Emerson and the Woman Question: The Evolution of His Thought
[In the following essay, Gougeon summarizes Emerson's views on the women's liberation movement.]
In a newspaper article celebrating the one-hundredth anniversary of Emerson's birth, Thomas Wentworth Higginson complained that those who knew Mr. Emerson in the light of a reformer, as he surely did, would find precious little information “given in that direction by his biographers.”1 Noting the generally conservative character of the two most influential and popular biographies of Emerson, those by Oliver Wendell Holmes and James Elliot Cabot,2 Higginson was particularly distressed over their “constitutional reticence” in discussing the philosopher's role in both the antislavery and women's movements. “It was a well-known fact,” Higginson observed, “that Mr. Emerson spoke several times at woman suffrage conventions, and this cordially and sympathetically. Yet,” he says, “this is not mentioned in Mr. Cabot's memoir.” If Higginson were to return today he would find that scant progress has been made in the biographical treatment of Emerson's views on the “Woman Question.” While serious efforts have recently been made to recover the record of Emerson's important activities in the antislavery movement, very little is presently known about his contributions to the cause of women's rights.3 Emerson's only published work on the topic is the well-known lecture he delivered before the women's rights convention in Boston on 20 September 1855. The address, titled simply “Woman,” was first published, in part, in the Woman's Journal in 1881 and later, in its entirety, in both the 1883 and 1903-4 Centenary Edition of Emerson's Complete Works.4 Our understanding of Emerson's public views on an important question of his day has, thus, been confined to this single source.
In editing the 1855 “Woman” address for publication in the 1903-4 Centenary Edition of his father's writings, Edward Waldo Emerson responded to Higginson's criticism of Cabot's Memoir. Cabot, in addition to being Emerson's biographer, was also his literary executor and worked with Edward and Emerson's older daughter, Ellen, in preparing various works for publication both before and after Emerson's death.5 In his “Notes” to the reprinted version of “Woman” in the Centenary Edition, Edward stated that “the only other address on the subject which is known to exist Mr. Cabot did not print probably because Mr. Emerson never delivered it.”6 In fact, the brief address Edward titles “Discours Manqué” and reproduces from manuscript in the Notes (11:627-30) was delivered. On 26 May 1869, at Boston's Horticultural Hall, Emerson joined Wendell Phillips, William Lloyd Garrison, Paulina Wright Davis, and Julia Ward Howe, all prominent advocates of women's rights, and others to celebrate the anniversary of the New England Woman's Suffrage Association. An account of the proceedings, including Emerson's brief speech, is registered in the Boston Post.7 Before turning to the Post's record, however, it is interesting to speculate about what may have led Emerson to that podium by reflecting on the evolution of his thinking on the Woman Question.
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Emerson's involvement with the women's movement, although initiated at a later date, approximates the trajectory of his experience with the antislavery movement. Both began with a troubled concern, moved to a reserved commitment, and culminated in unambiguous support. While committed to social reform his entire life, Emerson was always resistant to organized efforts to address a single social ill. He sought a comprehensive reform of American society and this, he felt, could be accomplished only if individuals thoroughly reformed themselves.8 Thus, in his 1844 lecture “New England Reformers,” he stated rather caustically, “when we see an eager assailant of one of these wrongs, a special reformer, we feel like asking him, What right have you, sir, to your one virtue? Is virtue piece-meal? This is a jewel amidst the rags of a beggar.”9
Emerson also objected to the organizational structure of specific reform efforts. In his view, all organizations tend, by their very nature, to compromise the independence of individual members and also to aggrandize certain leaders. In his 1840 lecture “Reforms,” he cautioned, “Accept the reforms but accept not the person of the reformer nor his law. Accept the reform but be thou thyself sacred, intact, inviolable, one whom leaders, one whom multitudes cannot drag from thy central seat. If you take the reform as the reformer brings it to you he transforms you into an instrument.”10 Despite these reservations, however, antislavery drew Emerson irresistibly, and from the mid-1840s to the Civil War, he was an increasingly strong advocate of the cause. Something similar would happen with the women's movement.
After first experiencing the benefits of organization through their involvement in the antislavery movement, women began to organize to secure their own rights in the late 1840s. The seminal event, of course, was the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848.11 Thereafter, women began to form activist groups throughout the nation. As the virtual center of the abolition movement, Massachusetts had more than its share. In August 1850, Paulina Wright Davis sent Emerson a copy of a call for the women's rights convention to be held in Worcester, Massachusetts, and appended to it a handwritten note requesting “the sanction of your name and your personal attendance.” She signed it, “Yours with much respect, Paulina W. Davis.”12 It is not clear what prompted Davis to solicit Emerson's support at this time, but it is entirely likely that she was aware of his increasingly active role in the antislavery movement and hoped for a similarly sympathetic response to her cause.
