A Vindication of the Rights of Men

Examples of A Vindication of the Rights of Men in the following topics:

• Mary Wollstonecraft

  • Published in response to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), which was a defense of constitutional monarchy, aristocracy, and the Church of England, and an attack on Wollstonecraft's friend, Richard Price, Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) attacks aristocracy and advocates republicanism.
  • A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) is one of the earliest works of feminist philosophy.
  • She claims that men and women are equal in the eyes of God.
  • However, some of them, most notably Marquis de Condorcet, expressed a much more explicit position on the equality of men and women.
  • Despite the controversial topic, the Rights of Woman received favorable reviews and was a great success.

• Introduction to the Enlightenment

  • The ideas of the Enlightenment played a major role in inspiring the French Revolution, which began in 1789 and emphasized the rights of the common men, as opposed to the exclusive rights of the elites.
  • She argued for a society based on reason, and that women, as well as men, should be treated as rational beings.
  • Hobbes also developed some of the fundamentals of European liberal thought: the right of the individual; the natural equality of all men; the artificial character of the political order (which led to the later distinction between civil society and the state); the view that all legitimate political power must be "representative" and based on the consent of the people; and a liberal interpretation of law which leaves people free to do whatever the law does not explicitly forbid.
  • While the philosophy of the Enlightenment was dominated by men, the question of women's rights appeared as one of the most controversial ideas.
  • She is best known for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), in which she argues that women are not naturally inferior to men, but appear to be only because they lack education.

• Women as a Minority

  • Women are considered a minority group, because they do not share the same power, privileges, rights, and opportunities as men.
  • There a number of examples, both historical and contemporary, of women not being granted the same rights and access as men, both historically and in the present day.
  • The existence of a glass ceiling indicates that women, even today, do not enjoy the same opportunities as men.
  • They differ from broader notions of human rights through claims of an inherent historical and traditional bias against the exercise of rights by women and girls in favor of men and boys.
  • The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948, advocates "the equal rights of men and women," and addresses issues of equality.

• Women vs. Men

  • In 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution gave women the right to vote and, today, women vote at similar rates to men.
  • There are a variety of theories that help to explain who votes.
  • A behavioral approach focuses more on the actions of individuals and groups, taking voting as one part of a larger bundle of political activities.
  • For a large part of the history of the United States, women were denied their right to vote.
  • Instead, while they may identify these issues as more important than men, women tend to be split over the correct solutions to a problem.

• Economic Retaliation and Reaction to the Townshend Acts

  • Charles Townshend, Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer, knew that his program to try to raise revenue and convince the colonists of the rightful authority of the British to impose taxation would be controversial in the colonies, but he argued that, "The superiority of the mother country can at no time be better exerted than now."
  • When the Virginia House of Burgesses passed a resolution stating that Parliament had no right to tax Virginians without their consent, Governor Lord Botetourt dissolved the assembly.
  • Dickinson sent a copy of his "Letters" to James Otis of Massachusetts, informing Otis that "whenever the Cause of American Freedom is to be vindicated, I look towards the Province of Massachusetts Bay."
  • The Massachusetts House of Representatives began their own campaign against the Townshend Acts by first sending a petition to King George asking for the repeal of the Revenue Act, and then sending a letter to the other colonial assemblies, asking them to join the resistance movement.
  • By a vote of 92 - 17, the House refused to comply, and Bernard promptly dissolved the legislature.

• Environmental Protests

  • The conservationist principles, as well as the belief in an inherent right of nature, were to become the bedrock of modern environmentalism.
  • Their investigation vindicated Carson's work and led to an immediate strengthening of the regulation of chemical pesticides.
  • Greenpeace is a non-governmental environmental organization whose goal is to "ensure the ability of the Earth to nurture life in all its diversity."
  • A major milestone in the environmental movement was the establishment of Earth Day, which was first observed in San Francisco and other cities on March 21, 1970, the first day of Spring.
  • It marked a turning point in the development of international environmental politics.

• Comparative Psychology

  • Comparative psychology is the scientific study of animal behavior and mental processes, which can lead to a deeper and broader understanding of human psychology.
  • "Comparative psychology" refers to the scientific study of the behavior and mental processes of nonhuman animals (especially as these relate to the adaptation, evolution, and development of behavior), which can lead to a deeper and broader understanding of human psychology.
  • In the treatise, he demonstrates how a camel's pace can be hastened or slowed with the use of music.
  • Through the 19th century, a majority of scholars in the Western world continued to believe that music was a distinctly human phenomenon, but experiments since then have vindicated Ibn al-Haytham's view that music does indeed have an effect on animals.
  • A wide variety of species have been studied by comparative psychologists in order to gain insight into the behavior and mental processes of nonhuman animals.

• The Declaration of the Rights of Man

  • The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, passed by France's National Constituent Assembly in August 1789, is a fundamental document of the French Revolution that granted civil rights to some commoners, although it excluded a significant segment of the French population.
  • The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (August 1791) is a fundamental document of the French Revolution and in the history of human and civil rights.
  • The document defines a single set of individual and collective rights for all men.
  • At the time of writing, the rights contained in the declaration were only awarded to men.
  • While the French Revolution provided rights to a larger portion of the population, there remained a distinction between those who obtained the political rights in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen and those who did not.

• Tyler and Texas

  • John Tyler's presidency was marked by a series of moves favoring American expansionism, including the annexation of Texas.
  • Americans at this time asserted a right to colonize vast expanses of North America beyond their country's borders, especially in Oregon, California, and Texas.
  • Major events in the western movement of the US population were the Homestead Act, a law by which, for a nominal price, a settler was given a title to 160 acres of land to farm.
  • Of the 29 Whig senators, 28 voted against the treaty with only one Whig, a southerner, supporting it.
  • The Mexican government regarded this action as a violation of its sovereignty.

• Enfranchisement and Its Limits

  • White men without property, almost all women, and all other people of color were denied the right to vote.
  • Two other new states, Indiana (1816) and Illinois (1818), also extended the right to vote to white men regardless of property.
  • American democracy had a decidedly racist orientation; a white majority limited the rights of black minorities.
  • New Jersey explicitly restricted the right to vote to white men only.
  • Connecticut passed a law in 1814 taking the right to vote away from free black men and restricting suffrage to white men only.