Woman thinking: Feminism and transcendentalism in nineteenth-century America

This dissertation, Woman Thinking: Feminism and Transcendentalism in Nineteenth-Century America by Tiffany K. Wayne, explores the theoretical relationship between feminism and Transcendentalism through the ideas and activism of Ednah Dow Cheney, Caroline Dall, Paulina Wright Davis, and Elizabeth Oakes Smith. Feminism and Transcendentalism were linked through the philosophical ideal of self-culture, which emphasized that all humans, regardless of sex, had the right to self-development and to the pursuit of a meaningful vocation. According to Ralph Waldo Emerson, the philosopher-scholar, or "Man Thinking," was the ideal state of being, the ideal vocation. Central to the self-realization of the women of this study was the right to an intellectual vocation. As theorists, they contributed to establishing a role for female intellectuals in nineteenth-century America. As reformers, they translated a philosophy and rhetoric of self-culture into an agenda promoting women's education and "right to think": a right they understood as a necessary precursor to social and political equality.; The community of women surrounding Margaret Fuller in the 1840s was directly linked to the first national woman's rights convention in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1850 and to the founding, in 1852, of The Una, the first paper dedicated specifically to the cause of woman. This is the first full-length study of The Una, where Transcendentalists theorized the relationship between gender ideology and the social reality of women's experience, providing the necessary link between our historical understanding of Transcendentalism as both a philosophy and a reform movement.; Finally, this dissertation challenges not only scholarly definitions of Transcendentalism that exclude women thinkers, but also its periodization. Women were prominent as lecturers and as attendees at Bronson Alcott's Concord School of Philosophy in the 1870s and 1880s, where they discussed Transcendentalist themes of self-culture, education, and vocation. Ultimately, this study combines the methodologies of traditionally disparate fields of women's and American intellectual history to argue that women thinkers were central to the continuing presence of Transcendentalist ideas in post-Civil War American intellectual culture.