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 in 1843, then in expanded form in the first book written in America to argue for woman's rights, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, in 1845, Fuller's ideas, transmitted to Emerson through their frequent conversations and correspondence, came to form the core of his thinking on women. Fuller's carefully reasoned tactics would form the basis for the approaches and arguments that would later be adopted by the nascent woman's rights movement, as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage acknowledged in their monumental History of Woman Suffrage, when they stated that Fuller's work “gave a new impulse to woman's life as a thinker.”¹ Thus Emerson shared essential concepts and patterns of thinking about issues regarding women with the American woman's rights movement from the earliest days of its existence, inspiring suffragists to accept him as one of their champions.

Following on Fuller's prescient presentation of the issues of women's role in society, the woman's rights movement in nineteenth-century America emerged from the crucible of the abolitionist movement, in much the same way that the contemporary women's movement would later spring from the furor of the civil rights movement. The catalyzing event for the woman's rights movement was the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention in London. After women organized and planned the first international convention, a massive undertaking, when they arrived at the site they were informed that they could not be seated at their own conference due to their sex; all women were to be excluded from the platform and convention seating and allowed only to stand voiceless and silent in the aisles and gallery. Outraged, organizers Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton agreed to hold the first woman's rights convention upon their return to America.²

By 1848, these American women had organized their historic first woman's rights convention, held in Seneca Falls, New York. As Julia Ward Howe, later leader of the suffragist American Woman's Party, observed, 1848 was considerably before “the claims of women to political efficiency had begun to occupy the attention … of the American public”; full recognition of the “woman question” came only after the Civil War.³ Word spread quickly among women involved in social reform, however, and another National Woman's Rights Convention was held in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1850, only two years after the historic Seneca Falls Convention. Emerson was invited to the convention and gave it his support. As was the common practice, the convention prepared a public declaration of principle that would be signed by the attendees, indicating their agreement with these principles. Emerson signed this statement of support, an unusually bold step for a writer who generally avoided identification with any formal organization for social reform and who tended to be extremely cautious about any public pronouncement. His willingness to be publicly included as a supporter of the convention indicated not only his awareness of the aims of the woman's movement long before most of the country realized its existence but also the strength of his agreement with its principles.⁴

Certainly Emerson was sincere in his letter expressing his wish to appear at the 1850 convention; it was not an excuse to avoid facing the issue. In 1855, Emerson would appear in person to address that year's Woman's Rights Convention. His address on that occasion was later revised to form the essay “Woman.” In both the original lecture and the slightly emended essay, “Woman” was Emerson's most public and extended statement of his opinion on women's issues, a serious avowal of his dedication to woman's rights. Couched as it was in the terms of the nineteenth-century woman's movement, the essay may seem lukewarm to contemporary readers. Yet Emerson made his partisanship of woman's rights clear from the start, first by staking a claim for the importance of the issue, declaring that no reform movement was “more seriously interesting to every healthful and thoughtful mind” than the position of women (w 11:405).⁵ Later in the essay he would contrast these “healthful and thoughtful” supporters of woman's rights with the presumably unhealthy and thoughtless detractors of the movement, whom Emerson attacked—in very strong language for him—deriding the “cheap” jokes at the expense of the campaigners for equal rights and the “monstrous exaggeration” of every misogynist writer from “Mahomet” and Aristophanes to Rabelais and the highly popular Tennyson (w 11:418). Previously, Emerson had deplored this tendency to denigrate women, and particularly, their intellectual efforts. Writing in his journal in 1841, he quoted the mayor of Lowell, Massachusetts, as saying disparagingly of a group of women arriving to testify in a trial, “There go the light-troops!” and criticized, “Neither Plato, Mahomet, nor Goethe have said a severer thing on our fair Eve. Yet the old lawyer did not mean to be satanic” (jmn 8:85). In 1848, while in France, he observed that “At the Club des Femmes, there was among the men some patronage, but no real courtesy. The lady who presided spoke & behaved with the utmost propriety,—a woman of heart & sense,—but the audience of men were perpetually on the look out for some equivoque, into which, of course, each male speaker would be pretty sure to fall; & the laugh was loud & general” (jmn 10:268).

Having established the significance of the issue and the superficiality of its opponents' arguments, Emerson consolidated his position by establishing woman's strengths. Unfortunately, the strengths he singled out for praise, however complimentary to nineteenth-century women, would come to seem problematic to late twentieth-century readers. As he had stated in the address to the 1855 Woman's Rights Convention on which “Woman” was based, “Women feel in relation to men as geniuses feel among energetic workers, that tho' overruled & thrust aside in the press, they outsee all these noisy masters.” This praise of women's “oracular nature,” their greater intuitive powers, has reminded many contemporary women of the cliché of “women's intuition.” Whenever they used their intelligence more quickly or efficiently than the men around them, it was dismissed as “women's intuition,” not recognized as a sign of women's equal intellectual capacity. In the address, Emerson had clarified this idea by suggesting that what appeared to be women's intuition was actually the result of a quicker thought process: “They learn so fast & convey the result so fast, as to outrun the logic of their slow brother.”

Further, during this period, even the strongest suffragists clung to their claim for psychic and spiritual superiority. Fuller's Woman in the Nineteenth Century resounded with such rhetoric: “The especial genius of Woman I believe to be … intuitive in function” (emf 309). Her influence on Emerson was evident here, as in so many of the other ideas in “Woman,” particularly since he had been so recently at work on editing the Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli. Like Fuller, too, Emerson suggested that women's faster thought processes placed them in the vanguard of social reform: “Any remarkable opinion or movement shared by women will be the first sign of revolution” (w 11:406). In this firmer logic, women influenced the progress of society, as Emerson observed in his journal: “they buy slaves where the women will permit it; where they will not, they make the wind, the tide, the waterfall, the steam … do the work” (jmn 10:103). The French Revolution was another example (jmn 10:296).

