The Nexus Archive
American Transcendentalism and Feminism
Fuller
The Critic of Unfinished Freedom · Antebellum America, 1810-1850
Fuller joins women's freedom, literary criticism, travel, art, and national self-examination.
- Women's freedom
- Self-culture
- Criticism
- National literature
- Human development
Life
Margaret Fuller was an American critic, editor, teacher, journalist, and advocate of women's equality. Her writing moved between transcendentalist circles, the Great Lakes frontier, New York criticism, and revolutionary Europe.
The question
“Who might a person become if convention stopped deciding beforehand?”
Argued against
Fixed gender roles, intellectual dependence, shallow criticism, and national complacency.
Why Fuller matters
Fuller makes freedom psychological, intellectual, and social at once, while bringing a demanding critical voice to American literature and public life.