Initially, the neglect of Julia Wedgwood's role in the first wave of Victorian feminism seems surprising. She wrote the key article in an important collection of essays on women's issues edited by Josephine Butler in 1869. She campaigned for Elizabeth Garrett Anderson's election to the new London Schools Board in 1870 and also spent two terms as an informal tutor to the first intake of what became Girton College. She signed the big petition calling for female enfranchisement in 1884 and wrote a series of articles as well as an outspoken pamphlet pressing the case. She was not, however, a member of the two most influential women's networks, the Langham Place Group and the Kensington Society. Nor was she involved in the successful campaigns to amend the legislation on married womens’ property and the Contagious Diseases Acts. Her feminism was less passionate than Josephine Butler’s, less far-reaching and practical than Barbara Bodichon's and less organized and determined than Emily Davies’s. But though it does not fall into well-established categories, it was an important part of both her private and public personae in her middle years. She was also more influential than her current absence from the record suggests.

Her family did not share her outspokenness on women's issues. For all her energetic campaigning for good causes and connection with Anna Swanwick and Elizabeth Bostock, Fanny never joined their discussions in the Kensington Society. Nor did she sign suffrage petitions. Similarly, she only got involved in the committee Emily Davies set up to establish a new women's college in Cambridge as a way of protecting the interests of Bedford College. Effie and Hope also kept away from women's causes. Julia, by contrast, contributed what she could.

Her feminism was distinctive. She was as ready to attack unhelpful female attitudes as male obfuscation and misogyny; she was less interested in the political effects of securing the vote for women than in its social implications; she avoided talk of equal rights; and she addressed herself as much to men as to women, conscious that with an exclusively male Parliament, change could come only when men had been persuaded that this was in everyone's interests.