ABSTRACT
Less than a month after the publication of Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, the anonymous A Vindication of the Rights of Men was published.1 Its author, Mary Wollstonecraft (her name appeared on the second edition), had never written a political pamphlet before, although she had reviewed extensively for the Analytical and had herself published a number of works, including a novel, a treatise on female education and a children’s book.2 A Vindication of the Rights of Men was not to have the same impact as Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, which was published the following year, but it was notable as one of the very earliest pamphlets to appear in response to Reflections and the fact that it went to a second edition indicates that it met with some success. It is, of course, also notable in that Wollstonecraft went on to write A Vindication of the Rights of Woman two years later, a text which develops many of the ideas that first appear in A Vindication of the Rights of Men.
