The Clash of Gendered Referents in Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men

Abstract

Whenever critics talk about Mary Wollstonecraft’s commitment to feminism, they very often turn to her A vindication of the rights of woman for illustration. Her A vindication of the rights of men is rarely referred to in this regard, though it constitutes the conceptual basis of her later reflection on gender power relationships. Taking its bearings from Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1999) dialogic theory of discourse and the sociological theorization of space developed by Jurgen Habermas (2010) in his The structural transformation of the public Sphere , this paper argues that A vindication of the rights of men , much more than its sequel A vindication of the rights of woman is the one discursive space wherein Wollstonecraft clashes with the best male brains of her time (Burke, Rousseau, etc). The clashes concerned include, though not entirely confined to British constitutional history, the bourgeois family, aesthetics, and the impact of civilization on the shaping of the new society heralded by the French Revolution.