Mary Wollstonecraft’s writings reveal a mind keenly interested in the politics of her day and well-read in the works of prominent political theorists of her time – Locke, Rousseau, “commonwealth men,” Scottish Enlightenment thinkers – whose ideas helped shape her political thought. Among these writers, none had quite the catalytic, galvanizing effect that Edmund Burke did in spurring her to articulate her political convictions and her feminist principles. Burke’s writings on the French Revolution, especially his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) and his early aesthetic treatise, An Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757, 1759), challenged Wollstonecraft to formulate her views on key issues in eighteenth-century political thought, such as the basis of political virtue; the origins of political society (social contract theory); the existence of natural rights or “rights of men” (as human rights were then called); and the place of women in the social and political order.