Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century: A Reading

Abstract

The article analyzes the book on the equality of women “Woman in the Nineteenth Cen­tury” (1845) written by Margaret Fuller (1810–1850), an outstanding American romantic, to elaborate the ideas she had expressed in the essay “The Great Lawsuit: Man versus Men. Woman versus Women” (1843). The author compares these two works and shows their com­mon conceptual ground, as well as the development of Fuller’s views that grew in scope and radicalism. The book is analyzed in its cultural and historical context as a religious and philosophical work that gave a unique expression to the ideas of American Transcendental­ism: Fuller was the first to apply its fundamental principle of self-reliance to women and created in the cultural discourse the image of “woman thinking”, complementing thus the image of “man thinking” elaborated in the works of Emerson and other transcendentalists. The author shows that Fuller’s ethical conception drew on the moral philosophy of Im­manuel Kant, Christianity, mystical teachings (Swedenborg), utopian socialism (Fourier), Goethe, European romanticism and points out that transcendental moral universalism was Fuller’s basic premise. The article demonstrates that in her book Fuller combined ethical theory with a criticism of the social reality, norms and morals in the USA as unjust (particu­larly concerning women’s rights, slavery, rights of the underprivileged) and stressed the sig­nificance of justice as a moral value. A special attention is drawn to the peculiarities of the book as a publicistic work, in which Fuller develops her ethical ideas through forms of liter­ary expression: sermon, artistic imagination (characters, dialogues), works by other writers in a discussion on the place of women in the history of cultures.