By comparing the textual variants of VRM, we see that Wollstonecraft initially borrowed some of John Locke's ideas on the 'compact' that undergirds political societies as found in chapter VIII of his Second Treatise of Government (1690), then revised her own definition of the 'social compact' in the 2nd edn. to make clear how her vision of individual liberty differed from Locke and other 'social contract' thinkers after him, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau (indeed, the title of the 1764 English translation of Rousseau's Du contrat social was 'On the social compact', and was a likely inspiration for Wollstonecraft's use of the term 'social compact' alongside some earlier Lockean ideas of the 'compact' that forms 'political societies'. Rousseau was indebted to Locke, of course, in his own theorization of the social contract or compact—a future blog post will explore Wollstonecraft's debt to Rousseau on the 'social compact'.). 

In both versions of VRM, Wollstonecraft agreed with Locke that the social-political 'compact' covers everyone who explicitly or tacitly joins it. Elsewhere in VRM, she followed Locke in allowing for tacit consent to the social compact, especially in her remarks on children, women, the enslaved, conscripted soldiers, and the poor, who are all born with a 'birthright' to liberty under a 'social compact', but do not as yet have and hold the full slate of civil and political rights as men in positions of power. Wollstonecraft also agreed with Locke that a 'social compact' that establishes a legitimate government guarantees the liberty of individuals, both civil and religious.

Where she diverged from Locke was in her use of gender-neutral and universalistic language to establish that the 'birthright of man' applied to 'every' 'individual', not solely to men. The abstract noun 'man' thus applied to all humanity, regardless of sex, rank, or economic station, as she argued in each edition of VRM. With the addition of the word 'every' and her shift to the singular of 'individual', she established that every individual held the same rights under the compact, at least in the abstract if not yet in legal and cultural reality. These edits, in turn, changed the meaning of the masculine third-person pronoun in the same sentence, so that 'he' can be read in universalistic terms—as in, applying to 'every...individual', not just men.

By contrast, Locke's vision of the social 'compact' did not expressly guarantee the equal rights and liberties of all people, especially women, the poor, and the enslaved. Like Wollstonecraft, Locke allowed children to be 'born to' a right to liberty that they would be variously raised to enjoy as adults. Unlike Wollstonecraft, Locke focused on the rights of underage male heirs, not all children regardless of sex or economic station (Hunt Botting 2017). Wollstonecraft saw the egalitarian potential of Locke's arguments about children's birthright to liberty, however, and used gender-neutral and universalistic language to express this potential in her own conception of the 'social compact'. 

The final way that Wollstonecraft diverged from Locke was with her addition of the qualifying phrase 'and the continued existence of that compact'. With this clause, she made clear to her readers—many of whom would have been sympathetic to Burke—that she was not a defender of revolution either in the sense of Locke's vision of justified majoritarian rebellion against tyranny (in ch. 19 of the Second Treatise) or in the sense of the French revolutionaries whom Burke had attacked as dangerous anarchists. For Wollstonecraft, the social compact is only legitimate insofar as it guarantees an equal share of liberty for every individual that is compatible with the endurance of the compact itself. 

In a paradoxical moment of agreement with her opponent Burke, Wollstonecraft upheld the peaceful endurance of society and the state, including religion, as the final political standard by which the justice of the mutual and egalitarian exercise of liberty should be determined. This strikingly conservative and pragmatic point echoes not only Burke but also Hobbes before him, for they both had insisted that the final purpose of the compact or contract that unites people in society and government is the stability, peace, and endurance of that same society and its government. The just exercise of individual liberty, in other words, must always be aimed toward the preservation of peace and the social compact itself. Across her two editions of VRM, Wollstonecraft thus revealed some unexpected synergies with Burke and Hobbes in her implicit critique of Lockean ideas of the social compact.