Emerson was personally aware of women's special contributions to the antislavery movement. He considered Lucretia Mott a “noble woman,” and he had a high regard for Harriet Martineau, the British social reformer and antislavery advocate. His own wife, mother, and, eventually, daughters were early activists in the Women's Anti-slavery Society established in Concord in 1835, and when the Grimké sisters, Angelina and Sarah, lectured on antislavery in Concord, they stayed at the Emersons' home. Emerson's Aunt Mary Moody Emerson, a significant intellectual influence throughout his life, was also an early convert to the cause and encouraged her nephew to make a similar commitment. These women, along with Henry Thoreau's mother and sisters, also members of the Concord Women's Anti-slavery Society, eventually persuaded Emerson to compose his first significant abolition address, “Emancipation in the British West Indies,” delivered in Concord on 1 August 1844.13
Emerson's reputation as an antislavery advocate was growing throughout the late 1840s, and Davis was undoubtedly aware that his third address celebrating West Indian Emancipation was received in Worcester just a year earlier by a crowd estimated to be over five thousand.14 Clearly Emerson would be quite a catch for her cause, and Davis's expectations must have mounted as summer waned. On 18 September, Emerson sent his response:
I have waited a very long time since I had your letter, because I had no clear answer to give, and now I write rather that I may not neglect your letter, than because I have anything very material to say. The fact of the political & civil wrongs of woman I deny not. If women feel wronged, then they are wronged. But the mode of obtaining a redress, namely, a public convention called by women is not very agreeable to me, and the things to be agitated for do not seem to me the best. Perhaps I am superstitious & traditional, but whilst I should vote for every franchise for women,—vote that they should hold property, and vote, yes & be eligible to all offices as men—whilst I should vote thus, if women asked, or if men denied … these things, I should not wish women to wish political functions, nor, if granted assume them. I imagine that a woman whom all men would feel to be the best, would decline such privileges if offered, & feel them to be obstacles to her legitimate influence.15
Emerson's reservations have nothing to do with the right of women to vote, hold property or public office, or generally enjoy the full benefits of citizenship. He fears, rather, that a public role will de-feminize the fairer sex. As Ralph Rusk comments, Emerson “hoped that women would not after all wish an equal share with men in public affairs,” for “his imagination balked when he pictured women with masculine aggressiveness wrangling in public.”16 Robert Richardson suggests that in this matter Emerson's views were very similar to Margaret Fuller's. He notes that Fuller had written in “The Great Lawsuit,” which was the forerunner of Woman in the Nineteenth Century, that “Were they [women] free, were they wise fully to develop the strength and beauty of woman, they would never wish to be men, or man-like.”17 While holding fast to his principles, however, Emerson stopped short of condemning Davis's plan. Indeed, he conceded her right to go forward and pledged a measure of support: “At all events, that I may not stand in the way of any right you are at liberty if you wish it to use my name as one of the inviters of the convention, though I shall not attend it, & shall regret that it is not rather a private meeting of thoughtful persons sincerely interested, instead of what a public meeting is pretty sure to be a heartless noise which we are all ashamed of when it is over.”
The following year, 1851, Lucy Stone invited Emerson to another convention for women's rights, also to be held in Worcester. He again declined, but this time he excused himself by noting that he was working on a biography of Margaret Fuller, who had died tragically in May 1850 and whose Woman in the Nineteenth Century was already becoming a classic of feminist literature.18 Expressing full support for the principles of the women's movement in his journal at the time, Emerson observed, “I think that, as long as they have not equal rights of property & right of voting, they are not on a right footing.” He continued, however, “For the rest, I do not think a woman's convention, called in the spirit of this at Worcester, can much avail. It is an attempt to manufacture public opinion, & of course repels all persons who love the simple & direct method.” That “simple & direct method” involves the more or less private exercise of the feminine sensibility, the power of sentiment that would, in turn, have a renewing effect on the entire society. Thus, Emerson goes on to comment, “If it were possible to repair the rottenness of human nature, to provide a rejuvenescence, all were well, & no specific reform, no legislation would be needed. For as soon as you have a sound & beautiful woman, a figure in the style of the Antique Juno, Diana, Pallas, Venus, & the Graces, all falls into place, the men are magnetised, heaven opens, & no lawyer need be called in to prepare a clause, for woman moulds the lawgiver.”19 Emerson would later include some of these observations in “Woman.”
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Others attempting to coax Emerson into a more activist position on the Woman Question undoubtedly took heart from the increasing intensity of his public pronouncements on the slavery issue following the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in September 1850. Emerson's first public response to the law was a letter published in the Liberator on 18 April 1851 which urged defiance of “the detestable statute of the last Congress.”20 The next month he delivered an address on the subject, the most vitriolic of his career, which he repeated on several occasions throughout the spring of 1851 as a stump oration in support of John Gorham Palfrey's campaign for Congress on the Free Soil ticket.21 This highly untypical action by a man who generally avoided the degrading realm of politics reflects the level of Emerson's anxiety over the new aggressiveness of the slave states.
One of those who undoubtedly took notice of Emerson's waxing zeal was Wendell Phillips, the most eloquent of the abolitionist orators, a man Emerson genuinely admired.22 In January 1853 Phillips wrote to Emerson indicating that it had not been forgotten that he had signed the circular calling for the first women's convention in Massachusetts three years earlier and asking permission to use his name to help draw signatures for a petition to be laid before the state constitutional convention.23 After considering it, Emerson declined Phillips's request. His explanation is revealing:
I read the Petition with attention, & with the hope that I should find myself so happy as to do what you bade me. But this is my feeling in regard to the whole matter: I wish that done for their rights which women wish done. If they wish to vote, I shall vote that they vote. If they wish to be lawyers & judges, I shall vote that those careers be opened to them But I do not think that wise & wary women wish to be electors or judges; and I will not ask that they be made such against their will If we obtain for them the ballot, I suppose the best women would not vote. By all means let their rights of property be put on the same basis as those of men, or, I should say, on a more favorable ground. And let women go to women, & bring us certain tidings what they want, & it will be imperative on me & on us all to help them get it.24
In certain respects, Emerson's position resembles the arguments of those who successfully opposed the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s.25 He does not want women forced into accepting the social role and social obligations of males, which today would include being subject to the military draft and in his time involved, more immediately, voting and serving as electors and judges. In other words, Emerson did not feel that the best women would want to participate in the sordid game of politics and, certainly, should not be compelled to do so by the democratic obligations of citizenship. If, however, women decided among themselves that they truly wanted to exercise those rights, Emerson would be moved to support them.
