Transcendentalism

Abstract The chapter focuses on three women who played central roles in American transcendentalism. Mary Moody Emerson (1774–1863) inaugurated transcendentalism’s characteristic themes, and she was the dominant educational influence on a central figure in the movement, her nephew Ralph Waldo Emerson. Elizabeth Palmer Peabody (1804–1894), known today mainly as an educational reformer, was also a significant theologian and philosopher in her own right. The most prominent woman in the movement is Margaret Fuller (1810–1850), who edited The Dial and authored Woman in the Nineteenth Century. The dominant concern for all three writers is the development of the mind. They thematized the innocence of childhood and perfectibility of humans through education, the dialectic of mind and nature in the service of spiritual growth, and the idea that we achieve the millennium in reforming our social institutions.