Aside from appreciative references to her, especially by American suffragists, and a fictional account by George R. Preedy (Gabrielle M. Long), the nineteenth- and twentieth- century periodicals were silent about Wollstonecraft until 1947, when Ferdinand Landberg and Marynia F. Farnham published a bestseller, Modern Women: The Lost Sex. They accused Wollstonecraft of encouraging women to be more like men, which resulted only in increasing men's and women's neuroses because, according to them, women cannot be happy outside of their domestic sphere and men cannot be happy when women are competing with them for jobs and not supporting them at home, where women belong. Lundberg was a journalist, but Farnham was a psychiatrist who had her own private practice and worked for the New York State Psychiatric Institute. Despite the fact that Farnham was a professional who worked outside the home, they both criticized postwar women who wanted to continue to earn a paycheck “in an era that enshrined home, family, and motherhood in public discourse, but the social reality was often quite different” (Sigerman 8). The book is now considered “a classic in the genre of antifeminist psychoanalytical literature” (Buhle 174).

By the end of that year, 1947, a professor at the University of Omaha, Ralph M. Wardle, rose to Wollstonecraft's defense and published a sympathetic article about her for the PMLA. It focused on her employment as a reviewer for the Analytical Review. Four years later, he wrote the first comprehensive and first scholarly biography of Wollstonecraft.

It is in his biography that we not only perceive an attempt to depict Wollstonecraft's life without moral censorship, but we also find explanations for the behavior of most of the people in her life— explanations that are more plausible and credible than those that would follow during and after the great age of literary theory of the 1990s. For example, most biographies depict Wollstonecraft's father, Edward John Wollstonecraft, as a reckless dreamer whose wanderlust caused immeasurable and irreparable damage to his family. But Wardle's portrait seems much more realistic because of its historical context.