Like Fuller and most other nineteenth-century feminists, Emerson did not take into account the effect of social conditioning in creating women's “strength” of “sentiment” and “sympathy” (w 11:406-7). However, awareness of the effects of gender role conditioning was decades away, with the nascent science of sociology, and Emerson's tropes here, however painful to postmodern sensibilities, were no different than those of his female and suffragist contemporaries. In fact, by following the paths of argument laid down by Fuller and her suffragist successors, Emerson proved how closely he adhered to her ideas.

Emerson's views as expressed in “Woman” were what contemporary critics would today term “essentialist,” implying an innate, inborn difference between the male and female temperaments true across the bounds of cultural and historical conditioning. While today essentialism can be viewed as one among a variety of hotly contended feminist viewpoints, in Emerson's time, given this lack of awareness of social conditioning, it was the norm. In the nineteenth century it was truly the woman's—singular—movement, generally agreeing on an essentialist philosophy and a demand for equal legal rights, as compared to today's far more diversely oriented women's—plural—movement, in which a multiplicity of often clashing viewpoints have struggled for expression.⁶ Emerson's assumption of intrinsic emotional and physical discrepancies in men's and women's strengths were aligned to his era. The most outspoken suffragists of Emerson's time would have agreed that women were, in his words, “More vulnerable, more infirm, more mortal” than men, in a time when women had an exceptionally high death rate, especially in childbirth. Fuller, in fact, had stated unequivocally in Woman in the Nineteenth Century that “Woman is the weaker party” (emf 33). Emerson may also well have had the premature demise of his first wife Ellen in mind here. Indeed, Ellen Tucker Emerson was, with Fuller, the previously unacknowledged model for Emerson's vision of womanhood. As he mused in his journal, “I can never think of women without gratitude for the bright revelations of her best nature” (jmn 8:381). He continued to contemplate her sayings and examples throughout his life.⁷ As debatable as it may be in our time, few in the nineteenth century would have disagreed with Emerson's paraphrase of Swedenborg that “the difference of sex [runs] through nature and through thought” (w 11:416). Yet Emerson did at times approach a more androgynous ideal, as when he noted in his journals that “A highly endowed man with good intellect & good conscience is a Man-Woman, & does not so much need the complement of Woman to his being as another. Hence his relations to the sex are somewhat dislocated & unsatisfactory. He asks in woman sometimes the Woman, sometimes the Man” (jmn 8:175 and 10:392). He concluded that “the finest people marry the two sexes in their own person. Hermaphrodite is then the symbol of the finished soul … in every act shall appear the married pair: the two elements shall mix in every act” (jmn 8:380). Elsewhere, he observed the “feminine element” was always to be found in “men of genius” (jmn 10:394). Emerson agreed with Fuller that both men and women contained a balance of traits that society called masculine or feminine, but neither he nor Fuller were able to apply this insight further to realize the effect of social conditioning in encouraging certain traits more highly in each gender.

Perhaps contemporary readers wish that Emerson could have leaped so far ahead of his era as to be aware of the effects of societal conditioning precisely because, despite his consonance with the ideas of his time, “Woman” was a prescient statement of views that would not become current until recent times. When Emerson began to analyze the popular responses to the woman's movement, he sounded remarkably like women who would not be writing until the twentieth century.

An example would be the hoary charge that women had produced no masterworks in the arts and sciences. In the original address on which “Woman” was based, Emerson's only response to this charge had been that women excelled instead at life. He admired what he called in his journals this “putting of the life into [women's] deed” and used as examples Mary Seton, “who put her arm into the bolt to save Queen Mary,” and “the women in the old sieges who cut off their hair to make ropes & ladders” (jmn 10:346).⁸ This was itself an advance on Emerson's earlier reflection of the social stereotype that women's role was simply to inspire men (seen in, for example, jmn 8:149-50). By the time of the essay “Woman” Emerson had gone a step further and realized that it had not been possible for female genius to be recognized “Till the new education and larger opportunities of very modern times” (w 11:408). Here he anticipated Virginia Woolf's classic essay “A Room of One's Own,” which also refuted this charge by reference to women's historic denial of access to educational and occupational opportunities. In the original address Emerson had also followed the same line of argument as Woolf's lecture, often titled “Woman in the Professions,” pointing out that, in Emerson's words, women “are better scholars than we [men] are at school & the reason why they are not better than we, twenty years later,” was not because of an innate intellectual deficit but “because men can turn their reading to account in the professions, & women are excluded from the professions.” Similarly, as he controverted the “monstrous exaggeration” of the misogynists, he noted their tendency to resort to stereotypes of women as mentally deficient and of femininity as an illness, anticipating the twentieth-century analyses of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Simone de Beauvoir, and others.

Still, “Woman” has been questionable for modern readers because the essay was typical of Emerson's penchant in public statements to first summarize all the negative ideas on a topic, then turn to the positive—the technique his friend the feminist Caroline Dall called seeming “to lure the conservatives on over his flowers till all of a sudden their feet are pierced by the thorns of reform.”⁹ In the second half of the essay, if contemporary readers can bear through, they will find Emerson stating an agenda of women's rights that was extremely radical even for the late nineteenth century, much less for its midpoint. Emerson called openly for women to receive their “one half of the world … the right to [equality in] education” and “employment, to equal rights of property, to equal rights of marriage, to the exercise of the professions and of suffrage” (w 11:416). In essence, Emerson was here setting out the full agenda of the 1850 Women's Rights Convention for which he had signed the call, proving that he was fully aware of his actions in so doing and truly supported all of these then-radical reforms.

