Margaret Fuller, repubblicanesimo e femminismo in Woman in the Nineteenth Century

Margaret Fuller is mainly known as the first American feminist manifesto’s author, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, published in1845. The article tries to analyze Fuller’s work from different perspectives, discussing her claim to women’s rights as a part of the antebellum debate on American democracy. Using the republican theory of freedom as independence from arbitrary power, Fuller demonstrated that, where domination was primarily social rather than political, the legal recognition of women’s rights would never bring freedom unless there was also a change in the cultural patterns and the defeat of the patriarchal ideology. The paper examines how Fuller challenged nineteenth-century rules and tried, with the publication of her book, to fight women’s social domination, which prevented them from becoming independent, in the republican sense, in order to establish more equal relations between the sexes.