WOLLSTONECRAFT, Mary.

£9,750 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

A Vindication of the Rights of Men, First edition of the precursor to A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), in which Wollstonecraft disputes the conservative assumptions made in Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). It is bound with the third edition of Burke's tract - published in the same year - along with Joseph Priestley's response.Wollstonecraft's treatise formed the initial response in the tract war triggered by the Reflections. An attack on aristocracy and a defence of republicanism, "it was here that she first recognized how the old regime was held in place by an interlocking system of class and sex subordination naturalized through the practice of male sentimentality … [The pamphlet has a] unique positioning as a feminist as well as radical challenge to the old regime" (Johnson, pp. 25-6).Immediately influential, the anonymous first edition was widely praised and sold out within three weeks of publication. Yet the tide turned when the second edition revealed the author's identity; the work began to be viewed not as political commentary but the over-passionate work of a female writer, in contrast to Burke's restrained "reason". Wollstonecraft responded two years later in her groundbreaking Rights of Woman, in which she extended many of the arguments made here.It is bound with:a) BURKE, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France, and on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London relative to that event, in a Letter intended to ha

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