“Woman” encapsulated Emerson's support for full equality for women: “Let the public donations to education be equally shared by them, let them enter a school as freely as a church, let them have and hold their property as men do theirs.” In a time when colleges were closed to women and the law forbade their owning property, Emerson's demands were extremely progressive. Emerson even went so far as to argue that if suffrage was denied to women, “You [must] also refuse to tax them,” based on the American principle of no taxation without representation. That Emerson was aware of this central and most controversial principle of Susan B. Anthony's in only the first decade of her public work revealed how much he was abreast of the developing suffrage movement and how far ahead of his time he was, but it was not surprising, given that Anthony also cited Fuller as her source material.¹⁰

Another reason for contemporary readers to perceive “Woman” as lacking in enthusiasm for the suffrage movement is the fact that Emerson, like many among the relatively few Americans who first became aware of and involved with the woman's movement in the 1850s, experienced some confusion from listening to the women who constituted both the pro-suffrage and equally vocal anti-woman's rights campaigns. Emerson was influenced for a time by women who were anti-suffrage, and at first believed the anti-suffrage view that the majority of women did not want change and that it would thus be forced violently upon them. Later, other of the women around him, such as his aunt Mary Moody Emerson, while like Emerson himself repulsed by the materialism and lack of moral judgment in the political and commercial worlds women would be entering, would persuade him that change in their status was nonetheless essential. At the time, however, Emerson had not yet come to his later realization that even the most refined and intellectual women desired the vote, as he stated, “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”—a position Emerson held as given, extreme though it was at the time—“yet the best women do not wish these things” (w 11:418-19). Despite this belief, Emerson did not ameliorate the radicalism of his demands for equality, urging that even if the most favored women did not want or even need political equality, it must nevertheless be available for the benefit of the women who lacked their social and economic advantages. Emerson understood that all women were, as he stated in his journals, “Starved for thought & sentiment,” but that the problem was most burdensome to the underprivileged: “In the labours of house & in poverty I feel sometimes as if the handiness & deft apparatus for household toil were only a garb under which the softest Cleopatra walked concealed” (jmn 10:78). Emerson often responded with strong sympathy to the plight of impoverished women.¹¹ He realized that change in women's financially dependent position was essential to their freedom; in his journals he observed: “Society lives on the system of money & woman comes at money & money's worth through compliment. I should not dare to be woman. Plainly they are created for that better system which supersedes money … on our civilization her position is often pathetic. What she is not expected to do & suffer for some invitation to strawberries & cream.” At the time he wrote that passage Emerson consoled himself, “Fortunately their eyes are holden that they cannot see” (jmn 10:392). By the time he was writing “Woman,” the woman's rights movement had made it plain that women did indeed see their subservient economic position and linked it directly to their deprivation of political rights and civic opportunities. This awareness of workingclass women was relatively rare even in the woman's movement, as recent histories of the British and American suffrage movements have made clear.

Despite his belief that all women did not desire equality, then, Emerson made a strong case for it, stating boldly that 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” (w 11:419). The change in number—from the plural “women” to the singular “a woman”—is interesting here, implying that even if only one woman desired the vote, it must be granted her. Further, Emerson determinedly refuted the objections to woman's suffrage. In reply to the common objection to women's political participation, their “want of practical wisdom” (w 11:411), he argued wittily that a less than perfect grasp of the issues had never disqualified men from voting. If men voted as they were told by their political bosses and parties without troubling to inform themselves on the issues, women could certainly do no worse. In response to the charge that women lacked worldly experience, Emerson quipped that this was “not a disqualification, but a qualification” (w 22:420). In a somewhat ironic tone, he pointed out that there would never be a shortage of voters who would represent “the expediency … the interest of trade or of imperative class interest” (w 11:422). Even if women did vote from a basis of naivete and aim “at abstract right without allowing for circumstances” (w 11:422), as many opponents of suffrage argued, they would serve to balance morally the voting populace who aimed only at material gain or maintaining a prejudicial status quo without allowing for right or justice. Emerson's implied argument was that granting women full political participation would improve the entire nation—again, an echo of Fuller's tactics, as they would be adopted by the suffrage movement.

Indeed, for Emerson, woman's civilizing influence was a major reason to give them the ballot. This argument, strong in “Woman,” was even more emphasized in the address to the 1855 Woman's Rights Convention upon which it was based. Emerson made the equation plain—“Woman is the power of civilization”; woman “altered & mended” the “rough & reckless ways of men.” Therefore, given the “election frauds & misdeeds” with which the land was rife, extending the suffrage to women to “civilize the voting” was “the remedy at the moment of need.” This was a more specific application of the general principle, which Emerson stated in his journals as “the virtue of women [is] the main girth or bandage of society” (jmn 10:83).

Emerson took this argument further in answering the other common objection to woman's suffrage, that it would “contaminate” women and “unsex” them. He pointed out that this argument “only accuses our existing politics … It is easy to see that there is contamination enough, but it rots the men now.” Rather than denying the vote to women in order to protect them from the dirty business of politics, he suggested, the wiser course was to clean up the political system. Again, Emerson here duplicated Fuller's tactics, as she was wont to argue—as were other suffragists such as Sojourner Truth—that if the system were inimical and harmful, then the system itself needed to be changed; banning women from it was only avoiding the problem. In fact, suggesting that to “Improve and refine the men” was to “do the same by the women,” Emerson implied that the better educated and the more moral men became, the more they would become, in his phrase, “true men,” and the more they would not only be willing to give women their “half of the world,” but would insist, like Emerson himself, on women's right to it (w 11:423). Emerson saw a “real man” as one who was so secure that he did not need to force others into a subservient position in order to aggrandize his own status. To Emerson, a “real man” was one who actively advocated women's rights and equality; in today's terms, to be a real man was to be a feminist.

