From within outwards. Self-culture and social reform in “Woman in the nineteenth century”

This article examines the use of self-culture in Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845) and sees it as inherently related to the calls for social reform that pervaded the works of American literary Romanticism from the 1830s to the start of the Civil War. Fuller’s Woman, now considered a manifesto of American feminism, is a unique example of transcendentalist ideas applied to gender issues. By exploring Fuller’s application of the concepts of self-culture and self-development, this essay wants to demonstrate that she uses this rather abstract notion to analyze and propose a solution to the condition of women in Antebellum America, thus advocating for a change that was meant to affect society and the nation as whole. I argue that her feminist self-culture is to be interpreted not as an end, but rather as a part of a circular process that aims at fostering social reform, thereby resolving the perceived opposition that seems to exist in Transcendentalism between individualist stances and communal reform efforts.