Emerson in the Context of the Woman’s Rights Movement

Abstract In order to understand Emerson’s developing attitudes toward the woman s rights movement, it is necessary to appreciate the way in which the movement began, grew, and changed and the issues around which the early debates were centered. Before even the earliest stages of the woman’s rights movement in America, Emerson had been introduced to the ideas that would inform it, especially through the pioneering work of his friend Margaret Fuller. As explained by her, first in “The Great Lawsuit,-Man Versus Men, Woman Versus Women” in the Transcendentalist literary journal, the Dial, in 1843, then in expanded form in the first book written in America to argue for woman’s rights, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, in 1845, Fuller’s ideas, transmitted to Emerson through their frequent conversations and correspondence, came to form the core of his thinking on women. Fuller’s carefully reasoned tactics would form the basis for the approaches and arguments that would later be adopted by the nascent woman’s rights movement, as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage acknowledged in their monumental History of Woman Suffrage, when they stated that Fuller’s work “gave a new impulse to woman’s education as a thinker.”