Despite his confirmed belief in the 1850s that most women did not desire suffrage, Emerson nonetheless insisted that it be available for those who did. Especially notable was how uncertain Emerson appeared to be about the true desires of women on this issue—notice the hedging language on the part of a writer who was usually so straightforward: “I do not think it yet appears that women wish this equal share in public affairs” (w 11:423-24, emphasis added). In the very next sentence, though, when Emerson returned to his call for equal opportunity, he again found his accustomed directness of voice: “But it is they and not we that are to determine it.” While Emerson was uncertain of the wishes of the women about him—and he was apparently receiving a great deal of contradictory information at this time—he was certain that the right to choose rested with them, not with men. Emerson explicitly acknowledged women's right to decide for themselves the part they would play on the national and world stage; men's role, in his view, was simply to support them in enforcing their decision against the weight of entrenched prejudice and tradition. As he would write in a letter to Caroline Sturgis Tappan in 1868, “It is of course for women to determine this question! the part of men, if women decide to assume the suffrage, is simply to accept their determination & aid in carrying it out” (l 9:326-27). In his journals he had reached a similar conclusion as early as 1845: “To me it sounded hoarsely the attempt to prescribe didactically to woman her duties. Man can never tell woman what her duties are … Women only can tell the heights of feminine nature, & the only way in which men can help her, is by observing woman reverentially & whenever she speaks from herself & catches him in inspired moments to a heaven of honor & religion, to hold her to that point by reverential recognition of the divinity that speaks through her” (jmn 8:381). The language of “sacred womanhood” here was a means of expressing respect for women's strengths. Emerson's was a very progressive opinion even for the 1850s, anticipating contemporary feminism's emphasis that women not ask men for rights, thereby implying that those rights were men's property to give to women as a gift, but rather that women should grasp their rights for themselves. As Fuller, again, had stated, these were women's “birthright” (emf 347), and Emerson's trust in Fuller's judgment was again apparent.

In fact, one could argue that Emerson followed Fuller with such implicit faith that he echoed her even in those ideas that contemporary feminism has discarded. Today's critics, who would not condemn Fuller for such concepts, have ignored her profound influence on Emerson when they have attacked him for following her lead. An example would be Emerson's statement that “a masculine woman is not strong, but a lady is” (w 11:425), echoing Fuller's sentiment that true women would “never wish to be men, or man-like” (emf 276-77). Emerson sounded most like Fuller when he argued such ideas as that it was “impossible to separate the interests and education of the sexes.” Woman in the Nineteenth Century was full of such pleas for the unity of women's and men's interests, as when Fuller stated that women's interests “were identical” with men's (emf 344) or that “I believe that the development of the one cannot be effected without that of the other” (emf 245). What has sounded to contemporary readers like an implication that women's interests were only important as they affected men was to nineteenth-century readers a daring avowal of the equal significance of women on the world stage, as well as a politic way to appeal to men's self-interest. Emerson emphasized his anticipation of this transformation in attitudes toward women's place when he concluded, perhaps overly optimistically, “the aspiration of this century [for women's equality] will be the code of the next” (w 11:424).

Regarding the timeline of the development of Emerson's thoughts on women, and particularly on their right to political equality, Emerson was already, at the beginning of the American suffrage movement in the 1850s, convinced of and speaking out for its necessity. While his arguments, influenced by Fuller, were couched like hers in the essentialist nineteenth-century language of sacred womanhood, gentility, and intuitive superiority, his political demands on behalf of woman were as bold as hers.

Emerson's ideas of woman's role were also continually evolving, as seen in the changes from the 1855 address to the essay “Woman.” In addition to the changes previously mentioned, the address dwelt far more fixedly on women's manners,¹² on custom and ritual, and on women's self-sacrifice and devotion, all stereotypes that were de-emphasized or removed from the published essay “Woman.”

The next major change in Emerson's developing awareness of women's issues would come after the Civil War, when most Americans became aware of the woman's rights movement. By this time, encouraged by such women in his circle as Mary Moody Emerson and Louisa May Alcott, Emerson had realized that the one caveat he had withheld—that women themselves did not desire the vote—was untrue. Emerson commented upon this change himself in the previously mentioned letter to Caroline Sturgis Tappan on 13 November 1868. In response to Sturgis Tappan's statement that “All women should feel & say that they are suffering from being governed without their consent,” he explained that previously, he had “believed that women did not wish [to enter into public life], that those whose decision would be final, the thoughtful serene typical minds shrank from it,” but, he continued, “I have been much surprised to find that my saints or some of them have a feeling of duty that however odious the new order may appear in some of its details they must bravely accept & realize it” (l 9:326-27). This process of transition in Emerson's views has not been previously recognized.¹³ Emerson himself would see this recognition of women's desire for emancipation as the point of his conversion to the woman's cause, even though he had been actively supporting it since 1850, and in the 1860s and 1870s he would become an icon of the suffragist leaders.

Today's readers may be surprised that the suffragists would find any aspect of women's equality “odious.” However, many women, and Emerson himself, valued some of the qualities that had arisen from women's socially enforced exile to a passive role in life: unselfishness, spirituality, cooperativeness, gentleness, caring. These women feared that when women entered into work and politics they would be forced to behave as men had been conditioned to so as to survive in the patriarchal outer world and would lose these attributes. Again, Julia Ward Howe, who by the time of Emerson's death had become a distinguished poet as well as a leader of the suffragist American Woman's Party, provided one of the most insightful analyses of this conflict between the appreciation of the more nurturing, “feminine” traits in both women and men and the need for fuller social and political freedom. She especially contrasted Emerson's attraction to the beauty of the feminine character as it had developed in a hothouse environment of artificial restrictions against his recognition of the justice of women's demand for a more equal and active part in defining their own lives. In analyzing this conflict, Howe accurately noted an essential Emersonian debate between Beauty and Justice, or Truth, as Emerson called the principle for which Howe used the term Justice.