In his response, Phillips addressed Emerson's concerns. “Giving the ballot does not oblige any woman to vote,” he reminded the Concordian. “Making women eligible to office does not oblige any one to take office. But if responsibility & interest in great questions be one of the best means of education for the masses—we want women to enjoy that advantage as well as men.” Phillips goes on to note, “You speak decidedly as to propriety—Is it either wise or republican to make one class or sex dependent for their rights in that respect, on the magnanimity or sense of justice of another class or sex—.” Phillips ends his appeal by asking Emerson to forgive him for “troubling you with all this,” but, he insists, “It only shows how sincere I believe your note & how confidently I expect your name on some future occasion.”26
Such appeals, as well as Emerson's accelerating participation in the antislavery movement throughout the early 1850s, undoubtedly had their impact. In June 1855 Paulina Davis once again asked Emerson to participate in the Second Annual New England Women's Rights Convention.
A meeting was last week held in Boston by several persons engaged in the Woman's Rights Movement at which I was appointed Committee to Correspond with yourself and others relative to a larger meeting to be held in Boston the third week in September. A very unanimous desire was expressed that you should occupy one evening of the day set apart for that gathering, in giving an expression of your views in relation to the great questions involved in this movement in which the whole human race are so deeply interested.
From your well known antecedents we have taken it for granted that your heart is with us, and that you have a message which will aid, cheer, and strengthen us in progress toward perfect freedom and the highest right.27
This time Mrs. Davis's appeal fell on a more sympathetic ear, and the result is Emerson's “Woman” address. Why he decided to speak on the topic at this time is not perfectly clear, but we might surmise that his continuing involvement in the antislavery movement, in which women played a major role, had something to do with it. Despite the reservations noted earlier, Emerson was becoming less reluctant to speak out on specific social issues, especially the growing slavery crisis. In 1854 he delivered his second address on the Fugitive Slave Law, which was only slightly less vitriolic than the first, and in 1855 he incorporated a major “Lecture on Slavery” into his regular lecture offerings, presenting it on several occasions.28 Of course, issues of individual freedom were involved in the plight of both slaves and women, and Emerson's efforts to articulate that basic human right may be the “well known antecedents” which led Davis to presume a positive response. The convention's roster of major speakers—which included Wendell Phillips, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Lucy Stone, Caroline Dall, Antoinette L. Brown, and Susan B. Anthony—may also have been persuasive. By this time, Phillips and Higginson had become Emerson's comrades-in-arms in the antislavery movement, and Dall was a protegée of Margaret Fuller's. Moreover, the purpose of the convention was to report, state by state, on the status of New England's laws relating to women's property rights, and Emerson's views on that topic were not in the least ambiguous, as his address, and his earlier comments, make clear.29
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Emerson's “Woman” address has always been somewhat problematic for feminist scholars because in it his emphatic support for the principles of women's rights is matched by equally strong reservations about the wisdom of fully exercising those rights. Women have qualities, he insists, that may prove vulnerable to the hurly-burly of politics. Soon after opening his address, Emerson invokes the authority of the classics. “Plato said, Women are the same as men in faculty, only less in degree. But the general voice of mankind has agreed that they have their own strength; that women are strong by sentiment; that the same mental height which their husbands attain by toil, they attain by sympathy with their husbands. Man is the will, and Woman the sentiment” (11:406-7). For Emerson, the power of sentiment is not insignificant. In fact, it is an expression of mankind's intuitive strength and divinity, one of the core tenets of transcendentalism. For women, this power expresses itself in marriage, art, and education, and through those activities, women play a fundamental part in shaping society. Emerson summarizes this position when he states, “Women are, by this and their social influence, the civilizers of mankind. What is civilization? I answer, the power of good women” (11:409). It is this sensitivity that Emerson fears will be compromised if women pursue a more public role. Still, the essential value of their public participation in the antislavery movement could not be denied. As he notes, “Another step [in the progress of woman in society] was the effect of the action of the age in the antagonism to Slavery. It was easy to enlist Woman in this; it was impossible not to enlist her. But that Cause turned out to be a great scholar. He was a terrible metaphysician. He was a jurist, a poet a divine. Was never a University of Oxford or Göttingen that made such students. It took a man from the plow and made him acute, eloquent, and wise, to the silencing of the doctors. There was nothing it did not pry into, no right it did not explore, no wrong it did not expose. And it has, among its other effects, given Woman a feeling of public duty and an added self-respect” (11:416).
In Emerson's view, women's sympathetic involvement in antislavery had led naturally to their demands for a greater share of rights for themselves as well. He notes, “One truth leads in another by the hand; one right is an accession of strength to take more. And the times are marked by the new attitude of Woman; urging, by argument and by association, her rights of all kinds,—in short, to one half of the world;—as the right to education, to avenues of employment, to equal rights of property, to equal rights in marriage, to the exercise of the professions and of suffrage” (11:416). On all of these issues Emerson is in complete philosophical agreement, and he is unambiguous in his affirmation: Women “have an unquestionable right to their own property. And if a woman demand votes, offices and political equality with men … it must not be refused” (11:419). Nonetheless, what is theoretically sound may not be practically so. “The answer that lies, silent or spoken, in the minds of well-meaning persons, to the new claims, is this: that though their mathematical justice is not to be denied, yet the best women do not wish these things; they are asked for by people who intellectually seek them, but who have not the support or sympathy of the truest women; and that, if the laws and customs were modified in the manner proposed, it would embarrass and pain gentle and lovely persons with duties which they would find irksome and distasteful” (11:418-19).
