Margaret Fuller: Woman in the Nineteenth Century

Woman in the Nineteenth Century sold out its initial fifteen-hundred-copy print run in the first week after its publication. Upon publication, the book stirred considerable controversy. As with Fuller's previous book, it was faulted by some for lack of organization and an overly verbose style. Many critics (mostly male) objected to her questioning of traditional gender roles. A smaller number praised the book as a needed attack upon outmoded ideas. It was reviewed by important American critics, though often skeptically—Edgar Allan Poe, for instance, wrote a negative review for Broadway Journal. Fuller noted that readers were greatly roused to both oppose and sympathize with her view and, at the same time, lamented that those feelings of sympathy were more often to be found among strangers.

If Fuller was disappointed in some of the reactions she received, the book had an undeniable impact among the American intellectual community, particularly in the Northeast. Her arguments for gender equity in social custom and in law added force to the growing feminist movement in the United States and England. The Declaration of Sentiments issued by the first women's rights convention, held at Seneca Falls, New York, in July 1848, drew upon many of Fuller's ideas. Her more radical views about sexual power dynamics within and outside marriage were later taken up by controversial feminist leader Victoria Claflin Woodhull, who in 1872 became the first woman to run for president of the United States.

The urgency of the antislavery movement in the 1850s and the coming of the Civil War in the 1860s pushed women's rights issues out of the spotlight for a time. When the fight for female voting rights and reform of divorce laws resumed in earnest in the post–Civil War era, Woman in the Nineteenth Century was regarded as a prophetic work of both inspirational and practical value. The passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, granting women the right to vote in 1920, and the emergence of the modern feminist movement in the 1960s can be traced directly back to the influence of Woman in the Nineteenth Century. In hindsight the book can be seen as the most important feminist work in the English language since Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792).