In a more abstract fashion, this dialectic between Beauty and Truth rang throughout Emerson's works as it did those of other Romantics such as the English poet John Keats. Emerson respected Keats's “Ode to a Grecian Urn” practically alone among Keats's works because it addressed this Romantic problem of the proper relationship of Beauty to Truth. However, Emerson disagreed with Keats as to the exact equivalence of Beauty and Truth (Keats had claimed “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”). Emerson believed that Truth was even more important than Beauty. This belief was notable in, among other indicators, Emerson's placing the chapter on Beauty in his book Nature before that on Truth (“Discipline”), since the chapters were placed, in typical Romantic fashion, in rising order of importance.

Emerson, Howe noted, did not use stereotypical definitions of Beauty as feminine and Justice or Truth as masculine, but recognized that “justice, as well as beauty, was to him a feminine ideal.” To Emerson, Beauty and Truth each embodied a “feminine” as well as a masculine “Ideal.” Further, Howe recognized Emerson's stand, in declarations such as “Woman,” that woman must have the power to decide for herself what her role in society would be: “He believed in woman's power to hold and adjust for herself the scales in which character is weighed against attraction.”¹⁴ As Emerson had stated to Caroline Sturgis Tappan, the power of self-determination must be given to woman even if her ultimate choice would involve less of “attraction”—Beauty—and more of “character”—Truth—than Emerson's personal aesthetic sense would find pleasing.

Emerson, who himself shrank from the public sphere, admired and appreciated the intensely spiritual unselfishness women had been forced to develop while sequestered as “the angel in the house.” He also had, as seen in “Woman,” deep doubts about the corruption inherent in participation in the world of politics and commerce. He would have preferred to see women remain, and men become, more inner-directed, aloof from the materialistic concerns of social life. While Emerson's democratic tendencies and his profound respect for the women in his own life forced him to support the movement for women's equality, he had an abiding distrust of the public and especially the political arena, which women were entering by their agitation for suffrage and would be entering even further by gaining the vote. Emerson feared that women, previously excluded and therefore protected from these areas, would make the same mistakes that he saw men as having made, losing their spiritual focus to the necessary compromises of politics (as had Daniel Webster, a prime example) and falling into the lure of materialism when they entered the workplace. Ultimately, Emerson questioned the feasibility of anyone, not only women, being what he had called in the lecture on which “Woman” was based “innocent citizens.” To Emerson, the very possibility of being both “innocent” and a participating “citizen” of a flawed—at that time, even slave-holding—political system was highly questionable. Aspirations to innocent citizenship appeared to him to be laudable in principle but in the practice of the corrupt state regrettably oxymoronic. Yet he also recognized that the choice was not his to make, but women's own. If they believed that political and social equality was necessary to their spiritual development, his responsibility was to support them in their struggle. He would not keep them housebound in order to promote their spiritual beauty any more than he would keep the slaves in captivity in order to enjoy the harmony of their songs for freedom.

Emerson's position was thus characteristic of nineteenth-century feminists, female and male, and the suffragists were outspoken in their praise and gratitude to Emerson for his efforts on behalf of women's empowerment, education, and equality. In the suffragist organ The Woman's Journal, the leaders of the suffragist movement specifically addressed Emerson's role, as they saw it, in the woman's movement. While Emerson, with characteristic modesty, would not give himself credit for his early support of the woman's rights movement, suffragists such as Julia Ward Howe were adamant concerning Emerson's stand: “At more than one woman suffrage meeting, he has entered his protest against the political inequality which still demoralizes society.” Howe was certain where Emerson's loyalties lay on the suffrage question: “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.”¹⁵

In 1882 Howe enlarged on Emerson's contributions, stressing his respect for women's intellect. Indeed, she went so far as to credit Emerson with an important role in her own conversion from judging women by their physical attractiveness to considering their true character, the very trait she had emphasized in her analysis of Emerson in the Woman's Journal. As she told it, when Emerson “asked me if I knew Margaret Fuller I told him I thought her an ugly person. He then dwelt upon her mind and conversation.”¹⁶ Clearly, Emerson had transcended the Victorian valuing of women solely for their ornamental role, to appreciate them on the same grounds by which he did men—for their intelligence. To Emerson, the key attraction was inner, not outer beauty. Even in admiring the famous actress Rachel, Emerson admired her “terror & energy … defiance or denunciation,” and most of all her “highly intellectual air” and “universal intelligence” (jmn 10:269). Indeed, he counted seeing Rachel more highly than hearing the renowned scientist Michelet lecture and as one of the high points of his trip to France (jmn 10:323, 362).

Howe's perception of the value of Emerson as a teacher of women was upheld by Ednah Dow Cheney, a leader of the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Society and the School Suffrage Association and a prominent woman writer. Cheney recalled, “When we were young girls, nothing in our list of entertainments was to be compared with Emerson—no party, no singing, no theatre.” Cheney went on to remark upon Emerson's total and eager attention to every person he met, however young, making no distinction between male and female.¹⁷ As Cheney had suggested, Emerson persisted in taking seriously his female audience despite the fact that they were a hindrance to his public (male) reputation. Emerson's journals bear testimony to this respect for his youthful and female audience; in the late 1840s or early 1850s he wrote, “No part of the population interests except the children & the young women” (jmn 10:465). As Howe would recall later in an article for the special issue of the Critic on Emerson's work, “The distinguished jurist, Jeremiah Mason, said of [Emerson's] lectures: ‘I cannot understand them, but my daughters do.’ This dictum was at the time considered a damning piece of irony.”¹⁸ Indeed, it could be argued that women, especially the suffragists, were among Emerson's earliest and most sympathetic audience because they shared his sense of alienation from the social sphere and were intimately acquainted with society's strictures against nonconformity. Howe continued to emphasize Emerson's respect for women as an important audience and his “sympathy with the new opportunities accorded to women. He spoke more than once in favor of woman suffrage, and was for many years an honorary member of the New England Women's Club, to whose gatherings he occasionally lent the charm of his presence and of his voice.”¹⁹ Cheney also recalled Emerson's honorary membership in the New England Woman's Club, noting that he became such immediately upon the club's formation in 1865: “He frequently came to its meetings and read some of his most personal and charming papers there,” including the first draft of his reminiscences of his aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, a major figure in his intellectual development.²⁰

