A transcendentalist's case that women need the same unimpeded self-culture men claim as their birthright.

Woman in the Nineteenth Century

Margaret Fuller · 1845

Fuller's 1845 essay — expanded from her 1843 Dial article 'The Great Lawsuit' — argues that women are held back not by nature but by a narrowed idea of what a woman's life is for, and makes the case in the allusive, exploratory voice of American transcendentalism rather than the tight legal argument of a Mill or a Wollstonecraft. It's an early and distinctly American statement of the claim that women's self-development is a right, not a luxury.

1 chapters · 44,817 words · ~3.4 hr read