Margaret Fuller: Woman in the Nineteenth Century

Fuller developed the ideas expressed in Woman in the Nineteenth Century during a time of great intellectual ferment in her native New England. The strict dominance of Calvinist theology had begun to decline in the early nineteenth century, spurred on by dissenters like Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing. Influenced by Eastern faiths and German Romanticism, former clergyman Ralph Waldo Emerson advanced the debate still further in the early 1840s by advocating a break from formal religious traditions and the embrace of the universal Over-Soul found in everyone. Massachusetts-based writers and teachers such as Bronson Alcott, Elizabeth Peabody, Henry David Thoreau, and George Ripley also contributed ideas to a philosophical movement that came to be known as transcendentalism. Though their concepts of human freedom and spiritual growth were often expressed in vague poetic language, their collective efforts had profound implications for American society and political life. What united the transcendentalists was a commitment to liberating individuals from the constraints of predetermined roles so that they could achieve their full potential. All the transcendentalists claimed the right to express their ideas without fear of censorship. Literally or by implication, they encouraged their readers and followers to demand freedom in their own lives, no matter their race, gender, or religious beliefs.

In her weekly Conversations, Fuller encouraged unrestricted dialogue about art, beauty, and morality among a select group of Boston women. These events both reflected the “newness” of outlook present among the transcendentalists and Fuller's own desire to break free of the restrictions she faced as a woman of her time. The renown she gained from her Conversations led her to become a cofounder and editor of the Dial (1840–1844), a small but influential publication that provided her with a forum to explore her ideas. Unaffiliated with any political party, the Dial spoke for and to a broad-based reformist movement that advocated the abolition of slavery, nonsectarian spirituality, and equality between the sexes.

Reformists in the 1840s often blurred the lines between causes, as in the case of Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who were active both in antislavery and in women's rights movements. When Fuller published her essay “The Great Lawsuit” in the July 1843 issue of the Dial, she was articulating a rising demand for gender equality that led to the first women's rights convention, held at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. The publication of Woman in the Nineteenth Century nearly two years later was a landmark event in a decade that saw an American radical vanguard challenge the nation's social mores and political status quo.

Fuller's writings met with resistance and ridicule from critics who spoke for the prevailing standards of American society. The New-York Tribune (of which Fuller was a staff member) was almost alone among newspapers of national influence that supported the legal and social equality of women. The Democratic and Whig parties both ignored the issues of female suffrage, property rights, and divorce reform in their 1844 campaign platforms. Woman in the Nineteenth Century stood outside the mainstream of American political discourse. In many, if not most, respectable circles, its contents would not have been considered fit for discussion. Fuller and her book were outliers in the era's conventional thought and would remain so for decades to come.