Emerson was also concerned with the effect of his lectures on women, especially what would today be called “empowering” women, as one anecdote makes clear. Respected author, lyceum lecturer, and women's rights activist Elizabeth Oakes Smith recalled that after Emerson's lectures on “Power,” he “approached the bright-minded Mrs. C.—I noticed he uttered the one word, ‘Well?’ interrogatively, and with an almost childish simplicity, to which she replied: ‘Oh, Mr. Emerson, you make me feel so powerless, as if I could do nothing.’” At this expected response of stereotypical feminine helplessness, Emerson, in Oakes Smith's words, “looked grave and turning to me, repeated the enigmatical monosyllable, ‘Well?’ … to which I replied, ‘In listening to you, Mr. Emerson, no achievement seemed impossible; it was as though I might remove mountains.’ ‘Ah, that is well,’ he answered cordially.”²¹

Oakes Smith remembered that while Emerson “did not seek contest, did not snuff the battle with the heat of the war-horse, like Wendell Phillips … he did … accept and give his testimony to all high luminaries, ideas, and movements, including that of suffrage for women; for he stood on the same platform with myself on more than one occasion.”²² Emerson's respect for Oakes Smith and her cause was reflected in his attendance at her lectures on the themes of women of history; womanhood, manhood, and our humanity; and her strong argument for women's rights.²³ Emerson responded with approval, telling her at one point, “you must come and live in Concord, and we shall have an oracle.”²⁴ To be invited by Emerson to join his Transcendentalist community was a rare honor, and it was an even higher sign of respect to be compared to the classic oracle, a simile usually reserved by Emerson for his friend, the philosopher Bronson Alcott. Emerson's attempts to include suffragists such as Fuller and Oakes Smith in his literary community reflected his admiration and support of their cause.

The Woman's Journal continued to emphasize this perception of Emerson as a nineteenth-century feminist. As Henrietta H. Bassett observed, “the psychic energy of our latter day women has drawn upon … [Emerson's] speech … Because of him, New England women who loved him will be the wiser to determine issues.”²⁵ Whether Bassett meant by “Emerson's speech” the lecture “Woman” or his general ideas taken as a whole, she emphasized the importance of Emerson to the suffragist readers of the Woman's Journal, which was then underscored in the same issue by several relevant announcements, as of a portrait of Emerson available for purchase and James Elliot Cabot's appointment to write the official biography of Emerson. The Woman's Journal saw Emerson specifically as a proponent of women's rights.²⁶

This response to Emerson by the suffragists has suggested a facet of his work that has thus far been overlooked in the ongoing debate over Emerson's response to women's issues. Like Margaret Fuller before them, the suffragists saw Emerson as one who encouraged women's intellectual independence and honored their literary status on fully equal terms with men. They appreciated his respect for the women and young people in his audience and his efforts to recruit brilliant women for his Concord coterie. They had no difficulty in reconciling his respect for women's spiritual endowments with his awareness of their need for entitlement and empowerment in society, since they themselves performed the same balancing act. While they recognized that he would himself prefer to cultivate both men's and women's souls even at the cost of their social participation, they knew that he understood their need and right to make that decision for themselves and would support their choice.

Further, as more critics of nineteenth-century women writers have begun to recognize, they were deeply aware of stylistic concerns. Dall's “thorns of reform” comment was a fine example. Julia Ward Howe stressed that Emerson tended to qualify his public statements, suggesting in her speech at the memorial meeting for the ninety-sixth anniversary of Emerson's birth that “Emerson was as great in what he did not say as in what he said. Second-class talent tells the whole story, reasons everything out; great genius suggests even more than it says.”²⁷ Emerson, in Howe's analysis, inspired the reader to consider for himself or herself the implications of a particular idea. Women could then apply these implications to and for themselves, as Margaret Fuller had done in extending Emerson's concepts of self-reliance, individualism, and the primacy of spiritual or moral character to women and their conditioning in Woman in the Nineteenth Century.

Emerson's full ideas on women's rights were not stated publicly but must be inferred from the incidents of his life and his response to women who dared to carry out the radical ramifications of his ideas for women, such as Fuller and Howe. The suffragists comprehended Emerson's typical technique of laying forth all the negative sides of an idea before the positive and saw that he applied this technique even-handedly, as much for his criticism of Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth as for women's issues. Indeed, they recognized, as few contemporary readers have, Emerson's strategy in using this advanced argumentation form to lure opponents of his ideas by apparent agreement, then trap them into considering reforms. There was no question in their minds that Emerson was, as they would have phrased it, a true friend and proponent of women's rights.

Emerson's periodical reading further illuminates his interest in women's issues. He did a great deal of reading on the issue of marriage, an institution with substantial impact on women's status, particularly in the nineteenth century. He had begun his investigation of these ideas as early as 1817, at the age of fourteen, when he borrowed Hannah More's Strictures on a System of Female Education, which argued that marriage should be a union based on an educated and mutual understanding, common interests, genuine respect, and sexual equality. In 1829 he read one of his major intellectual influences, Sampson Reed, whose unsigned “Introduction to Entomology” contained, surprisingly, a passage on celibacy.²⁸ The next year he followed this by reading in the same month two articles, Caleb Reed's unsigned article on the nature of affection²⁹ and John Hubbard Wilkins' unsigned “On Marriage.”³⁰ In 1831 he returned to Sampson Reed with the unsigned “Guardian Angels,” which like the previous articles stressed the permanence of spiritual ties between the sexes,³¹ and in 1832 he read Reed's similar piece “Marriage in the Heavens.”³² In 1834 Emerson read Caleb Reed's unsigned “Supposed Extinction of our Proper and Peculiar Loves at Death,” which reinforced the argument that human affections are eternal;³³ and in 1835, he read a last unsigned piece by Sampson Reed concerning marriage in heaven.³⁴ These articles, published in the New Jerusalem Magazine, an organ of the church founded by the philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg, conditioned Emerson to its view of marriage as a state of spiritual relation rather than a social institution. This outlook would predispose him to see women as souls rather than chattel and to assume their equal rights in marriage, for which he would argue so strongly in “Woman.”

