The Rights of Men was successful, its price contributing in no small measure: at one shilling and sixpence it was half the price of Burke's book.[49] After the first edition sold out, Wollstonecraft agreed to have her name printed on the title page of the second. It was her first extensive work as "a self-supporting professional and self-proclaimed intellectual", as scholar Mary Poovey writes, and:
took the form that most people would have considered the least appropriate for a woman—the political disquisition. Requiring knowledge of government (in which women had no share), analytical ability (of which women theoretically had little), and the ambition to participate directly in contemporary events (of which women were supposed to have none), political disquisition was in every sense a masculine domain.[70]
Commentaries from the time note this; Horace Walpole, for example, called her a "hyena in petticoats" for attacking Marie Antoinette. William Godwin, her future husband, described the book as illogical and ungrammatical; in his Memoirs of Wollstonecraft, he dedicated only a paragraph to a discussion of the content of the work, calling it "intemperate".[71]
All the major periodicals of the day reviewed the Rights of Men. The Analytical Review agreed with Wollstonecraft's arguments and praised her "lively and animated remarks".[72] The Monthly Review was also sympathetic, but it pointed out faults in her writing. The Critical Review, the "sworn foe" of the Analytical Review,[72] however, wrote in December 1790, after discovering that the author was a woman:
It has been observed in an old play, that minds have no sex; and in truth we did not discover this Defender of the Rights of Man to be a Woman. The second edition, however, which often reveals secrets, has attributed this pamphlet to Mrs. Wollstonecraft, and if she assumes the disguise of a man, she must not be surprised that she is not treated with the civility and respect that she would have received in her own person. As the article was written before we saw the second edition, we have presented an acknowledgement of this kind to the necessary alterations. It would not have been sufficient to have corrected merely verbal errors: a Lady should have been addressed with more respect. [emphasis in original][73]
The Gentleman's Magazine followed suit, criticizing the book's logic and "its absurd presumption that men will be happier if free", as well as Wollstonecraft's own presumption in writing on topics outside of her proper domain, commenting "the rights of men asserted by a fair lady! The age of chivalry cannot be over, or the sexes have changed their ground."[74] However, the Rights of Men put Wollstonecraft on the map as a writer; from this point forward in her career, she was well known.[75]
Wollstonecraft sent a copy of the book to the historian Catharine Macaulay, whom she greatly admired. Macaulay wrote back that she was "still more highly pleased that this publication which I have so greatly admired from its pathos & sentiment should have been written by a woman and thus to see my opinion of the powers and talents of the sex in your pen so early verified."[76] William Roscoe, a Liverpool lawyer, writer, and patron of the arts, liked the book so much that he included Wollstonecraft in his satirical poem The Life, Death, and Wonderful Achievements of Edmund Burke:
Liberty Leading the People by Eugène Delacroix (1833)And lo! an amazon stept out, One WOLLSTONECRAFT her name, Resolv'd to stop his mad career, Whatever chance became.[77]
While most of the early reviewers of the Rights of Men, as well as most of Wollstonecraft's early biographers, criticized the work's emotionalism, and juxtaposed it with Burke's masterpiece of logic, there has been a recent re-evaluation of her text. Since the 1970s, critics who have looked more closely at both her work and Burke's, have come to the conclusion that they share many rhetorical similarities, and that the masculine/logic and feminine/emotion binaries are unsupportable.[78] Most Wollstonecraft scholars now recognize it was this work that radicalized Wollstonecraft and directed her future writings, particularly A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. It is not until after the halfway point of Rights of Men that she begins the dissection of Burke's gendered aesthetic; as Claudia Johnson contends, "it seems that in the act of writing the later portions of Rights of Men she discovered the subject that would preoccupy her for the rest of her career."[28]
Two years later, when Wollstonecraft published the Rights of Woman, she extended many of the arguments she had begun in Rights of Men. If all people should be judged on their merits, she wrote, women should be included in that group.[79] In both texts, Wollstonecraft emphasizes that the virtue of the British nation is dependent on the virtue of its people. To a great extent, she collapses the distinction between private and public and demands that all educated citizens be offered the chance to participate in the public sphere.[51]
