SOURCE: Gilbert, Armida. “‘Pierced by the Thorns of Reform’: Emerson on Womanhood.” In The Emerson Dilemma: Essays on Emerson and Social Reform, edited by T. Gregory Garvey, pp. 93-114. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001.

In the following essay, Gilbert considers the influence of Ralph Waldo Emerson on the struggle for expanded women's rights in nineteenth-century America.

In order to understand Emerson's developing attitudes toward the woman's rights movement, it is necessary to appreciate the way in which the movement began, grew, and changed and the issues around which the early debates were centered. Before even the earliest stages of the woman's rights movement in America, Emerson had been introduced to the ideas that would inform it, especially through the pioneering work of his friend Margaret Fuller. As explained by her, first in “The Great Lawsuit,—Man Versus Men, Woman Versus Women” in the Transcendentalist literary journal The Dial...