Common Human Nature

Born in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, on May 23, 1810, [Sarah] Margaret Fuller was well educated Greek and Latin by he father, Timothy Fuller, from a very young age. She even when to couple schools to continue her studies in German and Italian. However, after her father’s death, the family faced financial problems and Fuller was to teach her younger siblings. For two years, she taught school, but it limited the time for her to write. In 1839, she became close friends with most of the intellectual of Boston and Concord, especially Emerson, who she visited his home and taught him German. During 1840 to 1842, she worked with Emerson “as editor of The Dial a literary and philosophical journal for which she wrote many articles and reviews on art and literature” (Transcendentalism). After reading Fuller’s 1844 Web Site Summer on the Lakes, Horace Greeley asked if she wanted to join his newspaper as a book review editor in the New York Tribune. She became pretty successful and in 1845, she published, what became the classic of feminist thought, Woman in the Nineteenth Century.

In Jamie S. Crouse “’If They Have a Moral Power’: Margaret Fuller, Transcendentalism, and the Question of Women’s Moral Nature”, Crouse explain how Fuller was different in the way Fuller looked at women’s moral nature. The way Fuller argued was “as simply the development of human potential” (Crouse, 260). Doing so, Fuller shows women and men are essential related and share a common human nature. Crouse says that Fuller didn’t base her argument on “the popular belief of women’s moral power” (Crouse, 272). Taking the fight against slavery and women’s rights, Fuller says they are similar, however, they fight should be their own and not together (cited from a different version of Woman in the Nineteenth Century) “’There is a reason why the foes of American Slavery seek more freedom for women’ (167)” (Crouse). The women’s the nineteenth century thought that having having moral power was the way that would aid their cause. However, Fuller tells them that women should use whatever they had to get justice. Fuller tried to unit that “all human beings as souls in need of freedom to develop as souls” (Crouse, 277).

Work Cited
Crouse, Jamie S. “’It They Have a Moral Power’: Margaret Fuller, Transcendentalism, and the Question of Women’s Moral Nature”

Fuller, Margaret. Woman in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Dover, 1999. Print

[Sarah] Margaret Fuller 1810-1850. American Transcendentalism Web. Web. October 20, 2009