Margaret Fuller Influence On Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Through his book of essays, “Nature,” about the relationship between nature, man, and God, Ralph Waldo Emerson became the father figure of the transcendentalist period. “After the publication of his short treatise “Nature” in 1836, Emerson became the central figure of the transcendentalist movement in the United States and a guiding intellect for numerous American writers” (Source 1). Throughout his whole life, he disliked slavery. When living at Walden’s Pond for two years, Emerson urged Henry David Thoreau to keep a daily journal, which he turned into Walden, and influential Transcendentalist book about solitude in nature. Being purposeful and determined, Thoreau wrote “Civil Disobedience,” the transcendentalist doctrine about how a citizen …show more content…

In 1833, she began to publish essays in the Western Messenger, James Freeman Clarke’s journal, and in Boston papers. She worked at Bronson Alcott’s Temple school as a teacher from 1836 to 1837. Then for five winters, starting in 1839, Fuller held her conversations. Some of the women were Unitarians, and all were intellectuals and social activists. Since women had the same knowledge as men, but had little chance to express their thoughts, Fuller created a place where they could talk freely and express their thoughts on different matters. Using her funds from her conversations, she published a translation of Conversations with Goethe, by Eckermann. Also in 1839, Fuller became an editor for The Dial, where she ended up writing most of the material herself through reviews, critiques, and poetry. When Emerson took over editing The Dial in 1843, Fuller’s essay, “The Great Lawsuit: Man vs. Men and Woman vs. Women,” about women’s rights, was published. Her first book, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, included works from “The Great Lawsuit,” was her most influential Transcendentalist work. “A manifesto for the women’s rights movement, it revealed Fuller’s enormous knowledge of literature and philosophy as she described the oppression of the female sex through history and advocated equal status for women” (Source 7). Her book was inspired from her conversations, how women weren’t equal to