Emerson's personal feelings about the legal institution of marriage appeared to be ambivalent. If marriage were a spiritual state, its official and legal codification by the state was suspect. Emerson observed, “The wave of evil washes all our institutions alike,” especially marriage (jmn 8:185). In the journals he mused, “None ever heard of a good marriage from Mesopotamia to Missouri and yet right marriage is as possible tomorrow as sunshine. Sunshine is a very mixed & costly thing as we have it, & quite impossible, yet we get the right article every day. And we are not very much to blame for our bad marriages.” Emerson seemed almost to be aware of the negative results of social conditioning and gender roles on marriage:

We live amid hallucinations & illusions, & this especial trap is laid for us to trap our feet with, & all are tripped up, first or last. … Into the Pandora-box of marriage, amidst dyspepsia, nervousness, screams, Christianity, comes poetry, & all kinds of music, [and] some deep & serious benefits & some great joys … And in these ill assorted connections there is ever some mixture of true marriage. The poorest Paddy & his jade, if well-meaning & well tempered, get some just & agreeable relations of mutual respect & kindly observation & fostering of each other. & they learn something, & would carry themselves wiselier if they were to begin life anew in some other sphere.

(jmn 10:351-52)

The influence of Hannah More's work, with its emphasis on the need for “mutual respect” to constitute a “true marriage,” and the Swedenborgian emphasis on the positive effects of marriage on the after-death state, or “other sphere,” were both evident in Emerson's views. Indeed, he echoed Swedenborg frequently in his desire for “the true nuptials of minds” (jmn 8:94).

On the other hand, Emerson recognized that marriage as a social institution rather than a spiritual partnership, an “unfit marriage,” could paralyze individual growth (jmn 8:69). But the drawbacks of divorce for women's security prevented him from supporting its legalization:

We cannot rectify marriage because it would introduce such carnage into our social relations. … Woman hides her from the eyes of men in our world: they cannot, she rightly thinks, be trusted. In the right state the love of one, which each man carried in his heart, should protect all women from his eyes, and make him their protector & saintly friend, as if for her sake. But now there is in the eyes of all men a certain evil light, a vague desire which attaches them to the forms of many women, whilst their affections fasten on some one. Their natural eye is not fixed into coincidence with their spiritual eye. Therefore it will not do to abrogate the laws which make Marriage a relation for life, fit or unfit.

(jmn 8:95)

Indeed, Emerson had great respect for fidelity in marriage, noting in 1841: “Permanence is the nobility of human beings. We love that lover whose gayest of love songs, whose fieriest engagement of romantic devotion is made good by all the days of all the years of strenuous, long suffering, everrenewing benefit. The old Count said to the old Countess of Ilchester, ‘I know that wherever thou goest, thou wilt both trust & honor me, and thou knowest that wherever I am I shall honor thee’” (jmn 8:134). Emerson continued to try to solve the riddle of marriage, considering the ideas of Swedenborg and Percy Bysshe Shelley (jmn 8:174), whose idea of marriage for love, he noted, removed the scent of the Inquisitor's oppression (jmn 8:187), and even such unlikely solutions as “For marriage find somebody that was born near the time when you were born” (jmn 8:168). At least partial approval was suggested by the many matchmaking attempts into which Emerson entered with regard to younger male and female acquaintances such as Anna Barker and Samuel Gray Ward. Indeed, the very frequency of Emerson's attempts at devising matrimonial pairs from among his single friends suggests that his opinion of marriage was positive enough for him to attempt to bestow its benefits on the unattached members of his circle.

Emerson's involvement with women's issues, then, developed in stages, from his support of the movement despite some doubts in the 1850s—in itself a radical position for the time—through the resolution of his doubts after the Civil War and his wholehearted “conversion” to woman's suffrage. His correspondence with and support of key leaders of the woman's rights movement, such as Stone and Howe, has been minimized, although his relationship with Fuller made such associations mandatory. While plagued by the same disparity between the ideal world of innocent citizenship and the real world of political infighting, Emerson's advocacy of the woman's movement created a heretofore unrecognized crosscurrent of influence between Emerson and the major thinkers and writers of the suffrage associations. It is now our responsibility to see that he is, finally, given the credit that his forward-thinking efforts deserve.

Notes

1. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, History of Woman Suffrage, 2 vols. (New York: Fowler & Wells, 1881), 1:40.

2. Stanton et al., 1:53ff.

3. Julia Ward Howe, Reminiscences 1819-1899 (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1899), p. 158.

4. Stanton et al., 1:820. See also Thomas Wentworth Higginson's 1876 article on Emerson's participation at the convention, “Tested By Time,” in the suffragist organ the Woman's Journal 7, p. 1.

5. For more information on Emerson and the Woman Right's Convention, see Higginson, “Tested By Time.”

6. I am indebted to an audience member at the American Literature Association Thoreau Society Panel in 1996 for this cogent observation. While in the late nineteenth century the woman's suffrage movement split over regional and political issues, these controversies occurred largely after Emerson's active involvement in the movement, and so I will not address them here.

7. See, for example, jmn 8:29, 339.

8. It is interesting that Emerson misremembered this deed (actually Katherine Douglas's) as being undertaken to aid another woman, when in actuality Douglas acted to protect James I of Scotland (jmn 10:345 n.).

