"Ideas of female equality were in the air during and after the Revolution. Tom Paine spoke out for the equal rights of women. And the pioneering book of Mary Wollstonecraft in England, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, was reprinted in the United States shortly after the Revolutionary War. Wollstonecraft was responding to the English conservative and opponent of the French Revolution, Edmund Burke, who had written in his Reflections on the Revolution in France that "a woman is but an animal, and an animal not of the highest order." She wrote: "I wish to persuade women to endeavor to acquire strength, both of mind and body, and to convince them that soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, with delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste, are almost synonymous epithets of weakness, and that those beings who are only the objects of pity and that kind of love... will soon become objects of contempt....I wish to show that the first object of laudable ambition is to obtain a character as a human being, regardless of the distinction of sex.""