It is not clear with what justification Emerson generalizes his own concerns, expressed earlier in journal comments and letters to Paulina Davis and Wendell Phillips, to “well-meaning persons” at large, but he does go on to answer various specific objections against women's voting, maintaining that the whole process would be much improved through their participation. His concluding comments, however, fall short of a whole-hearted endorsement. “I do not think it yet appears that women wish this equal share in public affairs. But it is they and not we that are to determine it. Let the laws be purged of every barbarous remainder, every barbarous impediment to women. Let the public donations for education be equally shared by them, let them enter a school as freely as a church, let them have and hold and give their property as men do theirs;—and in a few years it will easily appear whether they wish a voice in making the laws that are to govern them” (11:423-24). In the final analysis, Emerson advocates a form of gradualism in the allocation of women's rights. First equal education and property rights, then voting rights, if women so wish. Overall, however, it is women who must dictate the process and the outcome.
Although Emerson's position may appear to be less than liberal by today's standards, during his time he was in the vanguard of women's rights advocates, for he stated unequivocally that men have no right to withhold from women the rights they demand. Commentators then and now, however, have shown mixed reactions to the 1855 address. An article appearing in The Boston Traveller the next day observed, “The Convention closed last night by a public meeting at the Melodeon, the chief attraction at which consisted in an Address from Ralph Waldo Emerson, and a Poem by Mrs. E. Oakes Smith. The place was crowded, many gentlemen being present who had come with the irreverent motive of laughing at the proceedings.” The writer then goes on to note, “Mr. Emerson was introduced, and delivered a very fine oration, full of mythic grandeur and nonsense, but redeemed by passages of great beauty and brilliance. On the whole, it told far more against ‘the cause’ than for it.”30 Echoing the same sentiment, one contemporary critic describes the address as one which “turned out full of ambivalence and ambiguity and could hardly have satisfied anyone.”31 Another observes that “from a late-twentieth-century perspective, at least, the lecture ‘Woman’ seems at best condescending.”32 A third critic points out that “this lecture remains obscure even though it is one of the first lectures in support of the woman's movement to be given by a major literary figure.” She goes on to note that, “Ironically, but somehow in keeping with this bias, Emerson's lecture has been attacked by feminist critics for its failure to supply a strong foundational ‘feminism.’”33
Paulina Davis, however, was effusive in expressing to Emerson her gratitude for his address:
At the close of our meeting I thanked you almost coldly as it seemed to me at the time for your noble words to that audience, but my heart was too full for utterance—There was no language for it but tears and the “public eye” restrained them till in the sacredness of my room I could let them flow while I thanked our Father for his truth and love.
Our committee met on the following day and I was desired by them to express to you their cordial thanks for your ready compliance with their invitation and for the good service done to our Cause; and at the same time they desired me to request the favor of the address or such parts of it as you might be disposed to have published. … We should like to announce that the address will be published should you be so disposed.34
In her journal, prominent feminist Caroline Dall, who helped organize and preside over the convention, described Emerson's lecture as “his finished poem.” Writing him a short time later, she hoped that he had been properly thanked for his “beautiful address” and that he had been asked to provide a copy for publication. Placing Emerson's words in context, she told him:
It did not trouble me that some of the papers thought it doubtful, whether you were for us or against us. That was only because they were too heavy to breathe that upper air. Neither was I inclined to quarrel with your estimate of woman per se, though it differs somewhat from my own. In the lowest sense—it has been true of the best women of the past. In one far higher, it may be true of the best that are to come. That they are fully capable of becoming “innocent citizens” was all we needed you should admit.35
It is not clear whether Emerson forwarded his address for publication or not. It is possible that he felt that such occasional forays into the realm of public controversy did not constitute a sufficiently polished example of his social thinking, for he always preferred his more philosophical and circumspect treatments of various subjects such as are represented in his Essays. After delivering his 1844 antislavery address, “Emancipation in the British West Indies,” for example, he told Thomas Carlyle that “though I sometimes accept a popular call, & preach on Temperance or the Abolition of slavery, as lately on the First of August, I am sure to feel before I have done with it, what an intrusion it is into another sphere & so much loss of virtue in my own.”36 Indeed, many of Emerson's antislavery addresses were not published in his lifetime. One of the most important, the 1855 “Lecture on Slavery,” was not published until 1995.37 It is also possible that Emerson felt that the publication of detailed accounts of his presentation, such as that found in the Boston Telegraph, sufficiently indicated his views.38
Other than repeating his “Woman” address before the Parker Fraternity on 2 December 1860, Emerson apparently offered no further formal public statement on the Woman Question for fourteen years.39 It is entirely possible that he was preoccupied with his continuing service in the cause of antislavery, which was, in its own way, also the cause of woman. Caroline Dall felt that Emerson's views on the Woman Question continued to liberalize following his 1855 address. On 12 February 1858, Dall addressed a joint committee of the Massachusetts legislature on the subject of women's rights. She was pleased when, some two months later, Emerson complimented her on her presentation, which he had read and admired.40 In his 1867 “Progress of Culture” lecture to the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard, Emerson heralded the women's movement as a sign of America's advancement. “The new claim of woman to a political status,” he said, “is itself an honorable testimony to the civilization which has given her a civil status new in history.” The progressive development of women's rights, which he had envisioned in his 1855 address, was now nearing its conclusion. “Now that by the increased humanity of law she controls her property, she inevitably takes the next step to her share in power” (8:208). Dall, who attended the event, was delighted when Emerson “turned slightly” towards her while making this comment.41
Emerson's evolving views on the Woman Question were undoubtedly influenced by a number of factors. Women's contributions to the campaign against slavery, and their unselfish labors in support of the Union cause, continued to impress him. Moreover, these activist women seemed to suffer no diminution of their sympathetic capacities; in fact, abolitionism seemed to provide them with a proper sphere for exercising those qualities. Thus, early in the Civil War, in January 1862, when Emerson traveled to Washington to promote emancipation, a Unionist goal that would not be officially declared for another nine months, he acknowledged the vital role of women in the cause. In the context of his speech on “American Civilization,” Emerson asserts that there have always been two distinct cultures in America, “the feudal one of the slave States, and the progressive one of the free States.” Among the characteristics of the superior civilization of the North, Emerson notes the prevalence of road building, commerce, agriculture, the post office, a cheap press, the division of labor, and “the right position of woman in society.” This last point was made emphatically enough that one reporter later commented that “The lecturer had thought that it was a sufficient definition of civilization to term it the influence of good women,” a point he had made seven years earlier in his “Woman” address.42 In more specific terms, Emerson was quite aware of the inestimable service rendered by women through the Sanitary Commission, as nurses, administrators, and inspectors; through the Freedman's Bureau, as teachers of emancipated slaves; and through the various “home front” organizations, which provided supplies ranging from clothing to bandages for the Union army. Concord's was one of the most active of these organizations, and all the Emerson women took part in it.43 In his 1863 address, “Fortune of the Republic,” Emerson observed that “the women have shown a tender patriotism, and an inexhaustible charity.”44
