e reference to those who had gone before and who had called for greater rights for women, and most of these earlier writers may have been unknown to Wollstonecraft. The book is thus not an outgrowth of previous social or philosophical thought except to the degree that it arose within the wide movement for social change taking place in Europe and the United States:
Broadening that movement to include a concern for women was Mary's unique contribution, and she made it, not so much because of what she had read or the thinkers she had listened to and argued with, but from her own personal experience and her reflections on those experiences (Flexner 149).
Her concern was not with the economic exploitation of women, though she would later recognize it, but she was concerned with middle-class women and t
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