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Mary Wollstonecraft became an icon for feminists because of her anti-Burkean point of view. She traveled to France to observe the revolution with her own eyes because she was so enthusiastic about it. The rights of man to liberty and legal equality were denied to women by the French revolutionaries. She and other women who were associated with the Jacobins would die in the reaction to the Terror.

During their lifetimes, Wollstonecraft and de Gouges only attracted a small following, but their ideas continued to spread in the following centuries. The early feminists posed fundamental questions about the human condition, and did so in ways that exposed serious problems with all three main isms. Many if not most liberals, in spite of their assumed universalism, were in fact speaking only about "man" and not all of humanity when proclaiming the value of liberty. The fitness of women for civil equality and modern freedom was doubted by the majority of early liberals. It was thought that women should be dependent on men for protection and guidance because of their inherent weaknesses. It would be wrong to grant them the same freedom as men. Women who embraced feminist ideas moved from an initial interest in individualism to socialism due to the fact that feminism found at least a somewhat sympathetic hearing.

At this point in time, socialist activists and theorists differed, but they all agreed with early feminists. Early socialists and early feminists defined themselves in opposition to liberalism because of their hypocrisies and egoistic individualism. The liberals left out the majority of the adult male population as well as all females when they defined freedom and equality. The socialist critique of elitism focused on the implications of the distribution of private property. Extreme inequality of wealth and property ownership corrupted the human spirit by subverting the sense of human solidarity and legitimizing exploitation was a common theme in socialist literature.

One of the most influential of the early socialists in France declared himself a radical feminist. He rejected patriarchy and the bourgeois family. He said that the position of women in the society around him was better than that of slaves. The equality he defended had to do with human rights and dignity, not physical or intellectual abilities. He said that women were profoundly different in their emotional and spiritual natures. He argued that women could only be free if their characters were allowed to be expressed without the restrictions of traditional Christian morality.

By the 1830s, liberal theory had developed into a more sophisticated and integrated body of thought than feminism or socialism, but it still had a variety of different positions. The liberals focused on political reform in opposition to the post-1815 reaction. Liberal ideas took on more explicitly antisocialist dimensions as socialism began to gain greater following by mid-century. Most members of the middle class were shocked by Fourier's ideas and his belief that private property and the free-market economy should be abolished.

There were significant overlaps with socialism on the left fringe of liberalism.

Disillusioned radicals collaborated with various kinds of socialists in their quest for what seemed to them to be more consistent, less hypocritical forms of liberty, equality, and Fraternity, but their emphasis remained more individualistic and more attached to private ownership.

Britain's long and bitter conflict with France made it difficult for the Philosophical Radicals to identify with the French Revolution. The ideas of the Philosophical Radicals were based on Enlightened principles, British rather than French in flavor, but still with a parallel respect for the ability of human reason to reform society in far-reaching ways. Jeremy Bentham, a prolific author who advocated for radical reforms in all branches of British life, was their most influential guide.