To help you complete this assignment, let's first examine what Walt Whitman declares in stanza 21 of “Song of Myself.” “I am the poet of the woman the same as the man,” he asserts. Then he continues, “And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man, / And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of men.” These are some pretty radical pronouncements for Whitman's day. Essentially, he is saying that men and women are equal in his eyes, and as a poet, he serves them both equally. Further, he proclaims that being a woman is just as good as being a man (something that most people would have strongly disagreed with) or perhaps even better since womanhood often means motherhood, and there is nothing greater than motherhood.

Margaret Fuller would agree with Whitman, at least on some points. In her essay “The Great Lawsuit,” she argues that women should be equal to men in all spheres of life. They should receive equal rights to hold property and participate in public life as well as an equal education. Further, Fuller declares that men and women should be equal partners in marriage.

Women, Fuller continues, can and should contribute their own feminine qualities to society, but she also claims that both men and women have different degrees of both masculine and feminine qualities. This is at the heart of her theory of androgynous gender. Men and women are not really all that different, Fuller argues, but the qualities of each vary in each individual. It is the responsibility of the individual to understand and embrace his or her masculine and feminine traits, balancing them within himself or herself. This, along with the equality of women in social life, will help to balance the masculine and feminine characteristics in society and lead to greater harmony and justice.