Stanton, Fuller, and the Grammar of Romanticism

Abstract

M OURNING a loss of intellectual life her move from Boston to western New York and energized by controversy following the 1848 Seneca Falls convention, Elizabeth Cady Stanton launched a weekly discussion group in imitation of Margaret Fuller's Conversationals.' The scene from Stanton's autobiography is often referenced histories of the American women's rights movement, but what it suggests about the relationship between these major theoreticians of American feminist thought at a crucial moment its inception has not been fully explored. On a larger scale, biographical and textual links between the women have remained elusive.