Mary Wollstonecraft was a controversial figure in her own time. Like Helen Maria Williams, she was reviled by England's anti-Jacobin backlash, called an “unsex'd female” and a “hyena in petticoats.” A few years after the bicentennial of her best-known work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, she is still controversial. Hailed in the 1970s as a feminist heroine, during the 1980s she drew less sanguine scrutiny by critics who believed her feminism had fallen prey to the crippling limitations of a liberal Enlightenment discourse of reason. Such assessments are part of the ongoing exploration of the multiple suppressions and exclusions that accompanied the Enlightenment's projects of emancipation and progress. Wollstonecraft seized on a key exclusion when she confronted the French revolutionaries with their failure to include women in the Rights of Man. But this most recent pendulum swing in her reception overlooks her assault on a key Enlightenment category: the aesthetic.

The language of aesthetics, as we have seen, strongly tended to reinforce the systematic inequalities that structured eighteenth-century British society. This comes into sharp focus when Wollstonecraft takes aim at Burke in what Frances Ferguson calls “one of the shrewdest political insights of late eighteenth-century writing.” Her Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), the first published reply to his Reflections on the Revolution in France, reveals his aesthetics of the sublime and beautiful to be inextricable from his anti-egalitarian politics, which she scaldingly condemns.