Woman in the Nineteenth Century

Glossary

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"Man" versus "Men": Fuller's key rhetorical distinction, carried over from the essay's original title: 'Man' (capitalized) as the ideal, potential form of humanity, versus 'men' (lowercase) as the fallen, compromised individuals society actually produces — a distinction she applies equally, and in parallel, to Woman and women.; Related: The Great Lawsuit
"Old Maids": The dismissive contemporary label for unmarried women that Fuller pointedly reclaims, arguing that the growing class of women choosing self-dependence over marriage should be welcomed as a sign of progress, even though it demands more inward strength than marriage's ready-made social position.; Related: Self-Reliance / Self-Culture
"Orphic Sayings": A reference to contemporaneous American transcendentalist writings (associated with Bronson Alcott) styled after the mythic poet-lawgiver Orpheus, which Fuller critiques as ambitious in title but lacking the genuine musical, natural insight of their namesake.; Related: Orpheus and Eurydice
"The Earth Waits for Her Queen": One of the essay's two opening epigraphs, paired deliberately with Shakespeare's 'Frailty, thy name is woman' — Fuller sets the two side by side to demonstrate that both a diminished and an exalted view of women already circulate, and to stake her claim to the latter.; Related: "Man" versus "Men"
"Word-Heroes" and Cant: Fuller's sharp early critique of reformers who traffic in inflated moral and religious rhetoric — 'word-Catos, word-Christs' — without living out their professed principles in private life, including, implicitly, men who preach liberty while denying it to women.

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Angelina Grimké and Abby Kelly: Contemporary abolitionist women orators Fuller cites as proof that women speaking in public on matters of conscience can overcome the prejudice against female public speech — evidence, for Fuller, that moral seriousness rather than gender determines a speaker's power to persuade.; Related: Woman and Slavery

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Cassandra and the Sibylline Priestesses: Figures Fuller invokes from classical myth and religion — prophetic women like Cassandra, Iphigenia, Antigone, and Macaria, and the Sibylline priestesses who spoke the oracles of the highest god — as evidence that ancient thought granted women a dignity and range that Fuller's own century had narrowed.; Related: The Self-Sufficing Goddesses
Crawford's Orpheus: A sculpture by the American artist Thomas Crawford that Fuller cites as an example of contemporary art grappling with the Orpheus myth, part of her habit of grounding abstract argument in specific contemporary works of art and literature.; Related: Orphic Sayings

F

Fourier and Swedenborg: The utopian socialist Charles Fourier and the mystic philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg, both referenced repeatedly as intellectual influences whose systems of social and spiritual harmony Fuller draws on to frame her argument for the equal, complementary development of men and women.; Related: Goethe and the Doctrine of Correspondence

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George Sand: The French novelist Fuller references as a contemporary example of female genius and independence, part of the essay's habit of citing living reformers and writers alongside classical and biblical allusions to build its case.
Goethe and the Doctrine of Correspondence: Fuller draws heavily on Goethe, along with Swedenborg and Fourier, as thinkers whose ideas of harmony, polarity, and correspondence between the material and spiritual worlds she adapts to argue that men and women are not ranked but complementary expressions of a shared human nature.

I

Influence versus Power: Fuller's critique of the argument that women already wield sufficient 'influence' through charm and domestic sway, and therefore need no direct rights or power of their own — she treats this substitution of influence for genuine self-possessed power as a form of 'selfish coquetry' encouraged by women's exclusion from real participation in public life.

L

Lady Godiva: The legendary English noblewoman whose ride to spare her people from taxation Fuller invokes briefly as an image of female courage and self-sacrifice exercised in the public sphere, rather than confined to domestic virtue.

M

Marriage as Companionship: Fuller's argument that the highest marriages are neither household-management partnerships nor romantic transports but unions of intellect and mutual growth between equals — exemplified in her reading of Ulysses and Penelope as partners in dignity, not master and domestic servant.; Related: Miranda
Miranda: Fuller's self-portrait, introduced partway through the essay as a case study: a woman raised by her father 'not as a plaything, but as a living mind,' addressed as an equal from earliest childhood. Miranda's calm self-possession and freedom from bitterness serve as Fuller's living proof that women reared without artificial limits develop full self-reliance.; Related: Self-Reliance / Self-Culture

O

Orpheus and Eurydice: A myth Fuller reworks early in the essay to reverse its usual meaning: rather than Orpheus calling Eurydice back from death, Fuller argues the nineteenth century has reached a point where 'Eurydice is to call for an Orpheus' — where women's development, long neglected relative to men's, must now take the lead in reforming society.

S

Self-Reliance / Self-Culture: Fuller's central demand: women need the same unimpeded inward growth — intellectual, moral, spiritual — that transcendentalism claimed as every soul's birthright, rather than a life defined entirely through service to husband, children, or household.; Related: The Great Lawsuit, Miranda

T

The Dial: The transcendentalist literary magazine, edited in part by Fuller herself, that first published this essay's material as 'The Great Lawsuit' in 1843, two years before Fuller expanded it into the full book Woman in the Nineteenth Century.; Related: The Great Lawsuit
The French Revolution's Broken Promise: Fuller's reference to the French Revolution as a moment when the principle of liberty was proclaimed broadly enough that women, too, began to claim it — even though the Revolution's own actual gains for women fell far short of its universalist rhetoric.; Related: Woman and Slavery
The Great Lawsuit: The essay's original 1843 title and framing device — 'Man versus Men, Woman versus Women' — naming the gap between what Man and Woman could ideally be and the diminished men and women society actually produces. Fuller expanded this Dial article into the full 1845 book.; Related: Self-Reliance / Self-Culture
The Muse: Fuller's recurring figure for female creative and inspirational power, invoked alongside classical references to the nine muses attending even the highest god — used to argue that intellectual and artistic inspiration has always been imagined as flowing through women, even when women themselves were denied the same scope for creation.; Related: Cassandra and the Sibylline Priestesses
The Prodigal Son: A biblical image Fuller invokes early in the essay to describe men who fall short of their 'princely promise' — capable of genius and love, but often found instead 'feeding on the husks' of a lesser life, setting up her broader argument that both sexes currently fall short of their ideal forms.
The Self-Sufficing Goddesses: Fuller's reading of Diana, Minerva, and Vesta as complementary but crucially self-sufficing figures in classical mythology — unlike goddesses defined only as companions to male gods, these three 'needed not to rise for any worshipper,' which Fuller offers as ancient evidence that full female independence has always had a place in the human imagination.
Transcendentalism: The mid-nineteenth-century American philosophical and literary movement, centered on figures like Emerson and Fuller's own Dial circle, whose core belief in each soul's capacity for direct, unmediated spiritual and intellectual growth underlies Fuller's argument that women deserve the same self-culture as men.; Related: Self-Reliance / Self-Culture, The Dial

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Ulysses and Penelope: Fuller's example of proper domestic partnership: Penelope weaving at home is not 'meant for a baker or weaver solely,' any more than Ulysses is meant only for herding cattle — both figures are fully realized only when their domestic labor is chosen and thoughtful, not an enforced, exclusive definition of their whole being.; Related: Marriage as Companionship

W

Woman and Slavery: A comparison Fuller draws repeatedly, in step with her abolitionist commitments: women's legal and social dependence structurally echoes the condition of the enslaved, and she argues neither cause — abolition nor women's emancipation — can be fully won without the other.