Title: "Women Thinking": Brook Farm, Transcendental Reform, and Women's Rights

Author: Ellen Kuhl

Primary Advisor: Lois Rudnick

Secondary Advisor: Judith Smith

Graduation Date: June 2004

Abstract:

"Women Thinking" explores the convergence of transcendental thought and early women's rights ideology in the 1840s by focusing on daily life at Brook Farm, a utopian community founded on transcendental principles. While reformers were just beginning to push for women's equality in American society, Brook Farm granted its female members economic parity, comprehensive political rights, gender-neutral education, shared domestic duties, unlimited entrepreneurial opportunities, and the freedom to pursue their own interests. Perhaps more than anywhere else in antebellum America, Brook Farm (located in West Roxbury, Massachusetts) provided a physical and cultural space that encouraged women's full participation in public life.

Women's unique experience at Brook Farm reveals that transcendentalism opened avenues for female involvement in the economic, social, and intellectual worlds of the antebellum era at precisely the moment that women's rights activists began to organize. The revolutionary philosophies of transcendentalism - which questioned tradition and the status quo and emphasized the full humanity of every individual - were a crucial prerequisite to the development of a viable women's rights movement.
After analyzing the most influential arguments of prominent transcendentalists and women's rights reformers - including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton - to explain how the two groups informed and relied on each other, I explore how their combined theories were put into practice at Brook Farm and how the failed experiment positively impacted the suffrage movement almost half a century later. The bulk of my evidence is drawn from contemporary letters and later reminiscences penned by Brook Farm residents and visitors (including Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel The Blithedale Romance), as well as criticisms published by the community's detractors. Insights from important scholarly works are incorporated as appropriate.

Surprisingly, scholars of both transcendentalism and women's history have ignored Brook Farm's conscious experiment with gender reform, and precious few historians have examined the gender aspects of transcendentalism in general. "Women Thinking" is the first systematic study of women's rights at the most famous transcendental community. It should, therefore, be of interest to students of transcendentalism, of the women's rights movement, and of antebellum utopias.