Margaret Fuller and Louisa May Alcott

Margaret Fuller

“A house is no home unless it contain food and fire for the mind as well as for the body.”

Margaret Fuller (1810 - 1850) was a pioneer of women’s rights in thought and practice, and spent her adult life advocating the idea that women’s lives might not have to be shaped entirely by the lives of the men around them.  Her own life had been dramatically altered by the death of her father when she was a young adult leaving her responsible for the emotional and economic welfare of her family.  She argued that women needed the freedom to grow and develop through education, reading, conversation, and friendship.  Fuller was powerfully influenced by Emerson and other Transcendentalists, but she found herself influencing men’s thinking as well.  Fuller met Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1835, falling into a deep friendship with him that would last the rest of her life. Dazzled by her eloquence, he introduced her to his circle of educators, writers, and ministers; the next year, several of them formed the Transcendental Club, to discuss new ideas in theology, literature, education, and beyond.

In 1838 Emerson invited Fuller to join meetings of the Transcendentalist circle, and she rose to greater prominence when Emerson asked her to edit The Dial, a journal devoted to transcendentalist views in 1840.  She found herself writing large portions of the influential journal in her own words, as well as corresponding with, and editing the works of Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott, Channing and others. Fuller became a contributor from the first issue and its editor. Her first book, based on a trip through the Midwest, was Summer on the Lakes (1844) and this led to an invitation by Horace Greeley to be literary critic at the New York Tribune that same year. She published her feminist classic, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, in 1845. In addition to writing a solid body of critical reviews and essays, she became active in various social reform movements. In 1846 she went to Europe as a foreign correspondent for the Tribune, and in England and France she was regarded as a serious intellectual and met many prominent people. The first to publish Henry David Thoreau, it also gathered poetry, essays, and anything else that Emerson classified as “an antidote to all narrowness.”

In 1840, she conducted her famous “Conversations,” discussion groups at which educated women discussed the big questions: “What were we born to do? How shall we do it?” One enraptured attendee compared Fuller’s leadership to “the sun shining upon plants and causing buds to open into flowers.” Fuller was sufficiently forward thinking and frank enough to link the topic of sexuality to not only the rights of women, but to men's rights as well.  She alienated some people because of a personality that was variously described as strident, energetic and intense. Fuller's most original and influential professional activities were her organized "Conversations" for women where two dozen women attended the first meeting, and where many other women soon found a new intellectual outlet. These dialogues led Fuller to her most influential work, Women in the 19th Century.

By the mid 1840's Fuller moved to New York to become a critic for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, where she had the foresight to champion Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne.  Emerson’s lecture entitled Woman which he delivered to the Women’s Rights Convention in Boston in 1855 is clearly a result of her influence on him. 

Louisa May Alcott

“My book came out; and people began to think that
topsy-turvy Louisa would amount to something after all ...”

Louisa May Alcott (1832 - 1888) reminds us that Transcendentalism was often a family affair.  Her upbringing was as unconventional as it was intellectual, and as a young child she referred to her father and his friends Theodore Parker, Emerson and Thoreau as “the modern Plato.”  An influential member of the Transcendentalists Louisa May Alcott never joined an organized church, but instead she practiced a Transcendental form of personal religion, especially unusual for a woman at the time, and could describe a spiritual morning in Thoreau’s woods near Concord. She also went to hear Theodore Parker preach his secular sermons.  Alcott’s career as a writer made her influential among her Transcendentalist friends and a woman with widespread public influence.  Her closeness to the Emerson family led to her first book, Flower Fables written for Ellen, Emerson’s daughter.

Her most famous work Little Women was perhaps sentimental, but it also presented a new version of the American family and a new set of American family values linked to Transcendentalist ideals such as self-awareness, resourcefulness, and resilience. Alcott gave much of her energy to practical social reforms such as nursing, women’s rights, and temperance.  Her contribution during the Civil War was her service as an army nurse.  Her social conscience was also evident when she attended the 1875 Women’s Congress in Syracuse New York, and like many women of the time she helped to establish the value of community activism.

Only a follower of Transcendentalist principles was likely to be a famous writer, a social activist, the sole supporter of her family, and also a woman in the second half of the 19^th century.