With two centuries of hindsight, one biographer attributes Wollstonecraft as “the first great champion of women's rights in the modern Western world” (Brody 6). Only a few days after Wollstonecraft's passing, her husband biographer etched in her gravestone in St. Pancras’ churchyard this simple epitaph: “Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin: Author of ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’” (Jacobs 274). What a significant betwixt and between are the two.

“Vindication” was a popular word for books, articles, and pamphlets in the late eighteenth century in both England and the United States. Typing “Vindication” as a keyword in WorldCat, from 1780 to 1800, results in 2,480 hits. Here are a few examples: A Letter from Edmund Burke, esq. in Vindication of His Conduct with Regard to the Affairs of Ireland (1780); […] a Vindication of the Late Bishop Hoadly (1790); and Pursuit of Literature […] A Vindication of the Work […]” (1800). Although the word was in popular usage in the Victorian period and appears in the titles of legal documents and theological treatises, apparently there was no longer the variety of subjects that needed vindicating as there had been in the previous century. Missing until 1792, when Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, however, was a vindication for anything that had to do specifically with women.

Ever since her own vindication, Wollstonecraft would be betwixt and between people's opinion of her. As Miriam Brody puts it, “her readers either hailed her as one of the brave generation of rebels who were ending monarchies and building republics, or they scorned her as proposing ideas so ridiculous and outrageous they could not be taken seriously” (7). Prior to her publication, she and Fanny Blood enjoyed a friendship with Thomas Taylor (1758–1835), well- known for his lectures on Plato. Taylor had considered Wollstonecraft his “greatest favourite” (Yarrington 86), but immediately following the publication of Rights of Woman, he wrote a savage rebuttal in A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes (1792), with the hypothesis that if women were equal to men, then beasts were also equal to men. Even to a man who had respected her intellectual acumen, once Wollstonecraft declared women to be on equal intellectual footing, she fell betwixt and between what was estimable and what was aberrant.