Poverty and the Limits of Tradition

Burke's argument depends on the reverence due to ancient institutions — the common law, the church, the hereditary constitution. Wollstonecraft reads these institutions from the bottom: what do they look like to those they impoverish and press into service? The penal law that punishes the starving thief with death while permitting the rich to expropriate the poor with impunity is venerable in Burke's sense — it is old. But age is not justice.

Wollstonecraft offers a counter-history of civilization: what looks like the gradual refinement of manners and institutions is, from another angle, the story of the strong gaining riches and the few sacrificing the many to their vices. The civilization Burke celebrates is partial — it has extended its benefits to the propertied while leaving the propertyless to be swept off by press gangs and executed for theft.

Burke's sentimentalism is selectively activated — it moves for the queen of France but not for the pressed sailor; for the ancient constitution but not for the peasant stripped of his strip of land. Wollstonecraft demands a sympathy that extends to the poor and the powerless — not the literary sympathy of someone who finds distress aesthetically interesting, but the moral sympathy of someone who recognises in the poor wretch a rational creature with the same birthright as any peer of the realm.

The critique of poverty under the old regime runs through the middle sections of the Rights of Men. Wollstonecraft's concern for the poor anticipates the radical reform tradition of the 1790s and connects her early political work to the feminism of the Vindication.