Different Scholarly Interpretations of Mary Wollstonecraft's Gendered Rhetoric in her A Vindication of the Rights of Men Boglarka Toth College

Considering the works of her scholars throughout the years, it seems evident that the relevance of Mary Wollstonecraft's pamphlet, A Vindication of the Rights of Men has mostly been overshadowed by her more famous later essay, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, even though the former played a similarly significant part in establishing her role as an eighteenth-century philosopher. Nevertheless, there are still some researchers who eventually began to turn serious attention towards the Rights of Men in their comprehensive studies on Wollstonecraft's writings, and found a common ground on which this political essay can be thoroughly examined: the notable rhetoric she used in constructing her reply to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France.

In her 1992 book, A Vindication of Political Virtue: The Political Theory of Mary Wollstonecraft, Virginia Sapiro dedicates the bigger part of a chapter to analysing Wollstonecraft's work from a political standpoint, revealing how her deliberate choice of tone and words prove her awareness and utilisation of not just the politics of language, but also of Burke's own style. More than twenty years later, with her article 'Effeminate Edmund Burke and the Masculine Voice of Mary...