Margaret Fullers Woman in the Nineteenth Century - Essay Example

Margaret Fuller is arguably one of the leading feminists during her time who has understood the relationship dichotomy between men and woman and the constant oppression of women’s status under men’s. Woman in the Nineteenth Century was an expanded essay on an article that Fuller wrote under the name, ‘The Great Lawsuit’. Fuller argued equality for women and men together and above all she also deconstructed the meaning of the relationship that exists between men and women that causes the faultiness of women in general.

The 19th century was a period of upheaval where many groundbreaking movements were made including the understanding of the Theory of Evolution in science by Charles Darwin. In the spirit of the revived renaissance, Fuller decides that her work in Woman in the Nineteenth Century will expose her ideas as to how this relationship between men and women has allowed continuously until her time of the idea that women are generally inferior whereas men are superior. Fuller has used several literary works within her writing to convey her message as well as serve as evidence to support her arguments.

Fuller’s argument reaches from the grassroots of womanhood to the sphere of woman’s identity, her role within society and her role within the centralized bureaucratized state. One of Fuller arguments includes this when she talks about the role of the state under the French Revolution and its motto of ‘Liberty, Equality and Fraternity,’. 13) it meant that women must need legal protection for their own cause. Although she agrees that women must need equality, she also realized that the position of woman within society has created them so much so that they themselves believe that they are the weaker party and in need of protection.

In her argument on the vices of men and their taking advantage of women and women's wealth she argued that some men evidenced within her own society would use legal means to deprive a woman from her wealth and her children. Within the state of law, whenever a man passes away, his wife who had borne him children and taken care of him whilst sick and poor, instead of becoming or 'taking at once his place as head of the family, inherits only a part of his fortune, often brought him by herself, as if she were a child, or ward only, not an equal partner.

' (Fuller 13). Because of this argument and her observation of the daily news that affects women largely she realized that women's legal status is not equipped to protect women from the problems of unequal access to wealth and resources. A similar conjecture has already been made by the 19th century author, Jane Austen when she wrote of the 'not so bad' depravity of the Dashwood women as they were cast out of their estate by their half-brother and his wife dung the death of the late Mr. Dashwood.

The secular civil law although has made many amendments to the equality of man has failed to make the providence for the liberty and equality of man and of Woman. Austen had realized just as Fuller during this trying time of the lowly position of women within the society that their roles as 'gentle women,' in need of protection actually suppressed them and was in favour of male