ABSTRACT
In 1790 Mary Wollstonecraft published her first political treatise, A Vindication of the Rights of Men. Hastily written, it is Wollstonecraft’s spirited response to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. In his well known treatise Burke argues that legitimate government rests on honored traditions and habits, rather than on individual rights-a notion that had gained philosophical and political currency by the eighteenth century. Wollstonecraft’s answer to Burke’s Reflections came just twenty-eight days after Reflections was published and it was the first of forty-five responses to Burke’s treatise within the first year of its publication. Wollstonecraft’s answer to Burke is often overshadowed by The Rights of Man, written by eighteenthcentury radical luminary, Tom Paine. Yet, one of Wollstonecraft’s most spirited verbal attacks against Burke captured the attention of Wollstonecraft’s contemporaries and has continued to interest scholars today. In what seems to Wollstonecraft to be “empty, rhetorical flourishes,” Burke laments the lowly treatment given to the Queen of France by the market women, who had slogged through the mud in the October rain in order to escort the King and Queen from Versailles to Paris. To Burke, the Queen of France is the epitome of feminine beauty and virtue. To Wollstonecraft, the Queen of France is the epitome of contemptible feminine weakness and vice. In A Vindication of the Rights of Men Wollstonecraft refutes Burke’s characterization of Marie Antoinette, suggesting the Queen is as wretched as the women who made up the vulgar mob. Reminding Burke of his description of the market women as “the furies of hell, in the abused shape of the vilest of women,” Wollstonecraft replies to Burke, “Probably you mean women who gained a livelihood by selling vegetables or fish, who never had had the advantages of education; or their vices might have lost part of their abominable deformity, by losing
part of their grossness. The queen of France-the great and small vulgar, claim our pity; they have almost insuperable obstacles to surmount in their progress towards true dignity of character.”1 This attack on Marie Antoinette is motivated by Wollstonecraft’s belief that woman, as well as man, may aspire to reason and virtue, eschewing the superficial feminine charms, pervasive in Wollstonecraft’s day and seemingly epitomized in the Queen of France.
