Close Friends Praise The Work Of Margaret Fuller

Close Friends Praise the Work of Margaret Fuller

Margaret Fuller’s work with the Women’s Right movement has impacted generations of women and has brought only praise and admiration from close friends.

James Freely Clark, a distant cousin and minister close to Fuller, said that engaging in conversation with her “could not merely entertain and inform, but make an epoch in one’s life.” Fuller published in essays in James Freely Clark’s journal, the Western Messenger.

Margaret Fuller’s most recognized literary work is Woman in the Nineteenth Century, which was published in 1845. This book had a great effect on the Women’s Rights movement and she received critical praise for it. Horace Greeley, publisher of New York Tribune, said that if Woman in the Nineteenth Century was “not the clearest and most logical, it was the loftiest and most commanding assertion yet made of the right of Woman to be regarded and treated as an independent, intelligent, rational well being, entitled to an equal voice in framing and modifying the laws she is required to obey, and in controlling and disposing of the property she has inherited or aided to acquire.” Greeley also said her work was the “ablest, bravest, broadest, assertion yet made of what are termed Woman’s Rights.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson originally had disliked her. He soon grew fond of Fuller, saying in a letter to Elizabeth Peabody that Fuller “has the quickest apprehension and immediately learned all we knew” and that she “had us at her mercy when she pleased to make us laugh. She has noble traits and powers and cannot fail of a permanent success.”

Prominent Women’s Rights leaders continued to celebrate Margaret Fuller’s accomplishments after