ABSTRACT
Most students of Wollstonecraft locate her significance at the point where those traditions meet. But to understand her significance we must remember one thing: we are talking about a woman who wrote at a time in which neither democracy nor a feminist movement, nor a democratic mass movement existed. She approached theorizing feminism without benefit of the invention of that very term that manifests group or political consciousness by women on the basis of their gender; that is, before the term "feminist" or even "womanist" was invented. The narrator of The Wrongs of Woman did not play the role of authoritative reasoner as she did in the Rights of Woman; in the former she took the part of a woman speaking with love to her daughter. Nevertheless, Wollstonecraft instructed her readers to understand this story "as of woman, than of an individual".
