Mary Wollstonecraft publishedA Vindication of the Rights of Men in 1790. It was written (like Tom Paine’s Rights of Man) in response to Edmund Burke’s counterrevolutionary work Reflections on the Revolution in France.
Here she sketches a vision of society without extremes of wealth and poverty, where property is divided more equitably, and independent smallholders form the basis of the economy:
But if, instead of the poor being subject to the griping hand of an avaricious steward, they would be watched over with fatherly solicitude, by the man whose duty and pleasure it was to guard their happiness…
Why cannot large estates be divided into small farms? These dwellings would indeed grace our land…
She even suggests that the ‘industrious’ peasant should be permitted to take over and cultivate unused land:
Why does the brown waste meet the traveller’s view, when men want work? But commons cannot be enclosed without acts of parliament to increase the property of the rich! Why might not the industrious peasant be allowed to steal a farm from the heath?
For its time this was certainly a bold suggestion.
Wollstonecraft’s ideas, though not expanded further, nevertheless marked a step towards the working class radicalism of Thomas Spence, and the more fully developed proposals of Thomas Paine’s Agrarian Justice published in 1797.
