Margaret Fuller Research Paper

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Isabel Orris John Wallace Major Essay # 3 July 17, 2011 Female Writers in the Nineteen-Century The nineteenth-century was a time of important changes in America: slave importation was prohibited, Louisiana and Florida were purchased, railroad, canal, and trail developments across the nation, inventions such as the steam locomotive, the cotton gin, the telegraph, the sewing machine, and the transatlantic cable, separation of the southern states from the Union and the subsequent Civil War, and women granted university degrees, among other. Although America was in the midst of an industrial revolution and on the way to become a world power, women did not play a major role politically, or economically. Women were relegated to domestic activities,…show more content…
Fuller would teach his daughter for her to be a self sufficient woman whose intellect were challenged constantly and thus could compete academically in a patriarchal world. Margaret learned how to read at the age of three and a half, and by the age of five she was translating small passages from Virgil. Her love for reading made her earned the reputation of the best-read person in New England by the age of thirty. Her devotion for the cause of women’s equality began after her father’s death when in the lack of a will, two of her uncles decided to handle the finances leaving her and her family penniless. She wrote at the time how she regretted to be “of the softer sex, and never more than now.” Her book Woman in the Nineteenth Century, initially published as an article in the magazine The Dial, has been considered the first major feminine manifesto. Written in a period when women were not allowed to even have a college education, Woman in the Nineteenth Century is based on the equal nature of man and woman derived from the divine love of God. To compensate the lack of education of women, she hosted meetings with other women in the Boston area to discuss and debate the real purpose of women in life and other topics such as mythology, philosophy, and fine arts. With these “conversations” she gained more widespread exposure and laid the seed in women’s minds about their place in the world. Her work focused basely in social reform instead of individual improvement, which is what makes her work different than those of the Transcendentalists at the
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