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

_______________________________ 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)

_____________________ Wiktionary's Word of the day:

precipitate: To make something happen suddenly and quickly; hasten. (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/precipitate)

_____________________ 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All that is not eternal is eternally out of date.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)