Margaret Fuller and the First Major Work of American Feminism — The Public Domain Review

That women should have the opportunity to experience as much as possible is precisely the argument she made in Woman in the Nineteenth Century. When the book appeared, Lydia Maria Child described it as “a contralto voice in literature: deep, rich, and strong”. She admired Fuller’s courage in questioning the inequity of marriage and admitted that “I should not have dared to have written some things in it, although it would have been safer for me, being married. But they need to have been said and she is brave to do it”. Child was responding to the kind of criticism levied by the one-time transcendentalist Orestes Brownson, who declared, “Miss Fuller thinks it is man who has crowded woman to one side, and refused her full scope for self-development; and although the sphere in which she moves may really be that most appropriate to her, yet man has no right to confine her to it, and forbid her to take another if she prefer it . . . All very plausible. But God, and not man, has assigned her the appropriate sphere”. As news of the book spread, it roused the curiosity of Mary Moody Emerson, who called its author “The Fuller”. From Maine, she wrote her nephew Waldo, asking, “Have you Fuller’s ‘Woman.’ I am longing to see it, & Brownson’s review of it. I want something exciting”.