Woman in The Nineteenth Century - Criticism and Legacy

Criticism and Legacy

An 1860 essay collection, Historical Pictures Retouched, by Caroline Healey Dall, called Fuller's Woman in the Nineteenth Century "doubtless the most brilliant, complete, and scholarly statement ever made on the subject". The typically harsh literary critic Edgar Allan Poe wrote of the work as "a book which few women in the country could have written, and no woman in the country would have published, with the exception of Miss Fuller", noting its "independence" and "unmitigated radicalism". Henry David Thoreau thought highly of the book, suggesting that its strength came in part from Fuller's conversational ability. As he called it, it was "rich extempore writing, talking with pen in hand". In the Evening Post, William Cullen Bryant noted "the thoughts it puts forth are so important that we ought to rejoice to know it read by every man and woman in America" despite some "pretty strong" language.

The influential editor Rufus Wilmot Griswold, believing Fuller went against his notion of feminine modesty, referred to Woman in the Nineteenth Century as "an eloquent expression of her discontent at having been created female". American author Nathaniel Hawthorne, previously a supporter of Fuller, was critical of her after Woman of the Nineteenth Century was published. The same was true of his wife, Sophia Hawthorne, who had attended some of her "Conversations" in Boston. Of Woman in the Nineteenth Century, she wrote:

The impression it left was disagreeable. I did not like the tone of it—& did not agree with her at all about the change in woman's outward circumstances... Neither do I believe in such a character of man as she gives. It is altogether too ignoble... I think Margaret speaks of many things that should not be spoken of.

Woman in the Nineteenth Century, which has become one of the major documents in American feminism, is considered the first of its kind in the United States. Scholars have suggested Woman in the Nineteenth Century was the first major women's rights work since Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), beginning with a comparison between the two women made by George Eliot in her 1855 essay "Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft". Even so, Fuller's work is considered mainly literary today because oratory was more valued in the politics of her time. Oratory relied strictly on masculine conventions and women’s writing was generally sentimental literature. Sandra M. Gustafson writes in her article, “Choosing a Medium: Margaret Fuller and the Forms of Sentiment”, that Fuller’s greatest achievement with “The Great Lawsuit” and Woman in the Nineteenth Century is the assertion of the feminine through a female form, sentimentalism, rather than through a masculine form as some female orators used.