philosophes, of Voltaire, Diderot and Rousseau, opened up a discourse of equality in which women could participate. On Bastille Day, 1789, Mary Wollstonecraft was living alone in London, working as a staff writer for the pro-Jacobin journal The Analytical Review published by Joseph Johnson, and meeting daily with the leading freethinkers of the day. In Joseph Johnson's bookshop she eagerly discussed the progress of the American Revolution and the revolutionary events in France with Thomas Paine, Richard Price, William Godwin, Thomas Holcroft, Thomas Christie, and the painters Fuseli and Blake. Seeing in their demands for liberty and equality against the claims of inherited wealth and aristocratic privilege the possibility for women's liberation as well, she sprang to the defense of Richard Price and Thomas Paine in the pamphlet war concerning the origin of political authority that raged in London in 1790. The war began with Price's heretical speech before the annual meeting of the London Revolution Society in 1789. This anniversary address, historically intended to celebrate the glorious English revolution of 1688, became in Price's hands the opening salvo of a fiery attack on the British monarchy and the established privileges of the English aristocracy. Endorsed by Thomas Paine's Rights of Man (1790), which called upon the common Englishman to throw off the shackles of monarchy as both the Americans and the French were doing, these revolutionary ideas inspired a powerful counterattack from Edmund Burke. His rhetorically inspired defense of the French monarchy, of the hereditary principle of succession, of the necessary alliance between church and state, and of the restriction of political power to men “of permanent property” was published in early November, 1790, as Reflections on the Revolution in France, and on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London, relative to that Event.