Following the war, the women's suffrage movement continued to gain momentum. The abolition of slavery having been achieved, reformers focused their attentions on a campaign to liberate American women. The similarities between the two causes seemed obvious and compelling to many. Harriet Beecher Stowe, for example, noted in an article on “The Woman Question,” published in Hearth and Home, that “The position of a married woman, under English common law, is, in many respects, precisely similar to that of the negro slave.”45 Aware, no doubt, of Emerson's notable service in the cause of antislavery, and his previous contributions to the cause of women's rights, activists once more appealed to him for public support. He was persuaded. Emerson agreed to speak, for the second time in his career, on the Woman Question. The complete text of his 1869 speech is as follows:
Ladies and Gentlemen—It seems unnecessary to add any words to the statements and arguments which you have already heard, and I certainly shall do but little more than to express my sympathy and my delight in the rightness of this movement—the rightness of this action, as it is shown by the discourses which you have just listened to. There seems little to say and it ought directly be put to vote. I think that the action of this Society, the sentiment of this assembly, is by no means a whim; but is an organized policy—slow, cumulative, and reaching a greater height of health and strength than hitherto. I think we all feel the necessity of the admission into our colleges of the two partners in the activity of this world. We look upon the man as the representative of intellect and the woman as the representative of affection; but each shares the characteristics of the other, only in the man one predominates and in the woman the other. We know woman as affectionate, as religious, as oracular, as delighting in grace and order possessed of taste. In all ages woman has been the representative of religion. In all countries it is the women who fill the temples. In every religious movement the woman has been an active and powerful part, not only in those in the most civilized, but in the most uncivilized countries; not less in the Mahommedan than the Greek and Roman religions. She holds a man to religion. There is no man so reprobate, so careless of religious duty, but what delights to have his wife a saint. All men feel the advantages that abound of that quality in a woman. I think it was her instinct in the dark superstitions of the Middle Ages which tempered the hardness of the theology by making the Virgin Mary, the mother of God, the intercessor to whom all prayers were directed. My own feeling is that in all ages woman has held substantially the same influence. I think that superior women are rare as superior men are rare. I think that women feel when they are in the press, as men of genius are said to do among energetic workers,—that they see through all these efforts with finer eyes than their noisy masters. I think that all men in the presence of the best women feel over-looked and judged, and sometimes sentenced. They are the educators in all our society. Through their sympathy and quickness they are the proper mediators between those who have knowledge and those who want it; but what I would say is that in this movement an important part of the history of woman is the history of the Quakers, and then of the Shakers, who gave an equal part of their power to the elderess and the elder, and so made active and instructed workmen and workwomen in social and public affairs. When the great enterprise of recent civilization, the putting down of slavery,—of that institution, so called, was done, it was done, as you know, in this country, by a society whose executive committee was composed of men and women, and every step was taken by both. So they hung together till success was achieved. This was getting instruction of our sisters in the direction and control of important affairs, and now at the moment when we are agitating the question of how to save society from the threatened mischief of the invasion of the purity of the ballot, by corrupt and purchased votes, and thus stultifying the will of the honest community—now, at this moment, woman asks for her vote. If the vote is to be granted to woman, and certainly it must be, then we must arrange to have the voting clean and honest and polite. The State must build houses, instead of dirty rooms and corner shops; the State must build palaces and halls in which women can deposit their votes in the presence of their sons and brothers and fathers. The effect of that reform upon the general voting of the State all can feel. But it isn't for me at this time, after what you have heard, to detain you longer. I only feel the gladness with which such representations as you have heard, such arguments as you have heard, inspire me. It is certain that what is not given to-day will be given to-morrow, and what is asked for this year will be given in the next year; if not in the next year then in the next lustrum. The claim now pressed by woman is a claim for nothing less than all, than her share in all. She asks for her property; she asks for her rights, for her vote; she asks for her share in education, for her share in all the institutions of society, for her half of the whole world; and to this she is entitled.46
Despite his well-known reservations about organized reform efforts, at the conclusion of the meeting Ralph Waldo Emerson allowed himself to be elected a vice-president of the New England Woman's Suffrage Association.47
While there are some similarities between the 1869 address and the 1855 “Woman,” it is obvious that Emerson's position on the Woman Question had changed significantly. One of the most striking differences between this and the earlier address is the total lack of qualification regarding women's right to full participation in the political process. Emerson leaves no doubt that women, even the best women, want and deserve the right to vote. Indeed, they are not just entitled to but have earned their rights. In the manuscript version of the speech, Emerson refers specifically to the means by which they have done so. “Civilization is progressive,” he notes. “One truth leads in another by the hand, & her activity in putting an end to Slavery; & in serving the Hospitals of the Sanitary Commission in the war & in the labors of the Freedman's bureau have opened her eyes to larger rights & duties. They claim now her full rights of all kinds,—to education, to employment to equal laws of property.”48
In addition to their exemplary service, women had, as Emerson stipulated in his 1855 address, demonstrated their commitment to securing their own rights, and they had done so patiently. “[I]n a few years it will easily appear whether they wish a voice in making the laws that are to govern them” (11:424), Emerson had stated in 1855. The years had passed, and it was now manifest that women, indeed, did want the right to vote, and they had said so consistently and eloquently, both in public and, as Emerson must have surmised from his own experience, in private as well. His wife, Lidian, “became a strong supporter of women's rights,” according to Robert Richardson, while daughter Edith was in favor, and only Ellen opposed.49 Emerson's views of what “the best women” might want as their proper rights having thus altered and the terms for offering his support having been fulfilled, he held true to his promise to affirm women's right to vote without hesitation or qualification.
