Mary Wollstonecraft: Mother of Women's Rights by Miriam Brody is a perfect example of biographical material that falls betwixt and between information from other biographies and contains a lot of betwixt and between information from other biographies, with the end result being a biography that is sometimes accurate and sometimes not. I almost did not include it in this study because, even though published by the prestigious Oxford University Press, it cannot be considered a scholarly work— but then, as I argued earlier, most of Wollstonecraft's biographies cannot be considered scholarly. Consisting of only 150 pages and most of them with pictures, it was designed to be one of the “Oxford Portraits” and, hence, not much more than a sketch of a famous person. Even so, most assuredly Oxford intended for that sketch to be accurate. Published in 2000, it represents a selective gleaning of biographical information that has been accumulating ever since Wollstonecraft died in 1797. Unfortunately, there is no documentation, making it difficult to ascertain the source of Brody's information and to judge the basis of her claims betwixt and between previous biographies and her own suppositions. Despite these limitations, her book is one of the more accurate of the biographies in regard to detail and the leanest in regard to bias. But it also suffers from a paucity that reflects myriad unsubstantiated assumptions and gaps, most likely drawn from the Wollstonecraft biographies that came before it.

Brody's subtitle demonstrates leanness. It makes no claim to Wollstonecraft as the mother of feminism, when “feminism” is such a broad term. Brody pares down the epithet to the most accurate that one can be about Rights of Woman; Mary Wollstonecraft was the “Mother of Women's Rights.”

However, she does offer several unique details not found in any other biography. For example, she identifies Wollstonecraft's grandfather as a “master weaver,” explaining that he would have bought thread for the journeymen who in turn would have their families in their homes spin it into cloth, and then the master weaver would sell the cloth. This was called the “putting- out” system of manufacture, and it predated factory work (10–11).