This summer’s Reading Circle will focus on Margaret Fuller’s essay “The Great Lawsuit. MAN versus MEN, WOMAN versus WOMEN,” originally published in The Dial in 1843.
Founder of the New-York Tribune, Horace Greeley, was so impressed by Fuller’s writing that he offered her a position in 1843 as a journalist and literary critic. Fuller accepted the position and moved to New York but did not actively begin working for the Tribune until she finished expanding her essay “The Great Lawsuit. MAN versus MEN, WOMAN versus WOMEN.” Fuller’s expansion, titled Women in the Nineteenth Century, was published in February, 1845 and became known as the first landmark in American Feminist literature. Of her published pieces in the Tribune, Fuller wrote numerous essays addressing what she considered to be significant issues of the nineteenth century. Among these issues was the growing disparity between upper and lower classes in the wake of the industrial revolution, the social and economic iniquity faced by women and African Americans, and the desperate need to reform institutions such as prisons and asylums.
Join Curator of Collections and Thoreau Scholar Jeffrey S. Cramer, Education Assistant Sarah Walker, AND Fuller Scholar and Pulitzer Prize winning author Megan Marshall in discussing Fuller’s famous essay and life in relation to Thoreau, Transcendentalism, and more. Thursday, August 13, 7:30-8:30 PM EST via zoom.
“The Great Lawsuit. Man versus Men, Woman versus Women,” is available on our website: https://www.walden.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Fuller-Dial-July-1843-The-Great-Lawsuit.pdf
