Key Collecting Areas: Collecting Margaret Fuller

61.  Margaret Fuller.  Woman in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Greeley & McElrath, 1845).

Women in the 19th century

Fuller’s feminist manifesto (a revision of her article “The Great Lawsuit” in the July 1843 Dial) is a call for equality of the sexes.   Among her astute psychological comments are those about how children can be gender-patterned in youth simply by identifying playthings as belonging to one sex or the other; her androgynous view of the human psyche—“There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman”; and her belief that women needed to be educated up from dependence and men up from mere idolatry—“We must have units before we can have unions,” a type of Emersonian self-reliance applied to interpersonal relations. Shown here is the Americal first edition of Women.

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