In November 1839, a group of young women in Boston formed a conversation society “to answer the great questions” of special importance to women: "What are we born to do? How shall we do it?" The five women who discussed these questions were remarkable thinkers and artists who played pathbreaking roles in the transcendentalist movement.
Transcendentalism remains the most important literary and philosophical movement to have originated in the United States. Most accounts of it, however, trace its emergence to a group of young intellectuals (primarily Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau) dissatisfied with their religious, literary, and social culture. Yet there is a forgotten history of transcendentalism—a submerged counternarrative—that features a network of fiercely intelligent women who were central to the development of the movement even as they found themselves silenced by their culturally assigned roles.
Scholar Randall Fuller examines transcendentalism as a more collaborative and interactive project between women and men than is commonly understood. He recounts the lives of writer and diarist Mary Moody Emerson; translator Elizabeth Palmer Peabody; her sister Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, a painter; essayist and poet Lydia Jackson Emerson; and Margaret Fuller, a prodigy in philosophy and German literature, as they developed crucial ideas about the self, nature, and feeling even as they pushed their male counterparts to consider the rights of enslaved people of color and women. Many ideas once considered original to Emerson and Thoreau are shown to have originated with women who had little opportunity of publicly expressing them. Together, these five women helped form the foundations of American feminism.
Fuller is the Herman Melville distinguished professor of 19th-century American literature at the University of Kansas. His book Bright Circle: Five Remarkable Women in the Age of Transcendentalism (Oxford University Press) is available for purchase.
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