Following his 1869 address, and to the end of his life in 1882, Emerson was consistently regarded as a friend to the cause of women's rights. Shortly after his address, Harriet Beecher Stowe approached Emerson about the possibility of writing a two-column article on woman suffrage for Hearth and Home, for which he would be paid fifty dollars. She indicated in her letter that his name and philosophical balance might win the ear of “fastidious circles” and “take [suffrage] out of the sphere of ridicule into that of rational consideration.” Emerson declined the request, citing other commitments that demanded all of his available time.50
Numerous articles in the Woman's Journal, a suffragist publication, testified over the next several years that Emerson was held in high esteem by the women reformers who knew him.51 Their admiration is conveyed in a memorial article, written by Julia Ward Howe, which was published in May 1882, just weeks after his death. It stands as a fitting conclusion to our examination of Emerson and the Woman Question.
Among all of Mr. Emerson's great merits, we of this Journal must especially mention his loyalty to woman. As tenderly conservative in nature as he was boldly original in thought, Mr. Emerson would have shrunk most sensitively from any infraction of the sacred sphere of womanhood. He knew and cherished all the feminine graces. But justice, as well as beauty, was to him a feminine ideal. He believed in woman's power to hold and adjust for herself the scales in which character is weighed against attraction. At more than one woman suffrage meeting, he has entered his protest against the political inequality which still demoralizes society. Some of us remember the sweet naif manner in which he did this, the sincerity and the measure with which he spoke, as if urged and restrained by a weight of conviction which called for simple and solemn utterance.
He was for us, knowing well enough our limitations and short-comings, and his golden words have done much both to fit us for the larger freedom, and to know that it belongs to us.52
Notes
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“Emerson as the Reformer,” Boston Daily Advertiser, 23 May 1903, p. 1. Higginson (1823-1911), an 1847 graduate of Harvard Divinity School, left the ministry, in part because of the unpopularity of his strong antislavery views. He participated in the 1854 forceful and unsuccessful attempt to free fugitive slave Anthony Burns from a Federal Court House in Boston, and he served as a colonel in a Negro Regiment during the Civil War. He was, like many abolitionists, a strong supporter of women's rights. In 1896 he presented to the Boston Public Library his “Galatea collection of books relating to the history of women,” numbering about one thousand volumes.
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Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1884); James Elliot Cabot, A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1887).
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Emerson's substantial contributions to the antislavery movement are documented in detail in my Virtue's Hero: Emerson, Antislavery, and Reform (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990) as well as my and Joel Myerson's edition of Emerson's Antislavery Writings (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). Emerson's social reform activities also receive substantial consideration in such recent biographies and studies as Robert Richardson's Emerson: The Mind on Fire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); David Robinson's Emerson and the Conduct of Life (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Merton M. Sealts, Jr.'s Emerson on the Scholar (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992); and Barbara Ryan's “Emerson's ‘Domestic and Social Experiments’: Service, Slavery, and the Unheard Man,” American Literature 66 (September 1994): 485-508.
The political ramifications of Emerson's reform philosophy are considered in John Carlos Rowe's At Emerson's Tomb: The Politics of Classic American Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Richard Teichgraeber's Sublime Thoughts/Penny Wisdom: Situating Emerson and Thoreau in the American Market (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); Stanley Cavell's Philosophical Passages (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1995); and George Kateb's Emerson and Self-Reliance (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Press, 1995).
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See Joel Myerson, Ralph Waldo Emerson: A Descriptive Bibliography (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1982), pp. 375, 680.
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For a comprehensive discussion of Cabot's seminal role in shaping, or misshaping, the Emerson canon in the late nineteenth century, see Nancy Craig Simmons, “Arranging the Sibylline Leaves: James Elliot Cabot's Work as Emerson's Literary Executor,” in Studies in the American Renaissance, ed. Joel Myerson (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1983), pp. 335-89.
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The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Edward Waldo Emerson, 12 vols. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1903-4), 11:625-26. All subsequent references to this edition of Emerson's works will appear parenthetically in the text.
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Boston Post, 27 May 1869, p. 1. A brief account of Emerson's address also appears in the Springfield Republican, 27 May 1869, p. 2, and the Boston Daily Advertiser, 27 May 1869, p. 1.
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For a detailed discussion of Emerson's philosophy of reform, see my Virtue's Hero.
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The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Alfred R. Ferguson et al., 5 vols. to date (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971-), 3:155.
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The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Robert Spiller et al., 3 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959-72), 3:260.
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For a full accounting of this important gathering, see The Birth of American Feminism: The Seneca Falls Woman's Convention of 1848, ed. Virginia Bernhard and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese (St. James, N.Y.: Brandywine Press, 1995).
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Pauline W. Davis to Ralph Waldo Emerson, [August 1850], bMS Am 1280 (775), Ms. Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. Quoted by permission of the Houghton Library and the Ralph Waldo Emerson Memorial Association. Paulina Wright Davis (1813-76) was a prominent feminist leader who once participated in Margaret Fuller's Boston “Conversations.” See Charles Capper, Margaret Fuller, An American Romantic Life: The Private Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 306.
