Sarah
Margaret Fuller was an author, editor and teacher and one of the leading intellectuals
of 19th century America. Her most famous work, Woman in the Nineteenth Century
was a major influence in the developing women's rights movement. Margaret Fuller
was also a leader in the transcendentalist movement. She was a close friend of
Ralph Waldo Emerson, another transcendentalist leader. In her essays, she adapted
Emerson's idea of self-reliance with a feminist slant. He had declared that we
have a divine energy within us; she argued that both men and women also have powerful
female energies inside.