A Teacher
Margaret Fuller
She turned Transcendentalist self-culture into a manifesto for women’s full personhood.
The transmission
Sarah Margaret Fuller was an American journalist, critic, and a leading figure of New England Transcendentalism. From 1840 to 1842 she edited The Dial, the Transcendentalist quarterly, alongside Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Her book ‘Woman in the Nineteenth Century’ (1845), expanded from her essay ‘The Great Lawsuit’, is regarded as the first major work of American feminism and argued that women should be free to develop their full inner potential. She drowned in a shipwreck off Fire Island in 1850 while returning from Italy.
What they gave
American feminism’s first treatise: ‘Woman in the Nineteenth Century’ (1845), expanded from her essay ‘The Great Lawsuit,’ argued for women’s freedom to develop their full inner potential.
- Editor of The Dial: From 1840 to 1842 she edited the Transcendentalist quarterly alongside Emerson, shaping the movement’s intellectual voice.
- Self-culture for emancipation: Extended the Transcendentalist ideal of inner divinity and self-culture into a manifesto for women’s full personhood.
In their words
Whatever the soul knows how to seek, it cannot fail to obtain. This is the Law and the Prophets.
The line they stand in
Taught by / Influenced by: Ralph Waldo Emerson’s self-culture; Henry David Thoreau’s Transcendentalism.
- Taught / Influenced: Ralph Waldo Emerson; Henry David Thoreau.
Revelations they taught
Essential Works
- Woman in the Nineteenth Century1845
- The Great Lawsuit1843