Mary Wollstonecraft - A Vindication of the Rights of Men, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution (Oxford World’s Classics)

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A VINDICATION OF THE RIGHTS OF MEN
AND
A VINDICATION OF THE RIGHTS OF WOMAN

MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT was born in 1759 and suffered a peripatetic childhood following an increasingly impecunious and drunken father. Fuelled by indignation at the inequality of treatment of herself and the eldest son, she left home to follow the few occupations open to a lady: as companion, schoolteacher, and governess. Her great break came when she was employed as assistant and reviewer for the radical publisher Joseph Johnson in London through whom she met such thinkers as Thomas Paine, Henry Fuseli, William Godwin, and William Blake. Excited by the possibilities of the French Revolution, she entered the propaganda war in England and within a short time wrote both A Vindication of the Rights of Men and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, arguing the rights of all people to education and consideration. Over the next years she struggled with the problems of trying to be an independent woman despite a conditioning in dependence. In France she entered an ultimately unhappy relationship with Gilbert Imlay and bore a daughter. During this time she wrote her history of the early French Revolution trying to come to terms with the violence and cruelty she had witnessed. In the last year of her life she married Godwin; she died following childbirth a few months later.

Godwins Memoirs of his wife was frank about Wollstonecrafts illegitimate child and suicide attempts and in the public mind welded her emotional romantic life onto the stern nationalist philosophy of the two Vindications.

JANET TODD is a Professor of English at the University of East Anglia. She is the author of several books on eighteenth-century women including Womens Friendship in Literature (1980) and The Sign of Angellica: women, writing, and fiction 16601800 (1989). Her most recent work is Gender, Art and Death (1993) and the first three volumes of the edition of Aphra Behns works.

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MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT

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Editorial material Janet Todd 1993

Hardback published by Pickering and Chatto Ltd. 1993

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First published as a Worlds Classics paperback 1994
Reissued as an Oxford Worlds Classics paperback 1999

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The works published in this volume are all parts of a controversy concerning the French Revolution. All were written between 1790 and 1794, a peculiar period in English culture which, in its richness of theoretical writing and enthusiasm for political discussion, can be compared only with the turbulent mid-seventeenth century. It was a period in which neighbouring France followed seventeenth-century England in trying to act out political and social theories. For its part, the English government, noting the direction of those theories, tried to limit the spread of activity by controlling the dissemination of ideas. The men and women who wrote on socio-political issues in such a context were not the sages of more peaceful periods but engaged polemicists who believed that their ideas might soon be put into practice; they also knew that their publishing might have political and social consequences for their personal lives.

The two works printed here in full, A Vindication of the Rights of Men and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution printed in part, were all reactive and provocative, elements in a series by people who knew or knew of each other; they make points in a debate about a single phenomenon, the French Revolution. When this event had begun in 1789, most liberal-thinking people in England judged it comparable with the English revolution of 1688. If the works here do not breathe this moderate acceptance, it is mainly because, after the publication in 1790 of Burkes vehement and emotional denunciation, Reflections on the Revolution in France, political alignments became both more problematical and more positive. In certain fundamental respects it is possible to see all Wollstonecrafts political works in dialogue with Burkes ideas and rhetorical stance.