Then in 1791, Talleyrand presented his Rapport sur l'instruction publique to the French National Assembly and it incited Wollstonecraft to pen this impassioned response defending the Rights of Woman.
One of the key arguments of Wollstonecraft's Rights of Men, published just six weeks after Burke's Reflections and in direct response to it, is that rights cannot be based on tradition, Rights, she argues, should be conferred because they are reasonable and just, regardless of their basis in tradition.
Burke viewed the French revolution as the violent overthrow of a legitimate government and in Reflections he argued that citizens do not have the right to revolt against their government because civilization is the result of social and political consensus its traditions cannot be continually challenged - the result would be anarchy. While they saw the revolution as analogous to Britain's own Glorious Revolution of 1688, Burke argued that the appropriate historical analogy was the English Civil War of 1642-1651 in which Charles I had lost his head. Wollstonecraft first entered this fray in 1790 with A Vindication of the Rights of Men, her response to Burke's Reflection on the Revolution in France (1790) in which he had criticized the many British thinkers who welcomed the early stages of the French Revolution.
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was written against the tumultuous background of the French Revolution and the debates that it had spawned in Britain. 3rd Edition of the Most Revolutionary and Famous Work by a Revolutionary Woman - The Very Beginning of Modern Feminism Published four years after the first edition and with identical printing and pagination. TP + -xiv = Dedication to Talleyrand + xv = Advertisement + -xix = Contents + -452, Octavo.
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