Donne trascendentaliste e il Summer on the Lakes di Margaret Fuller

Transcendentalism is one of the most important American movements in literature and philosophy which emerged in the early part of the 19th century in Massachusetts. The purpose of my thesis is to document and review the feminist participatory action in the 19th century, analysing some of the most important figures of one of the most revolutionary movement of the time. With this thesis, I offer perspective of those women, who, were living in a society which didn't allow them to be considered as equal as men, they did not have any participation for what concerned social and political activism. They were emerging figures in the Transcendentalist movement which criticized the social institutions of organized religion, industrialized society, slavery and the subjugation of women. Transcendentalists were also actively engaged in fighting for the abolition of slavery, the rights of women and the rights of Native Americans. The transcendentalist movement in America centred around such figures as: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Orestes Brownson, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody and Margaret Fuller. I focused my dissertation on the importance of Margaret Fuller who was a transcendentalist thinker of the 19th century, she focused on equality of all people and she was one of the first Americans to stand up for women. She explored the new idea of feminism through her writing and conversations. America was continuing to form, she was writing and thinking about the world she wanted it to become and she wanted to answer the crucial question about what role women would have in this world. Would they be able to transcend the prior social stigmas? Margaret Fuller had an unceasing spirit, she was not like other women and did not act as women were supposed to. However, Margaret Fuller did not only write about women's rights, she strove to write about all kinds of injustice. She traveled with Sarah and James Freeman Clarke and their mother Rebecca to Illinois and Wisconsin to experience the American wilderness. On this trip she encountered another type of injustice which was the one related to the life of American Indians. This will be another crucial issue of my study: the analysis of one of the aspects that interested the intellectuals in question. She wrote a book about her experience called Summer on the Lakes in 1843. She wrote about women and the beliefs in the native people, but really she was digging deeper beyond the issue, as any transcendentalist would. A second prominent figure in the Transcendentalist movement was another woman: Elizabeth Palmer Peabody. She became the publisher of The Dial, in 1842 and 1843. She was known as a teacher, founder of the Kindergarten system in the United States, writer, publisher, editor, bookstore proprietor. In fact, in 1830, she was the first to hold salons for women and in 1839 she opened West Street Bookstore near Boston Common. She played an important role for the emerging figure of women of the time and she supported important writers of that era, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Margaret Fuller with her bookstore and publishing house in Boston, where the seat of cultural and intellectual thought resided in America in the mid 1800s. In conclusion, my work constitutes an accurate analysis of the process of feminist participatory action which led to the evolution of the role of women in society, considered in their total individuality. ​