9. I am indebted to Helen Deese for providing me with information from her forthcoming edition of the Dall journals. This is from the journal of September 23, 1855.

10. Stanton et al., 1:40.

11. See, for example, jmn 10:181 and l 3:443.

12. As reflected in the earlier journals; see jmn 8:149.

13. In fact, the editor of the volume in which this letter appears, Eleanor M. Tilton, in a footnote terms Emerson's statement “evasive” and observes, “In Emerson's own household, only Ellen took his position” (9:327), thus assuming, despite the content of the letter concerning the change in his position, that Emerson was anti-suffrage. So pervasive has been the assumption of Emerson's monolithic and static opinion on women's rights that the evidence to the contrary, even in his own words, has been ignored.

14. J[ulia]. W[ard]. H[owe]., “Ralph Waldo Emerson,” Woman's Journal 13 (May 6, 1882), p. 140.

15. Howe, “Ralph Waldo Emerson,” p. 140.

16. Julia Ward Howe, “Reminiscences,” in Concord Lectures on Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Moses King, 1882), p. 63.

17. Ednah Dow Cheney, “Reminiscences,” in Concord Lectures on Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Moses King, 1882), p. 74.

18. Julia Ward Howe, “Ralph Waldo Emerson as I knew Him,” Critic 42 (May 1902), 411-15. The importance of this anecdote to nineteenth-century women was evident in the many times they recorded, repeated, and analyzed it. Ednah Dow Cheney, for example, mentioned it in her lecture “Emerson and Boston,” printed in F. B. Sanborn, ed., The Genius and Character of Emerson: Lectures at the Concord School of Philosophy (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1885), p. 19, and in her Reminiscences of Ednah Dow Cheney (Boston: Lea and Shepard, 1902), pp. 232-33.

19. Howe, “Ralph Waldo Emerson as I Knew Him,” 413.

20. These public reminiscences of Aunt Mary were typical of Emerson's respect for the women of his circle. He often quoted their bon mots and insights in his journal, citing Mary Moody Emerson (jmn 8:530, 10:26, 29, 39, 69, 178, 363, 385, 390), his second wife, Lidian (jmn 8:88-89, 134, 173, 195, 238, 260, 365), and his daughter, Ellen (jmn 8:178-80, 205). Emerson especially praised Elizabeth Hoar (jmn 8:25, 49, 161, 164, 165, 178, 385, 351, 10:385, 398, 399), whom he called “immortal … an influence I cannot spare” in his journals (jmn 8:105) and may have considered a fit contributor to the Transcendentalist literary journal The Dial (jmn 8:498). Emerson also frequently cited Sarah Alden Ripley, whose “high & calm intelligence” (jmn 8:94) he admired, as he did that of Rebecca Black (jmn 8:202, 204, 235, 347, 385). He admired the unconventionality and original thinking of Black and Aunt Mary (jmn 8:391). Jane Welsh Carlyle, wife of English author Thomas Carlyle, he regarded at least as highly as her husband (jmn 10:227). He also quoted and praised Anna Barker Ward (jmn 8:76) and Caroline Sturgis (jmn 8:22, 51, 122, 165, 174, 368) as well as lesser known women (jmn 8:36, 181-82, 3:205, 129), women writers (jmn 8:388), and women no longer remembered today (jmn 8:25, 49, 178, 161, 164-65, 388, 10:129, 205, 379, 428, 532-33).

21. Selections from the Autobiography of Elizabeth Oakes Smith, ed. Mary Alice Wyman (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1924), p. 145.

22. Ibid., p. 148.

23. Ibid., p. 14.

24. Ibid., p. 141.

25. Henrietta H. Bassett, “The King Is Dead,” Woman's Journal 13 (May 20, 1882), 159.

26. In this the Woman's Journal differed from the more general epitaphs written by women as well as by men, such as Mary Clemmer's in the Independent (Mary Clemmer, “A Woman's Letter From Washington,” Independent 34 [May 11, 1882], 2-3).

27. Laura E. Richards and Maude Howe Elliott, Julia Ward Howe, 1819-1910, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1916), 2:263-64.

28. [Sampson Reed,] “Introduction to Entomology (4),” New Jerusalem Magazine 2 (May 1829): 274-82 (listed in Cameron, p. 43).

29. [Caleb Reed,] “The Love of the World,” New Jerusalem Magazine 3 (Mar. 1830), 199-206 (listed in Cameron, p. 45).

30. [John Hubbard Wilkins,] “On Marriage,” New Jerusalem Magazine 3 (Mar. 1830), 217-19 (listed in Cameron, p. 45).

31. [Sampson Reed,] “Guardian Angels,” New Jerusalem Magazine 5 (Nov. 1831), 112-19 (listed in Cameron, p. 48).

32. [Sampson Reed,] “Marriage in the Heavens,” New Jerusalem Magazine 5 (May 1832), 321-28 (listed in Cameron, p. 49).

33. [Caleb Reed,] “Supposed Extinction of our Proper and Peculiar Loves at Death,” New Jerusalem Magazine 8 (Oct. 1834), 50-53 (listed in Cameron, p. 54).

34. [Sampson Reed,] “Changes Effected at Death—Personal Form and Appearance (5),” New Jerusalem Magazine 8 (May 1835), 296-300 (listed in Cameron, p. 55).

Abbreviations

emf: Fuller, Margaret. The Essential Margaret Fuller. Ed. Jeffrey Steele. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992.

jmn: Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. William H. Gilman, et al. 16 vols. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960-82.

l: Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. Ralph L. Rusk and Eleanor Tilton. 10 vols. New York: Columbia University Press, 1939-95.

w: Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Centenary Edition. Ed. E. W. Emerson. 12 vols. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903-04.