 Wollstonecraft attacked not only monarchy and hereditary privilege but also the language that Burke used to defend and elevate it . In a famous passage in the Reflections , Burke had lamented : " I had thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her [ Marie Antoinette ] with insult . — But the age of chivalry is gone . " Most of Burke 's detractors deplored what they viewed as theatrical pity for the French queen — a pity they felt was at the expense of the people . 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 . Burke had associated the beautiful with weakness and femininity and the sublime with strength and masculinity ; Wollstonecraft turns these definitions against him , arguing that his theatrical tableaux turn Burke 's readers — the citizens — into weak women who are swayed by show . In her first unabashedly feminist critique , which Wollstonecraft scholar Claudia L. Johnson argues remains unsurpassed in its argumentative force , Wollstonecraft indicts Burke 's defence of an unequal society founded on the passivity of women . 