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See my Virtue's Hero, pp. 361, 29, 10, 27-28, 25-26. See also Gougeon and Myerson, Emerson's Antislavery Writings, p. xxxvii, and, for the 1844 Emancipation Address, pp. 7-33. For a detailed discussion of Mary Moody Emerson's antislavery interests, see Phyllis Cole, Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendentalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
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Gougeon and Myerson, Emerson's Antislavery Writings, p. 211. For the complete address, see pp. 47-50.
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The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Ralph Rusk and Eleanor Tilton, 10 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939-95), 4:229-30. Excerpts from this letter were published by Cabot in his Memoir (pp. 455-56) to indicate Emerson's views on the women's movement generally. Many advocates of women's rights, in addition to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, objected to that choice as a gross misrepresentation.
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Ralph Rusk, The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949), p. 370.
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Richardson, Emerson: Mind on Fire, p. 533.
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Gay Wilson Allen, Waldo Emerson: A Biography (New York: Viking Press, 1981), p. 559. Emerson's letter to Lucy Stone was published in the New York Tribune, 17 October 1851, p. 7. See also Emerson's Letters, 8:288.
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The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. William H. Gilman et al., 16 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960-82), 11:444.
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See Gougeon and Myerson, Emerson's Antislavery Writings, pp. 51-52, for the letter.
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For the story of Emerson's only political campaign, see my Virtue's Hero, pp. 166-67. For the address, formally titled “An Address to the Citizens of Concord on the Fugitive Slave Law,” see Gougeon and Myerson, Emerson's Antislavery Writings, pp. 53-72.
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Wendell Phillips (1811-84) was an early advocate of women's rights as well as abolition. When he attended the world antislavery convention in London in 1840, he openly advocated the eligibility of women as delegates. Emerson was an early admirer of Phillips's abolition efforts and his eloquence. In 1845 Emerson became embroiled in a controversy in his hometown of Concord by insisting, successfully, that Phillips be allowed to speak at the local Lyceum on the topic of slavery. See my Virtue's Hero, pp. 95-96.
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Emerson, Letters, 4:345.
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Emerson, Letters, 8:360.
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For an interesting discussion of this issue, see Janet K. Boles, The Politics of the Equal Rights Amendment (New York: Longman, 1979), pp. 170-80.
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Wendell Phillips to Emerson, 21 February 1853, bMS Am 1280 (2544), Ms. Houghton Library. Quoted with permission of the Houghton Library and the Ralph Waldo Emerson Memorial Association.
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Paulina Wright Davis to Emerson, 7 June 1855, bMS Am 1280 (7740), Ms. Houghton Library. Quoted with permission of Houghton Library and the Ralph Waldo Emerson Memorial Association.
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William Charvat, Emerson's American Lecture Engagements: A Chronological List (New York: New York Public Library, 1961), pp. 30-31. For the complete text of Emerson's important 1855 “Lecture on Slavery,” see Emerson's Antislavery Writings, pp. 91-106, where it is published for the first time. For the story of his increasing antislavery activity in the mid 1850s, see my Virtue's Hero, pp. 187-249.
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Richardson, Emerson: Mind on Fire, p. 532.
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Reprinted in Transcendental Log, ed. Kenneth Walter Cameron (Hartford: Transcendental Books, 1973), p. 99.
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Albert J. von Frank, An Emerson Chronology (New York: G. K. Hall & Co., 1994), p. 301.
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Helen R. Deese, “‘A Liberal Education’: Caroline Healey Dall and Emerson,” in Emersonian Circles: Essays in Honor of Joel Myerson, ed. Wesley T. Mott and Robert E. Burkholder (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 1997), p. 248. This excellent essay presents an insightful discussion of Emerson's relationship with one of the most significant feminists of his time.
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Christina Zwarg, “Emerson's ‘Scene’ Before the Women: The Feminist Poetics of Paraphernalia,” Social Text 18 (Winter 1987/88): 133. Zwarg herself presents a generally positive analysis of the address in her insightful essay. See also her Feminist Conversations: Fuller, Emerson, and the Play of Reading (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995) for Fuller's feminist influence on Emerson.
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Davis to Emerson, 29 September 1855, bMS Am 1280 (775), Ms. Houghton Library. Quoted with permission of Houghton Library and the Ralph Waldo Emerson Memorial Association. Davis published The Una, “A Paper Dedicated to the Celebration of Woman,” in Providence, R.I., from 1853 to 1855. The final issue, published on 15 October 1855 (vol. 3, no. 10), was prepared by Caroline Dall in the absence of Davis. It indicates that reports on the speeches from the convention would follow in a later edition because “upon examining the phonographic report, it was found that the reporter had given the speakers credit for MS. in several instances where it did not exist. This inadvertent compliment to the fluency of the Convention is extremely inconvenient, inasmuch as it will compel much unexpected labor.” Unfortunately, the later edition, in which Emerson's “Woman” most likely would have appeared, never materialized, probably because a number of speakers were unable or unwilling to reconstruct their oral deliveries on paper.
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Quoted by Deese, in “A Liberal Education,” p. 248.
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The Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle, ed. Joseph Slater (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), p. 373.
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Gougeon and Myerson, Emerson's Antislavery Writings, pp. 91-106.
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Eventually, however, at least a portion of the “Woman” address was published by the women. An article in the Woman's Journal, 26 March 1881, titled, “Mr. Emerson on Woman Suffrage,” states, “In 1862 there was a proposition to establish a Woman Suffrage paper in this city [Boston]. Several articles were contributed for it, but the idea was not carried out, and the papers remained unpublished. The following from Ralph Waldo Emerson is characteristic and as valuable now as then” (p. 100). The article then presents a long excerpt from “Woman” focusing on the suffrage issue. This excerpt was later reprinted as a leaflet titled A Reasonable Reform (New York: National Woman Suffrage Publishing Co., 1881).
