A Vindication of the Rights of Men is a 1790 political pamphlet,
written by the eighteenth-century British feminist Mary
Wollstonecraft, which attacks aristocracy and advocates republicanism.
Wollstonecraft's was the first response in a pamphlet war sparked by
the publication of Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in
France, a defence of constitutional monarchy, aristocracy, and the
Church of England. Wollstonecraft not only attacked hereditary
privilege but also the rhetoric that Burke used to defend it. Most of
Burke's detractors deplored what they viewed as his theatrical pity
for Marie Antoinette but Wollstonecraft was unique in her attack on
Burke's gendered language. By redefining the sublime and the
beautiful, terms first established by Burke himself in A Philosophical
Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
(1756), she undermined his rhetoric as well as his argument.
Read the rest of this article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Vindication_of_the_Rights_of_Men
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Today's selected anniversaries:
1854:
The Eureka Flag was flown for the first time during the Eureka
Stockade rebellion in Australia.
(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_Flag)
1877:
Thomas Edison demonstrated the phonograph, his invention for
recording and replaying sound, for the first time.
(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/phonograph)
1890:
The Diet of Japan, Japan's bicameral legislature modelled after both
the German Reichstag and the British Westminster system, first met
after the Meiji Constitution went into effect.
(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diet_of_Japan)
1929:
American explorer Richard Evelyn Byrd and three others completed the
first flight over the South Pole.
(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Evelyn_Byrd)
1947:
The United Nations General Assembly voted to approve the Partition
Plan for Palestine, a plan to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict in the
British Mandate of Palestine by separating the territory into Jewish
and Arab states.
(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_General_Assembly_Resolution_181)
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Wiktionary's Word of the day:
precipitate: To make something happen suddenly and quickly; hasten.
(
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/precipitate)
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Wikiquote of the day:
All that is not eternal is eternally out of date. -- C. S. Lewis
(
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/C._S._Lewis)