As much as names like Ralph Waldo and Henry David get tossed around in Transcendental land, you best not believe that all those Transcendentalists were men. Because Margaret Fuller was a woman who 100% held her own in the Transcendentalist circle, otherwise pretty dominated by dudes like Emerson and Thoreau. Bully for her.

Fuller is an important Transcendentalist for a couple of reasons. First, she was one of the first members of the Transcendental Club, founded in 1836. Plus, she edited The Dial (you know, the Transcendentalist journal) for two years, from when it was founded in 1840 'til 1842.

Not only that, Fuller was also an important social reformer and activist. She was especially outspoken on women's rights. Way to go, Transcendentalista!

Woman in The Nineteenth Century

Fuller's book is about the dreary situation of—that's right—American women in the nineteenth century. The government sure didn't grant the ladies a lot of rights at the time. They couldn't vote, they didn't have the same access to inheritance as men did, and they were more often than not forced to be housewives, toiling away for their husbands and families—and they didn't even have access to things like equal education, their own club sports teams, or reality TV. Now those were for real desperate housewives.

In her book, Fuller makes the argument that women in the nineteenth century weren't much better off than slaves. And she argues that some serious social and political reform had to take place in order for the situation of women to improve. And it was about a lot more than which cable channels they should get access to.

"The Great Lawsuit. Man versus Men. Woman versus Women"

This essay, first published in The Dial in 1843, is like a forerunner to Fuller's book Woman in The Nineteenth Century. In it, Fuller expresses her anger at the plight of women, more or less working up to the larger claims she makes in her book a couple years later.

By the time Fuller published the essay, she was no longer the editor of The Dial. But she continued to be an active contributor to the journal, and not only that journal, but big-name newspapers, too. And she was quite the journalist, going on to become one of the first female foreign correspondents for a newspaper, The Tribune, in 1846. Those were key steps toward precisely the sort of equality she was arguing for.

Chew on This

Margaret Fuller's social reformist feminism is at the heart of her book Woman in the Nineteenth Century. You can see the buildup to a lot of ideas in contemporary feminism, along with plenty of echoes of that Transcendentalist spirit we just can't get enough of.

And Fuller didn't stop there with her writing about women's rights. Her essay "The Great Lawsuit," first published in The Dial, gives you even more proto-feminist fodder.