Also, a later article in the same journal (24 September 1887) complains, as Higginson did, about the misrepresentation of Emerson's views on the women's movement in James Elliot Cabot's Memoir. As a corrective, the writer quotes briefly from Emerson's “Woman” address and prefaces the quote with the notation that Emerson “put himself on the record in a statement so admirable that it has been published by the suffragists as a leaflet” (p. 312).
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See Charvat, Emerson's Lecture Engagements, p. 37. Most Boston newspapers took no notice of Emerson's presentation at the time, perhaps because they were preoccupied with numerous reports on secessionist fever, which was beginning to sweep the South. There were also numerous notices of John Brown and anti-John Brown meetings in the Boston area. However, the Boston Atlas and Bee of 3 December 1860 ran the following short notice of Emerson's talk: “Mr. Emerson gave a lecture yesterday forenoon, in Music Hall, before Theodore Parker's society, on ‘Woman.’ It was a characteristic production. The central idea of the lecture was that whatever contributes to the well being and progress of man, does so to woman. Incidentally he remarked that the ‘masculine’ woman is not so strong in influence as the lady. He favored so much of the woman's rights movement as to give woman entire justice. If she is to be taxed she should vote” (p. 3).
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Deese, “A Liberal Education,” p. 249.
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Deese, “A Liberal Education,” p. 250.
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Emerson lectured at the Smithsonian on 31 January 1862. A detailed report of his presentation appeared in the Washington Evening Star, 1 February 1862, p. 1, which is the source of the quotations here. The speech was later published as “American Civilization” in the Atlantic Monthly, April 1862, pp. 502-11. It was eventually divided into two parts and published as “Civilization” in Society and Solitude (Complete Works, 7:19-34) and “American Civilization” in Miscellanies (Complete Works, 11:295-311).
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The “Concord Soldier's Aid Society” was a women's organization which was established in 1861 to supply the needs of soldiers in the Concord Artillery. However, by 1862 the society was preparing boxes of goods to benefit all soldiers served by the U.S. Sanitary Commission. Members included Mrs. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Misses Ellen and Edith Emerson, Mrs. Amos Bronson Alcott, Miss Elizabeth Hoar, and others. The Society raised money through dues, donations, collections at local churches, and benefits such as theatrical productions, tea parties, Fourth of July festivals, dances, etc. (See Concord Soldier's Aid Society Records, 1861-65, Concord Free Public Library, Concord, Mass.)
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Emerson's Antislavery Writings, p. 152.
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Quoted by Joan D. Hedrick, in her Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 360.
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A comparison of this newspaper account with the transcription of the “Discours Manqué” manuscript provided by Edward Waldo Emerson in volume eleven, “Miscellanies,” of the Centenary Edition, as well as the original manuscript at the Houghton Library, bMS Am 1280.202 (13), which is somewhat longer, suggests that the “Discours” Edward Emerson and James Elliot Cabot assumed was never delivered served as the basis for Emerson's second address on the Woman Question. The original manuscript and the newspaper account are similar in terms of the major points made. The wording varies in some instances, which could represent Emerson's improvisations at the moment of delivery. Also, some points were repeated from the 1855 “Woman” address, which was considerably longer. These are also materials in the original manuscript which do not appear in the newspaper account and which may have been omitted due to the limitations of time as suggested by Emerson's desire not to “detain” his audience. Fortunately, a modern and carefully edited edition of both “Woman” and “Discours Manqué” will soon be available in Emerson's Later Lectures, edited by Ronald Bosco and Joel Myerson.
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Boston Daily Advertiser, 27 May 1869, p. 1.
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bMS Am 1280.202 (13), Ms. Houghton Library. Quoted with permission of the Houghton Library and the Ralph Waldo Emerson Memorial Association. See Complete Works, 11:629, for Edward's slightly different rendering of this passage.
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Richardson, Emerson: Mind on Fire, p. 534.
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Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, p. 361. Emerson was also requested in July to make a presentation to the Essex County Woman's Suffrage Association. In his letter declining that invitation, Emerson asks his correspondent to “say to the Essex County Woman's Suffrage Association, that while I think their political claim founded in equity, and though perhaps it does not yet appear to any what precise form in practice it will and ought to take, yet the seriousness and thoughtfulness with which it is urged seem to me to mark an important step in civilization.” This letter, which obviously pleased the women, was read at the convention in Newburyport, Mass., and published in both the Boston Daily Advertiser and the New York Times (Letters, 6:77-78). A writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer (31 July 1869, p. 4), however, saw the letter as evidence that Emerson “does not regard their claims to vote as at all pressing, and thinks he has work on hand more important than assisting in furthering it.” He goes on to express his hope that “the prime movers in this agitation will carefully review their crude and hasty conclusions in the light of Mr. Emerson's short, but pithy letter.”
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Woman's Journal was published in Boston, Mass., Chicago, Ill., and St. Louis, Mo., variously, between 1870 and 1912. The following articles from the Woman's Journal present very positive views on Emerson and his consistent support of the women's movement. The list is not intended to be exhaustive. “Tested by Time,” 1 January 1876, p. 1; “Mr. Emerson on Suffrage,” 26 March 1881, p. 100; “Bereaved Nations,” 29 April 1882, p. 1; “Obituary: Ralph Waldo Emerson,” 6 May 1882, p. 140; “The King Is Dead,” 20 May 1882, pp. 158-59; “Concord School of Philosophy,” 19 August 1882, p. 257; “Literary Notices, Review of James Elliot Cabot's, A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson,” 24 September 1887, p. 312; “Editorial Notes” (complains about the misrepresentation of Emerson's views on woman suffrage in biographies and the popular press).
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Woman's Journal, 6 May 1882, p. 140.
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