Admirers of Mary Wollstonecraft are often reluctant to see her as a religious thinker. This should not surprise us. The reiterated “appeals to God and virtue,” in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman are “a dead letter to feminists now,” a leading feminist critic tells us, and if by dead letter is meant a failed communication, then it is certainly true that of all aspects of Wollstonecraft's thought it is her religious faith that has failed to speak to modern interpreters. Most studies do no more than gesture toward it, and then usually dismiss it as ideological baggage foisted on her by her times, with no positive implications for her views on women. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is generally located in a tradition of Enlightenment humanism that is assumed to have been at least indifferent to religion, if not actively hostile to it.