January 15, 2025

This is my first blog post about the process of editing Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Men (hereafter, VRM) for Oxford University Press's 6-volume standard edition of her works (editor-in-chief, Emma Clery, Uppsala; volume editor and NEH Scholarly Editions collaborator, Nancy Johnson, SUNY-New Paltz). 

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As I was preparing a sample text for Nancy and our NEH-funded graduate RA, Rachel Lentz (Notre Dame) to review, I noticed a philosophically significant textual variant between Wollstonecraft's anonymous 1st edn. of VRM (published by 25-27 Nov. 1790) and her heavily revised 2nd edn. (published by 14-16 Dec. 1790) which featured her name on the title page. As the political theorist Wendy Gunther-Canada noted (2001), the revelation of the author's name was significant because it also revealed her gender.  In the London newspapers, around the time of the publication of  the 1st edn. of VRM, rumors had quickly circulated that "the ladies" were rising up to write defenses of the "rights of man" against Edmund Burke's anti-revolutionary Reflections on the Revolution in France (published on 1 November 1790) (see Hunt Botting, 2021). By revealing her name in the 2nd edn., Wollstonecraft claimed her right to be known as the first author of a book-length response to the Reflections. Catharine Macaulay's Observations on Burke's Reflections had appeared a few days after the 1st edn. of VRM. 

On page 4 of the 1st edn. (see screenshot above),  the anonymous Wollstonecraft represented "Reason" with a capital "R" to signify its importance and used the pronoun "she" to assign a feminine gender to this godlike faculty of the human mind. Wollstonecraft  wryly observed that Burke, as a man and a Member of Parliament, was overpowered by "unrestrained feelings" rather than allowing the feminine power of "Reason" to govern his analysis of the revolutionary political events unfolding in France.  

To see how she changed the argument by changing her pronouns, turn to the next screenshot from the 2nd edn. 

In the 2nd. edition of VRM, at the top of the same page (4), the no longer anonymous woman author Wollstonecraft changed the word "reason" to lower case and the gender of the pronouns referring to it. The rhetorical effect was to render more subtle the gendered word-play of her critique of Burke's over-emotional response to the French Revolution, while enhancing its philosophical consistency with the overall argument of her book. 

First, she demoted the status of "reason" in the sentence by using a lower case "r" and assigning it a masculine pronoun to make it refer "only" to Burke's limited use of the power of "reason"—as in, "his reason".

Second, she replaced the feminine pronoun "she" with the gender neutral pronoun "it" to clarify that "reason" was a  universal human mental capacity, not a special feminine capacity of the mind, which women somehow had more capability to exercise than men. In other words, Burke—as a man—had as much capability as her—as a woman—to use reason to soberly judge the circumstances in France, but he had elected to follow his "feelings" instead. 

Why did Wollstonecraft make these linguistic changes in her representation of the relationship of reason and gender in her reply to Burke? It would seem that she was keenly aware of how the revelation of her gender on the title page of VRM would change the way that readers responded to the book. Indeed, a number of readers commented that they had not suspected that a woman had written VRM, but found themselves impressed  by Wollstonecraft's force of intellect and witty deconstruction of Burke's prejudicial arguments on rights, manners, women, manliness, and chivalry. One of these readers was Catharine Macaulay, one of the leading English political historians of the era.

By making her arguments about gender and reason more subtle and consistent with her philosophical view—stated later in VRM—that the "cold arguments of reason...give no sex to virtue", Wollstonecraft elevated her claim to fame as the first writer (and, coincidentally, "lady") to systematically challenge Burke's Reflections in a published book, while reinforcing her (and other women's) growing authority in the men-dominated field of English political prose.

This is just one example of why tracking textual variants across the two VRM editions published in the author's lifetime matters for understanding the evolution of Wollstonecraft's critique of Burke and her self-representation as a woman political thinker. This OUP edition will be the first to offer a comprehensive account of the VRM's textual variants and their significance.

References

Botting, Eileen Hunt (2021). "Wollstonecraft in Jamaica: the international reception of A Vindication of the Rights of Men in the Kingston Daily Advertiser in 1791." History of European Ideas, 47 (8), 1304–1314. https://doi.org/10.1080/01916599.2021.1898434

Gunther-Canada, Wendy (2001), Rebel Writer: Mary Wollstonecraft and Enlightenment Politics (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press).