Woman in the Nineteenth Century

The first book-length argument for women's independence written in America: that a woman needs no man's permission to think, that marriage as practised is a trade, and that the question is not what women may do but what they are. Fuller edited "The Dial" with Emerson and was the first woman allowed into the Harvard library; she expanded this from an essay in 1845 and drowned five years later within sight of shore. Her sentences are difficult and her case has not needed revising. Fifty-nine plates by painters including Mary Cassatt and Vilhelm Hammershøi follow women reading, resting and thinking in quiet interiors, a visual counterpart to Fuller's argument for the life of the mind.