Mary Wollstonecraft at Notre Dame

September-December 2024 | Wollstonecraft: Revolution & Textual Evidence

Against Edmund Burke’s contention that the French Revolution was a “monstrous tragi-comic scene,” Mary Wollstonecraft hastily composed a defense in the pamphlet A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790). Her work quickly went into second edition, where she tinkered with her language and rhetorical strategy. Several years later, the same editorial mindset is evident in Wollstonecraft’s original and revised A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, where she brings women’s rights into the larger discussion of civil rights. The Hesburgh Libraries recently acquired multiple early editions of Wollstonecraft’s work, which bear witness to her thought process as she works out and reworks her early feminist philosophy.

This spotlight is curated by Daniel Johnson (English; Digital Humanities; and FTT Librarian).