group 6
A student of Emerson, Margaret Fuller was one of America’s first major feminist writers, authoring Summer on the Lakes and Women in the 19th Century. She is well known for her literary criticism and journalism; she contributed to The Dial , a quarterly periodical that related ideas and opinions inherent to New England transcendentalism. Though Fuller never met Thoreau in person, she was connected to him through shared ideals and Emerson. The closest the two ever came to meeting was when Thoreau, sent by Emerson, visited the seen of her death. Thoreau later wrote to Emerson about this visit and we were able to find, at least a piece of, what he wrote here.
In trying to connect Margaret with a section of Walden, we looked at “Reading” paragraph 12 where it says, “It is time that we had uncommon schools, that we did not leave off our education when we become men and women.” Given the fact that Fuller was clearly educated, even a professor, we believe that she would no doubt support this notion of Thoreau’s. We thought it was also important that Thoreau was progressive enough to include women in that statement, seeing as how women didn’t often pursue advanced education at that time, let alone education after education, and as Margaret was a feminist, we thought she would have really appreciated that inclusion.