ABSTRACT
The subject to which Mary Wollstonecraft devoted the largest amount of her prose was politics. Vindication of the Rights of Woman should be grouped with the preceding A Vindication of the Rights of Men and the succeeding An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution as her contributions to the great Anglo-French revolutionary debate of the 1790s. Wollstonecraft had already been introduced to the real Whig/Dissenting tradition when she moved to the Dissenting community at Newington Green in 1783. Price was its minister, and Burgh had kept a successful academy there with his wife until his death in 1775. Most striking in Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Men is its focus on Burke. Her title could well have been a reference to Burke's early satire on the intellectual tradition Wollstonecraft was now defending, entitled A Vindication of Natural Society; if so, she is calling his satire truth.
